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Fediverse as activist tool? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I recently made a post about Shinigami Eyes and BlockParty and started thinking about activist tools.

The ones mentioned are of course merely mitigation tools, but speaking of activist tools more broadly, like some people suggest Signal and Tor Browser for activists, as a fine balance between security and a low technical bar for entrance.

I am not really sure that any of these differ substantially from Matrix and Firefox and why they are so special.

The ActivityPub protocol. the one Lemmy uses, is a mature protocol and people have put thought in various aspects of it.

Apart from Lemmy, there are ActivityPub applications that foster activist and IRL communication, like Framasoft's Mobilizon.

The main issue I would think of about ActivityPub instances for community organizing is the lack of specialized features for this type of work, like polling.

And the major issue of course is the pseudonymity/anonymity and completely open signups renders existing apps like Lemmy untenable for community activism organizing.

In your opinion, what would it take for an Activity Pub application to be a secure, efficient tool for community activism?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

About the technical side of my response. I have difficulty understanding your concern, because from what I have seen so far, NOSTR is a protocol and has different implementations. As a protocol it is very liberal since it mostly goes on to specify the structure of the "event" data type. In the specification I saw that it specifies signing and verifying notes with private/public key pairs, but I haven't seen yet where on the protocol level it requires Bitcoin Lightning. Is it possible that you have looked into a specific implementation which elected to use such cryptographic keys as to make it interoperate with the Bitcoin blockchain to start with? In that case, the articles linked by the project mention that the protocol is simple and can be implemented "in a weekend". That means that instead of even forking it at all you can roll your own in your chosen framework?

[–] demesisx 1 points 3 months ago

Sounds great! Thanks for looking into that. I’m a bit of a jack of all trades. So, I tend to try and thoroughly vet a technology before I really dive in and commit my blood, sweat, and tears.

A couple of weeks ago, I found a previous implementation in Haskell. If I were really approaching the stack that I think will be best for the future, perhaps I should fork that one. I’m wishing Purescript was ready for prime time (was popular enough to have more educational material) because that would be a no brainer…especially the work they’ve recently been doing with a Chez Scheme back end.

I’ll start to look into it more in the coming week. Thank you so much! I have a community setup for this idea at https://infosec.pub/c/Lemventory

I may change it, though, since this is no longer Lemmy-related. As I realized, inventory is just not suited to Pub/Sub due to the need to have varying levels of security for the information being broadcast and subscribed to.