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Two spooky think tanks with their eye on controlling the fediverse (hexbear.net)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by davel@hexbear.net to c/hexbear@hexbear.net

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The American “intelligence community” wants to control the narratives on federated social media, as they already do on corporate social media.

Atlantic Council: Collective Security in a Federated World
Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund: Fediverse Governance Successes & Gaps

The whole “mis-, dis-, and mal-information” discourse was/is a psyop for top-down propaganda control. The Dem-aligned media did a bang-up job of discrediting Matt Taibbi such that his continued investigatory work into this intentionally opaque system is being ignored.

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[-] goose@hexbear.net 56 points 9 months ago

The full Atlantic Council Fediverse report is especially interesting (and only 12 pages). You can look at it a couple of different ways.

Replace all the mentions of Russia/China and disinformation with generic "bad actors" and you get a decent overview of the challenges Fediverse admins face
Look at the big "State Assessment" chart and its associated text for an overview of how corporations and states could seek to discredit (or worse) Fediverse instances

An instance like Hexbear with a stated ideology seems the most resilient to bad actors, imo. If you can just flat-out ban someone for being a wrecker, you're in a lot better shape than a general-public instance that has to come up with a bunch of general rules and exceptions and then try to figure out the letter+spirit of the rules on the fly

Also, Lemmy didn't even make the chart. Wamp waaaammmmmp

[-] 6daemonbag@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 points 9 months ago

What other lemmy-like platforms are there? I came straight here from Reddit because the people championing it were quite convincing. Also... Is hexbear lemmy or is it more akin to kbin?

[-] goose@hexbear.net 25 points 9 months ago

Hexbear is a Lemmy instance. As far as platforms, it's pretty much Lemmy and kbin to my knowledge.

[-] Raebxeh@hexbear.net 13 points 9 months ago

Mastodon is federated Twitter. Peertube is federated Youtube. Pixelfed is federated Instagram. Lemmy is federated Reddit. There are dozens of others. Most of them can talk to each other most of the time.

[-] 6daemonbag@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 9 months ago

I was leaning more towards reddit-like platforms such as Lemmy but I wasn't very clear about it in my comment

[-] kot@hexbear.net 44 points 9 months ago

Is that why it's called the "fediverse"?

[-] Owl@hexbear.net 21 points 9 months ago

no, but soon

[-] davel@hexbear.net 18 points 9 months ago

fedposting

[-] quarrk@hexbear.net 39 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Good post.

substantial technological, governance, and financial obstacles hinder efforts to develop these necessary functions.

Good lol

I feel like there isn’t much that can be done to stop federated and decentralized services like Lemmy. I guess they could do ISP-level or browser-level fuckery, make the websites slow to load or whatever. Or pass legislation banning anonymity online. Not super feasible options when VPNs are so simple to use.

[-] davel@hexbear.net 41 points 9 months ago

I think I know what their strategy will be already: Gain control of liberal/conservative instances, and cause the uncontrollable socialist instances to be defederated in order to isolate them. The instances that choose to federate with corpo social media will probably be the easiest to control and also have the largest user base. Running instances costs money without really making any, so there will be admins happy to accept assistance in the form of funding, but also in the form of “moderation” tooling and labor.

[-] Lemmygradwontallowme@hexbear.net 9 points 9 months ago

Running instances costs money without really making any, so there will be admins happy to accept assistance in the form of funding, but also in the form of “moderation” tooling and labor.

How do we solve this issue?

[-] the_itsb@hexbear.net 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Have something set up so users can donate to server costs etc? I was a monthly donor when I was on Mastodon and even during my brief stint at Beehaw, and I have been meaning to figure out how to donate to Hexbear.

~~I know it's easier said than done, and there are larger complications for Hexbear regarding payment processors and whatnot; like, how do you accept money without doxxing yourself or your donors?~~ also, I am a dingus who should occasionally poke around the website instead of just using an app all the time

[-] Sphere@hexbear.net 8 points 9 months ago

Hexbear has a Patreon and a Liberapay

[-] the_itsb@hexbear.net 7 points 9 months ago

Thank you!

[-] davel@hexbear.net 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Patreon: 20 members • $65.56/month
Liberapay: hexbear receives $55.87 per week from 31 patrons.

People, lets-fucking-go

lemmy[grad].ml also accepts donations in several forms (Liberapay is preferred).

[-] voight@hexbear.net 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I think the best move for people on Lemmy would be to target communities which have a bad relationship either with a new powermod or come under the scope of reddit's disinformation policy because of current events or a change in opinion etc, general side moderation issues (I no longer care enough about to even make a joke related to this),,,

You get communities like Piracy that are more likely to get it scraped off you get those people to divert a tiny bit of collective resources into running an efficient federated site. AskHistorians briefly considered moving to a new site or something but balked because they are worms. Wish they'd made a lemmy.

Similar strategy applies for microblogging platforms. Mastodon has lifted people like Robert Reich and that seems to be the high tier stuff on there.

I will never forgive them for doing stuff like removing quote tweets to "stop bullying" as if screenshots don't work, but I still visit because a lot of the wildlife and insect and landscape photography community, like programmers, is more willing to reach out for new platforms.

Maybe they care more about what's functional than about a brand of social media, maybe it's bc they're all Robert Reich libs but idk there's hella bug dudes on Mastodon so I still visit.

TLDR - Convincing 50k+ accounts to leave for Pleroma or Mastodon would be good for them. Lemmy needs more communities to leave from various sites. Not just reddit. Maybe scope out even weird forums.

I'm not going to do any of this though, it sounds like a complete waste of my time. So maybe that undermines this as advice.

[-] oktherebuddy@hexbear.net 34 points 9 months ago

wasn't taibbi's investigation about hunter biden dick pics and not like. mass consensus manufacturing of the state dept line through botting

[-] davel@hexbear.net 30 points 9 months ago

That is what the Dem-aligned corporate media wanted Democrats to believe, and they seem have been very successful at it.

Jacobin, Dec. 2022: Why the Twitter Files Are in Fact a Big Deal

Taibbi and others have discovered & revealed much more about the corporate social media propaganda system in the year since then, but Democrats have been trained to ignore all of it.

[-] jonne@infosec.pub 29 points 9 months ago

Yeah, he basically ignored how voices on the left are way more likely to get banned for bullshit reasons, presumably because Musk didn't provide him with those files. He let himself and his reputation be used, despite knowing better.