Aggregator | JCA-NET

California lawmakers are debating an ill-advised bill that would require internet users to show their ID in order to look at sexually explicit content. EFF has sent a letter to California legislators encouraging them to oppose Assembly Bill 3080, which would have the result of censoring the internet for all users.

If you care about a free and open internet for all, and are a California resident, now would be a good time to contact your California Assemblymember and Senator and tell them you oppose A.B. 3080.

Adults Have The Right To Free And Anonymous Internet Browsing

If A.B. 3080 passes, it would make it illegal to show websites with one-third or more “sexually explicit content” to minors. These “explicit” websites would join a list of products or services that can’t be legally sold to minors in California, including things like firearms, ammunition, tobacco, and e-cigarettes.

But these things are not the same, and should not be treated the same under state or federal law. Adults have a First Amendment right to look for information online, including sexual content. One of the reasons EFF has opposed mandatory age verification is because there’s no way to check ID online just for minors without drastically harming the rights of adults to read, get information, and to speak and browse online anonymously.

As EFF explained in a recent amicus brief on the issue, collecting ID online is fundamentally different—and more dangerous—than in-person ID checks in the physical world. Online ID checks are not just a momentary display—they require adults “to upload data-rich, government-issued identifying documents to either the website or a third-party verifier” and create a “potentially lasting record” of their visit to the establishment.

The more information a website collects about visitors, the more chances there are for such data to get into the hands of a criminal or other bad actor, a marketing company, or someone who has filed a subpoena for it. So-called “anonymized” data can be reassembled, especially when it consists of data-rich government ID together with browsing data like IP addresses.

Data breaches are a fact of life. Once governments insist on creating these ID logs for visiting websites with sexual content, those data breaches will become more dangerous.

This Bill Mandates ID Checks For A Wide Range Of Content

The bar is set low in this bill. It’s far from clear what websites prosecutors will consider to have one-third content that’s not appropriate for minors, as that can vary widely by community and even family standards. The bill will surely rope in general-use websites that allow some explicit content. A sex education website for high-school seniors, for instance, could be considered “offensive” and lacking in educational value for young minors.

Social media sites, online message forums, and even email lists may have some portion of content that isn’t appropriate for younger minors, but also a large amount of general-interest content. Bills like California’s that require ID checks for any site with 33% content that prosecutors deem explicit is similar to having Netflix require ID checks at login, whether a user wants to watch a G-rated movie or an R-rated movie.

Adults’ Right To View Websites Of Their Choice Is Settled Law

U.S. courts have already weighed in numerous times on government efforts to age-gate content, including sexual content. In Reno v. ACLU, the Supreme Court overruled almost all of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 law that was intended to keep “obscene or indecent” material away from minors.

The high court again considered the issue in 2004 in ACLU v. Ashcroft, when it found that a federal law of that era, which sought to impose age-verification requirements on sexual online content, was likely unconstitutional.

Other States Will Follow

In the past year, several other state legislatures have passed similar unwise and unconstitutional “online ID check” laws. They are being subject to legal challenges now working their way through courts, including a Texas age verification law that EFF has asked the Supreme Court to look at.

Elected officials in many other states, however, wisely refused to enact mandatory online ID laws, including Minnesota, Illinois, and Wisconsin. In April, Arizona’s governor vetoed a mandatory ID-check bill that was passed along partisan lines in her state, stating that the bill “goes against settled case law” and insisting any future proposal must be bipartisan and also “work within the bounds of the First Amendment.”

California is not only the largest state, it is the home of many of the nation’s largest creative industries. It has also been a leader in online privacy law. If California passes A.B. 3080, it will be a green light to other states to pass online ID-checking laws that are even worse.

Tennessee, for instance, recently passed a mandatory ID bill that includes felony penalties for anyone who “publishes or distributes” a website with one-third adult content. Tennessee’s fiscal review committee estimated that the state will incarcerate one person per year under this law, and has budgeted accordingly.

California lawmakers have a chance to restore some sanity to our national conversation about how to protect minors online. Mandatory ID checks, and fines or incarceration for those who fail to use them, are not the answer.

【経済】歴史的な円安　貧しくなる日本　経常収支に構造的変化　デジタル分野の赤字拡大　債権取り崩し国になる恐れ＝志田義寧

日本ジャーナリストクラブ（JCJ）

1 month 1 week ago

成長への戦略怠ったツケが　歴史的な円安が続いている。この背景には、日米金利差の拡大や新ＮＩＳＡ（少額投資非課税制度）による円売り／ドル買い需要など様々な要因があるが、海外とのモノやサービス、投資の取引状況を示す経常収支に構造的な変化が生じていることも見逃せない。輸出は自動車の一本足打法になりつつあり、デジタル分野の赤字は今後さらに拡大することが予想される。超低金利のぬるま湯に浸かり、成長戦略を怠ってきたツケが回ってきた。為替への介入焼け石に水だ　ドル／円は４月29日に一時１６..

ＪＣＪ

How to Clean Up Your Bluesky Feed

EFF update

1 month 1 week ago

In our recent comparison of Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads, we detail a few of the ways the similar-at-a-glance microblogging social networks differ, and one of the main distinctions is how much control you have over what you see as a user. We’ve detailed how to get your Mastodon feed into shape before, and now it’s time to clean up your Bluesky feed. We’ll do this mostly through its moderation tools.

Currently, Bluesky is mostly a single experience that operates on one set of flagship services operated by the Bluesky corporation. As the AT Protocol expands and decentralizes, so will the variety of moderation and custom algorithmic feed options. But for the time being, we have Bluesky.

Bluesky’s current moderation filters operate on two levels: the default options built in the Bluesky app, and community created filters called “labelers”. The company’s default system includes options and company labelers which hide the sorts of things we’re all used to having restricted on social networks, like spam or adult content. It also includes defaults to hiding other categories like engagement farming and certain extremist views. Community options use Bluesky’s own moderation tool, Ozone, and are built exactly the same system as the company’s default ones; the only difference is which ones are built into the app. All this choice ends up being both powerful and overwhelming. So let’s walk through how to use it to make your Bluesky experience as good as possible.

Familiarize Yourself with Bluesky’s Moderation Tools

Bluesky offers several ways to control what appears in your feed: labeling and curation tools to hide (or warn about) the content of a post, and tools to block accounts from your feed entirely. Let’s start with customizing the content you see.

Get to Know Bluesky’s Built-In Settings

By default, Bluesky offers a basic moderation tool that allows you to show, hide, or warn about a range of content related to everything from topics like self-harm, extremist views, or intolerance, to more traditional content moderation like security concerns, scams, or inauthentic accounts.

This build-your-own filter approach is different from other social networks, which tend to control moderation on a platform level, leaving little up to the end user. This gives you control over what you see in your feed, but it’s also overwhelming to wrap your head around. We suggest popping into the moderation screen to see how it’s set up, and tweak any options you’d like:

Tap ≡ > Settings > Moderation > Bluesky Moderation Service to get to the settings. You can choose from three display options for each type of post: off (you’ll see it), warn (you’ll get a warning before you can view the post), or hide (you won’t see the post at all). blueskymoderation.png There’s no way currently to entirely opt out of Bluesky’s defaults, though the company does note that any separate client app (i.e., not the official Bluesky app) can set up its own rules. However, you can subscribe to custom label sets to layer on top of the Bluesky defaults. These labels are similar to the Block Together tool formerly supported by Twitter, and allow individual users or communities to create their own moderation filters. As with the default moderation options, you can choose to have anything that gets labeled hidden or see a warning if it’s flagged. These custom services can include all sorts of highly specific labels, like whether an image is suspected to be made with AI, includes content that may trigger phobias (like spiders), and more. There’s currently no way to easily search for these labeling services, but Bluesky notes a few here, and there’s a broad list here.

To enable one of these, search for the account name of a labeler, like “@xblock.aendra.dev” and then subscribe to it. Once you subscribe, you can toggle any labeling filters the account offers. If you decide you no longer want to use the service or you want to change the settings, you can do so on the same moderation page noted above.

blueskylabeler_2.png

Build Your Own Mute and Block Lists (or Subscribe to Others)

Custom moderation and labels don’t replace one of the most common tools in all of social media: the ability to block accounts entirely. Here, Bluesky offers something new with the old, though. Not only can you block and mute users, you can also subscribe to block lists published by other users, similar to tools like Block Party.

To mute or block someone, tap their user profile picture to get to their profile, then the three-dot icon, then choose to “Mute Account,” which makes it so they don’t appear in your feed, but they can still see yours, or “Block Account,” which makes it so they don’t appear in your feed and they can’t view yours. Note that a list of your Muted accounts is private, but your Blocked accounts are public. Anyone can see who you’ve blocked, but not who you’ve muted. blueskymute.png You can also use built-in algorithmic tools like muting specific words or phrases. Tap ≡ > Settings > Moderation and then tap “Mute words & tags.” Type in any word or phrase you want to mute, select whether to mute it if it appears “text & tags” or just in “tags only,” and then it’ll be hidden from your feed.

Users can also experiment with more elaborate algorithmic curation options, such as using tools like Blacksky to completely reshape your feed.

If all this manual work makes you tired, then mute lists might be the answer. These are curated lists made by other Bluesky users that mass mute accounts. These mute lists, unlike muted accounts, are public, though, so keep that in mind before you create or sign up for one.

As with community run moderation services, there’s not currently a great way to search for these lists. To sign up for mute list you’ll need to know the username of someone who has created a block or mute list that you want to use. Search for their profile, tap the “Lists” option from their profile page, tap the list you’re interested in, then “Subscribe.” Confusingly, from this screen, a “List” can be a feed you subscribe to of posts you want to see (like if someone made a list of “people who work at EFF,”) or a block or mute list. If it's referred to as a “user list” and has the option to “Pin to home,” then it’s a feed you can follow, otherwise it’s a mute or block list.

blueskymodlist.png

Clean Up Your Timeline

Is there some strange design decision in the app that makes you question why you use it? Perhaps you hate seeing reposts? Bluesky offers a few ways to choose how information is displayed in the app that can make it easier to use. These are essentially custom algorithms, which Bluesky calls “Feeds,” that filter and focus your content however you want.

Subscribe to (or Build Your Own) Custom Feeds

bluskyfeeds.png

Unlike most social networks, Bluesky gives you control over the algorithm that displays content. By default, you’ll get a chronological feed, but you can pick and choose from other options using custom feeds. These let you tinker with your feed, create entirely new ones, and more. Custom feeds make it so you can look at a feed of very specific types of posts, like only mutuals (people who also follow you back), quiet posters (people who don’t post much), news organizations, or just photos of cats. Here, unlike with some of the other custom tools, Bluesky does at least provide a way to search for feeds to use.

Tap ≡ > Settings > Feeds. You’ll find a list of your current feeds here, and if you scroll down you’ll find a search bar to look for new ones. These can be as broad as “Posters in Japan,” to as focused as “Posts about Taylor Swift.” Once you pick a few, these custom feeds will appear at the top of your main timeline. If you ever want to rearrange what order these appear in, head back to the Feeds page, then tap the gear icon in the top-right to get to a screen where you can change the order. If you’re still struggling to find useful feeds, this search engine might help.

Customize How Replies Work, and Other Little Things in Your Feed

blueskyfeedcleanup.png

Bluesky has one last trick to making it a little nicer to use than other social networks, and that’s the amount of control you get over your main “following” feed. From your feed, tap the controls icon in the top right to get to the “Following Feed Preferences” page.

Here, you can do everything from hide replies to controlling what replies you do see (like only seeing replies to posts from people you follow, or only for posts with more than two replies). You can also hide reposts and quote posts, and even allow for posts from some of your custom feeds to get injected into your main feed. For example, if you enable the “Show Posts from My Feeds” option and you have subscribed to “Quiet Posters,” you’ll occasionally get a post from someone you follow outside of a strictly chronological time.

Final bonus tip: enable two-factor authentication: Bluesky rolled out email-based two-factor authentication well after many people signed up. If you’ve never looked at your settings, you probably never noticed this was offered. We suggest you turn it on to better secure your account. Head to ≡ > Settings, then scroll down to “Require email code to log into your account,” and enable it.

Phew, if that all felt a little overwhelming, that’s because it is. Sure, many people can sign up for Bluesky and never touch any of this stuff, but for those who want a safe, customizable experience, the whole thing feels a bit too crunchy in its current state. And while this sort of empowerment for users, which gives so many levers to control the content, is great, it’s also a lot. The good news is that Bluesky’s defaults are currently good enough to get started. But one of the benefits of community-based moderation like we see on Mastodon or certain Subreddits, is that volunteers do a lot of this heavy lifting for everyone. AT Protocol is still new however, and perhaps as more developers shape its future through new tools and services, these difficulties will be eased.

Thorin Klosowski

What’s the Difference Between Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads?

EFF update

1 month 1 week ago

The ongoing Twitter exodus sparked life into a new way of doing social media. Instead of a handful of platforms trying to control your life online, people are reclaiming control by building more open and empowering approaches to social media. Some of these you may have heard of: Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads. Each is distinct, but their differences can be hard to understand as they’re rooted in their different technical approaches.

The mainstream social web arguably became “five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four,” but in just the last few years radical and controversial changes to major platforms were a wake up call to many and are driving people to seek alternatives to the billionaire-driven monocultures.

Two major ecosystems have emerged in the wake, both encouraging the variety and experimentation of the earlier web. The first, built on ActivityPub protocol, is called the Fediverse. While it includes many different kinds of websites, Mastodon and Threads have taken off as alternatives for Twitter that use this protocol. The other is the AT Protocol, powering the Twitter alternative Bluesky.

These protocols, a shared language between computer systems, allow websites to exchange information. It’s a simple concept you’re benefiting from right now, as protocols enable you to read this post in your choice of app or browser. Opening this freedom to social media has a huge impact, letting everyone send and receive posts their own preferred way. Even better, these systems are open to experiment and can cater to every niche, while still connecting to everyone in the wider network. You can leave the dead malls of platform capitalism, and find the services which cater to you.

To save you some trial and error, we have outlined some differences between these options and what that might mean for them down the road.

ActivityPub and AT Protocols ActivityPub

The Fediverse goes a bit further back, but ActivityPub’s development by the world wide web consortium (W3C) started in 2014. The W3C is a public-interest non-profit organization which has played a vital role in developing open international standards which define the internet, like HTML and CSS (for better or worse). Their commitment to ActivityPub gives some assurance the protocol will be developed in a stable and ostensibly consensus driven process.

This protocol requires a host website (often called an “instance”) to maintain an “inbox” and “outbox” of content for all of its users, and selectively share this with other host websites on behalf of the users. In this federation model users are accountable to their instance, and instances are accountable to each other. Misbehaving users are banned from instances, and misbehaving instances are cut off from others through “defederation.” This creates some stakes for maintaining good behavior, for users and moderators alike.

ActivityPub handles a wide variety of uses, but the application most associated with the protocol is Mastodon. However, ActivityPub is also integral to Meta’s own Twitter alternative, Threads, which is taking small steps to connect with the Fediverse. Threads is a totally different application, solely hosted by Meta, and is ten times bigger than the Fediverse and Bluesky networks combined—making it the 500-pound gorilla in the room. Meta’s poor reputation on privacy, moderation, and censorship, has driven many Fediverse instances to vow they’ll defederate from Threads. Other instances still may connect with Threads to help users find a broader audience, and perhaps help sway Threads users to try Mastodon instead.

AT Protocol

The Authenticated Transfer (AT) Protocol is newer; sparked by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey in 2019. Like ActivityPub, it is also an open source protocol. However, it is developed unilaterally by a private for-profit corporation— Bluesky PBLLC— though it may be imparted to a web standards body in the future. Bluesky remains mostly centralized. While it has recently opened up to small hosts, there are still some restrictions preventing major alternatives from participating. As developers further loosens control we will likely see rapid changes in how people use the network.

The AT Protocol network design doesn’t put the same emphasis on individual hosts as the Fediverse does, and breaks up hosting, distribution, and curation into distinct services. It’s easiest to understand in comparison to traditional web hosting. Your information, like posts and profiles, are held in Personal Data Servers (PDSes)—analogous to the hosting of a personal website. This content is then fetched by relay servers, like web crawlers, which aggregate a “firehose” of everyone’s content without much alteration. To sort and filter this on behalf of the user, like a “search engine,” AT has Appview services, which give users control over what they see. When accessing the Appview through a client app or website, the user has many options to further filter, sort, and curate their feed, as well as “subscribe” to filters and labels someone else made.

The result is a decentralized system which can be highly tailored while still offering global reach. However, this atomized system also may mean the community accountability encouraged by the host-centered system may be missing, and users are ultimately responsible for their own experience and moderation. This will depend on how the network opens to major hosts other than the Bluesky corporation.

User Experience

Mastodon, Threads and Bluesky have a number of differences that are not essential to their underlying protocol which affect users looking to get involved today. Mastodon and Bluesky are very customizable, so these differences are just addressing the prevalent trends.

Timeline Algorithm

Most Mastodon and most ActivityPub sites prefer a more straightforward timeline of content from accounts you follow. Threads have a Meta-controlled algorithm, like Instagram. Bluesky defaults to a chronological feed, but opens algorithmic curation and filtering up to apps and users.

User Design

All three services present a default appearance that will be familiar to anyone who has used Twitter. Both Mastodon and Bluesky have alternative clients with the only limit being a developer’s imagination. In fact, thanks to their open nature, projects like SkyBridge let users of one network use apps built for the other (in this case, Bluesky users using Mastodon apps). Threads does not have any alternate clients and requires a developer API, which is still in beta.

Onboarding

Threads has the greatest advantage to getting people to sign up, as it has only one site which accepts an Instagram account as a login. Bluesky also has only one major option for signing up, but has some inherent flexibility in moving your account later on. That said, diving into a few extra setup steps can improve the experience. Finally, one could easily join Mastodon by joining the flagship instance, mastodon.social. However, given the importance of choosing the right instance, you may miss out on some of the benefits of the Fediverse and want to move your account later on.

Culture

Threads has a reputation for being more brand-focused, with more commercial accounts and celebrities, and Meta has made no secret about their decisions to deemphasize political posts on the platform. Bluesky is often compared to early Twitter, with a casual tone and a focus on engaging with friends. Mastodon draws more people looking for community online, especially around shared interests, and each instance will have distinct norms.

Privacy Considerations

Neither ActivityPub nor AT Protocol currently support private end-to-end encrypted messages at this time, so they should not be used for sensitive information. For all services here, the majority of content on your profile will be accessible from the public web. That said, Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky differ in how they handle user data.

Mastodon

Everything you do as a user is entrusted to the instance host including posts, interactions, DMs, settings, and more. This means the owner of your instance can access this information, and is responsible for defending it against attackers and law enforcement. Tech-savvy people may choose to self-host, but users generally need to find an instance run by someone they trust.

The Fediverse muffles content sharing through a myriad of permissions set by users and instances. If your instance blocks a poorly moderated instance for example, the people on that other site will no longer be in your timelines nor able to follow your posts. You can also limit how messages are shared to further reduce the intended audience. While this can create a sense of community and closeness, remember it is still public and instance hosts are always part of the equation. Direct messages, for example, will be accessible to your host and the host of the recipient.

If content needs to be changed or deleted after being shared, your instance can request these changes, and this is often honored. That said, once something is shared to the network, it may be difficult to “undo.”

Threads

All user content is entrusted to one host, in this case Meta, with a privacy policy similar to Instagram. Meta determines when information is shared with law enforcement, how it is used for advertising, how well protected it is from a breach, and so on.

Sharing with instances works differently for Threads, as Meta has more restricted interoperability. Currently, content sharing is one-way: Threads users can opt-in to sharing their content with the Fediverse, but won’t see likes or replies. By the end of this year, they will allow Threads users to follow accounts on Mastodon accounts.

Federation on Threads may always be restricted, and features like transferring one's account to Mastodon may never be supported. Limits in sharing should not be confused with enhanced privacy or security, however. Public posts are just that—public—and you are still trusting your host (Meta) with private data like DMs (currently handled by Instagram). Instead these restrictions, should they persist, should be seen as the minimum level of control over users Meta deems necessary.

Bluesky

Bluesky, in contrast, is a very “loud” system. Every public message, interaction, follow and block is hosted by your PDS and freely shared to everyone in the network. Every public post is for everyone and is only discovered according to their own app and filter preferences. There are ways to algorithmically imitate smaller spaces with filtering and algorithmic feeds, such as with the Blacksky project, but these are open to everyone and your posts will not be restricted to that curated space.

Direct messages are limited to the flagship Bluesky app, and can be accessed by the Bluesky moderation team. The project plans to eventually incorporate DMs into the protocol, and include end-to-end-encryption, but it is not currently supported. Deletion on Bluesky is simply handled by removing the content from your PDS, but once a message is shared to Relay and Appview services it may remain in circulation a while longer according to their retention settings.

Moderation Mastodon

Mastodon’s approach to moderation is often compared to subreddits, where the administrators of an instance are responsible for creating a set of rules and empowering a team of moderators to keep the community healthy. The result is a lot more variety in moderation experience, with the only boundary being an instance’s reputation in the broader Fediverse. Instances coordinating and “defederating” from problematic hosts has already been effective in the Fediverse. One former instance, Gab, was successfully cut off from the Fediverse for hosting extreme right-wing hate. The threat of defederation sets a baseline of behavior across the Fediverse, and from there users can choose instances based on reputation and on how aligned the hosts are with their own moderation preferences.

At its best, instances prioritize things other than growth. New members are welcomed and onboarded carefully as new community members, and hosts only grow the community if their moderation team can support it. Some instances even set a permanent cap on participation to a few thousand to ensure a quality and intimate experience. Current members too can vote with their feet, and if needed split off into their own new instance without needing to disconnect entirely.

While Mastodon has a lot going for it by giving users a choice, avoiding automation, and avoiding unsustainable growth, there are other evergreen moderation issues at play. Decisions can be arbitrary, inconsistent, and come with little recourse. These aren't just decisions impacting individual users, but also those affecting large swaths of them, when it comes to defederation.

Threads

Threads, as alluded to when discussing privacy above, aims for a moderation approach more aligned with pre-2022 Twitter and Meta’s other current platforms like Instagram. That is, an impossible task of scaling moderation with endless growth of users.

As the largest of these services however, this puts Meta in a position to set norms around moderation as it enters the Fediverse. A challenge for decentralized projects will be to ensure Meta’s size doesn’t make them the ultimate authority on moderation decisions, a pattern of re-centralization we’ve seen happen in email. Spam detection tools have created an environment where email, though an open standard, is in practice dominated by Microsoft and Google as smaller services are frequently marked as spammers. A similar dynamic could play out with the federated social web, where Meta has capacity to exclude smaller instances with little recourse. Other instances may copy these decisions or fear not to do so, lest they are also excluded.

Bluesky

While in beta, Bluesky received a lot of praise and criticism for its moderation. However, up until recently, all moderation was handled by the centralized Bluesky company—not throughout the distributed AT network. The true nature of moderation structure on the network is only now being tested.

AT Protocol relies on labeling services, aka “labelers” for moderation. These special accounts using Bluesky’s Ozone tool labels posts with small pieces of metadata. You can also filter accounts with account block lists published by other users, a lot like the Block Together tool formerly available on Twitter. Your Appview aggregating your feed uses these labels to and block lists to filter content. Arbitrary and irreconcilable moderation decisions are still a problem, as are some of the risks of using automated moderation, but it is less impactful as users are not deplatformed and remain accessible to people with different moderation settings. This also means problematic users don’t go anywhere and can still follow you, they are just less visible.

The AT network is censorship resistant, and conversely, it is difficult to meaningfully ban users. To be propagated in the network one only needs a PDS to host their account, and at least one Relay to spread that information. Currently Relays sit out of moderation, only scanning to restrict CSAM. In theory Relays could be more like a Fediverse instance and more accurately curate and moderate users. Even then, as long as one Relay carries the user they will be part of the network. PDSes, much like web hosts, may also choose to remove controversial users, but even in those cases PDSes are easy to self-host even on a low-power computer.

Like the internet generally, removing content relies on the fragility of those targeted. With enough resources and support, a voice will remain online. Without user-driven approaches to limit or deplatform content (like defederation), Bluesky services may be targeted by censorship on the infrastructure level, like on the ISP level.

Hosting and Censorship

With any internet service, there are some legal obligations when hosting user generated content. No matter the size, hosts may need to contend with DMCA takedowns, warrants for user data, cyber attacks, blocking from authoritarian regimes, and other pressures from powerful interests. This decentralized approach to social media also relies on a shared legal protection for all hosts, Section 230. By ensuring they are not held liable for user-generated content, this law provides the legal protection necessary for these platforms to operate and innovate.

Given the differences in the size of hosts and their approach to moderation, it isn’t surprising that each of these platforms will address platform liability and censorship differently.

Mastodon

Instance hosts, even for small communities, need to navigate these legal considerations as we outlined in our Fediverse legal primer. We have already seen some old patterns reemerge with these smaller, and often hobbyist, hosts struggling to defend themselves from legal challenges and security threats. While larger hosts have resources to defend against these threats, an advantage of the decentralized model is censors need to play whack-a-mole in a large network where messages flow freely across the globe. Together, the Fediverse is set up to be quite good at keeping information safe from censorship, but individual users and accounts are very susceptible to targeted censorship efforts and will struggle with rebuilding their presence.

Threads

Threads is the easiest to address, as Meta is already several platforms deep into addressing liability and speech concerns, and have the resources to do so. Unlike Mastodon or Bluesky, they also need to do so on a much larger scale with a larger target on their back as the biggest platform backed by a multi-billion dollar company. The unique challenge for Threads however will be how Meta decides to handle content from the rest of the Fediverse. Threads users will also need to navigate the perks and pitfalls of sticking with a major host with a spotty track record on censorship and disinformation.

Bluesky

Bluesky is not yet tested beyond the flagship Bluesky services, and raises a lot more questions. PDSes, Relays and even Appviews play some role in hosting, and can be used with some redundancies. For example your account on one PDS may be targeted, but the system is designed to be easy for users to change this host, self-host, or have multiple hosts while retaining one identity on the network.

Relays, in contrast, are more computationally demanding and may remain the most “centralized” service as natural monopolies— users have some incentive to mostly follow the biggest relays. The result is a potential bottle-neck susceptible to influence and censorship. However, if we see a wide variety of relays with different incentives, it becomes more likely that messages can be shared throughout the network despite censorship attempts.

You Might Not Have to Choose

With this overview, you can start diving into one of these new Twitter alternatives leading the way in a more free social web. Thanks to the open nature of these new systems, where you set up will become less important with improved interoperability.

Both ActivityPub and AT Protocol developers are receptive to making the two better at communicating with one another, and independent projects like Bridgy Fed, SkyBridge, RSS Parrot and Mastofeed are already letting users get the best of both worlds. Today a growing number of projects speak both protocols, along with older ones like RSS. It may be these paths towards a decentralized web become increasingly trivial as they converge, despite some early growing pains. Or the two may be eclipsed by yet another option. But their shared trajectory is moving us towards a more free, more open and refreshingly weird social web free of platform gatekeepers.

Rory Mir

Ah, Steamboat Willie. It’s been too long. 🐭

EFF update

1 month 1 week ago

Did you know Disney’s Steamboat Willie entered the public domain this year? Since its 1928 debut, U.S. Congress has made multiple changes to copyright law, extending Disney’s ownership of this cultural icon for almost a century. A century.

Creativity should spark more creativity.

That’s not how intellectual property laws are supposed to work. In the United States, these laws were designed to give creators a financial incentive to contribute to science and culture. Then eventually the law makes this expression free for everyone to enjoy and build upon. Disney itself has reaped the abundant benefits of works in the public domain including Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid" and "The Snow Queen." Creativity should spark more creativity.

In that spirit, EFF presents to you this year’s EFF member t-shirt simply called “Fix Copyright":

The design references Steamboat Willie, but also tractor owners’ ongoing battle to repair their equipment despite threats from manufacturers like John Deere. These legal maneuvers are based on Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA. In a recent appeals court brief, EFF and co-counsel Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati argued that Section 1201 chills free expression, impedes scientific research, and to top it off, is unenforceable because it’s too broad and violates the First Amendment. Ownership ain’t what it used to be, so let’s make it better.

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Aaron Jue