Yep. And also, like I said in https://privacy.thenexus.today/bluesky-atmosphere-fediverse/

For one thing, most of the people who came to Mastodon in late 2022 didn't have good experiences ... so didn't stay in the Fediverse.6 Flash forward to 2024, and Mastodon still hasn't addressed the reasons why.

Bluesky, by contrast, has put a lot of work into onboarding and usability – as well as giving people better tools protect themselves and others, and find and build communities ... So today, BTS ARMY and millions of Brazilians, and everybody else looking for a Twitter alternative are more likely to have a good experience on Bluesky than Mastodon.

Yeah. Well, discussions about stuff like this are good at revealing people to block and ban.

Agreed, that would have been a much better title. There's a lot of negativity around Mastodon -- the Twitter migration in 2022 is often described as a "failure". It certainly wasn't a success, but I see it much more as a missed opportunity.

Network effects are certainly a big deal but every social network has to deal with the issue, and some succeed. Addressing some of the reasons for bouncing not only improves retention, but makes it more likely that people recommend it to their friends. So many of the problems from July 2023's Mastodon Is Easy and Fun Except When It Isn’t were problems back in 2017 as well ... how much progress has Mastodon made? Fortunately other fediverse software's making more progress, but it's still frustrating.

Thanks much for the detailed response ... I didn't realize the purpose of this community. Somebody had suggested I post the draft here, which I did, and now I realize that their suggestion was a snarky trap that I fell for 🤣. Oh well, joke's on them (as well as me), I got good feedback on the draft here.

Agreed that there are structural problems with AP; I wrote about this in And it's about the protocol, too. But even though software improvements can help, the underlying problem's cultural.

I intentionally didn't phrase it in terms of allyship (in fact I'm pretty sure the word "ally" doesn't even appear in the article) ... still, I don't think white folks (me included) can stop being white, nor should we -- we are who we are, and that's okay. I do think we (again including me) can make more of an effort to deal with our default attitudes and behaviors, and try to use our privilege for good.

That's a great point, can I quote you on having seen it on Lemmy quite a few times?

Indeed. Funny how that works! Glad you thought it was reasonable, and agreed that point 2 needs work.

Preemption is bonkers from a privacy perspective, and also flies in the face of the basic principle that the states are "the laboratories of democracy." But from a corporate perspective preemption is wonderful ... it keeps pesky pro-privacy states like California and Washington from ever raising the bar above whatever can get through Congress! So historically privacy advocates and organizations have always opposed preemptive federal legislation. But that wall cracked in 2022, where EPIC Privacy joined pro-industry privacy orgs like Future of Privacy Forum to support a preemptive bill (although EFF and ACLU continued to oppose the preemptive aspects).

The argument for supporting a preemptive bill (not that I agree with it, I'm just relaying it) is that the federal bill is stronger than state privacy bills (California unsurprisingly disagreed), and many states won't pass any privacy bill. Industry hates preemption, industry hates the idea of a private right of action where people can sue companies, most Republicans and corporate Democrats will do what industry wants, so the only way to pass a bill is to include at most one of those. So the only way to get that level of privacy protection for everybody is for people in California, Maine, Illinois, etc, to give up some of their existing protection, and for people in Washington etc to give up the chance of passing stronger consumer privacy laws in the future. California of course didn't like that (neither did other states but California has a lot of votes in Congress), and Cantwell's staffers also told us in Washington that she was opposed to any preemptive bill, so things deadlocked in 2022.

With this bill, I'm not sure why Cantwell's position has changed -- we're trying to set up a meeting with her, if we find out I'll let you know. I'm also not sure whether the changes in this bill are enough to get California on board. So, we shall see.

A very good idea! https://startrek.website/ took this approach, it'd be intersting to check in with them to see what they learned.

I had shared the draft version here a few weeks ago, and this incorporates some of the feedback -- including "This goes against everything the Fediverse stands for" 😎

Indeed, the entire point is that instances should decide for themselves -- I say it multiple times in the article and I say it in the excerpt. If they think that you federating with Meta puts them at risk, then they should defederate. And yes, it says more about the instances making the decisions than it does about Meta -- Meta's hosting hate groups and white supremacists whether or not people defederate or transitively defederate.

It's good feedback, thanks -- I thought I had enough of explanation in the article but maybe I should put in more. Blocking Threads keeps Threads userws from being able to directly interact with you, but it doesn't prevent indirect interactions: people on servers following quoting or replying to Threads posts, causing toxicity on your feeds (often called "second-hand smoke"); hate groups on Threads encouragiingtheir followers in the fediverse to harass people; and for people who have stalkers or are being targeted by hate groups Threads, replies to your posts by people who have followers on Threads going there and revealing information.

Yes, I'd say Lemmy communities are cross-instance communities - people can join communities on a different instance than their account.