If you’re reading this I’d recommend against joining the ml or hexbear chat groups
Please join the actual Blahaj Matrix group instead as it is moderated by Ada
Blahaj Sidebar:
We have a public matrix channel for all Blahaj users at #blahaj:chat.blahaj.zone
If you’re looking for the support channel, rather than the general chat channel, you can find it at #blahaj-support:chat.blahaj.zone
Sounds like nazifur donkeyshit to me
“You won’t find a community there” uhhhhhhhhhhhh, the instance census proved that was a lie
Are you yet another cis person coming into trans spaces to fearmonger about other trans spaces and why certain trans people are ‘the good ones’? Just wondering, because that would definitely be transphobia.
Rich of you fuckers to talk about brigading when you’re deliberately sending other admins into this thread, likely from an admin chat. You don’t even have pronouns displayed anywhere, which is the bare minimum for supporting trans people online and normalizing showing pronouns.
Whether you like them or not, they have very useful mutual aid groups that have funded a lot of HRT, rent, etc for trans people. One trans person got hit by a hurricane and needed assistance with rent for 2 months and it was paid in full. Without their help, that person would have been homeless.
I appreciate the intent of this message, but how sure are you that federated social media like Lemmy is really any safer than Reddit? Not much on here is encrypted, to my knowledge, and instance admins need to respond to subpoenas just like anybody else… In the event of hostile government action, you’re much better off communicating on E2EE platforms, and unfortunately, posting on public social media platforms is a risk.
You can mitigate much of that risk with a burner email and VPN, but you can do that on other platforms too.
I don’t know a lot about this. If the United States wants to subpoena records from an instance admin based outside of the United States, do they have to comply?
I think it’s pretty murky, ignoring a subpoena is a crime, so US may be able to charge them with obstruction and request extradition, it’s then on their home countries to decide whether to accept the US’s requests. Either way I’m sure it would make them ever traveling to the US very tense.
See: Julian Assange
Remember though, these instance admins are generally doing this out of the kindness of their heart on shoestring budgets, it’s so much safer and easier for them to just comply with legal requests. They’re nice people, but not political martyrs.
Mainstream social media track and identify in non-obvious ways such as browser fingerprinting. If you’re on a federated open source social media site then there’s none of that. If you use a VPN (and if you can’t afford one, Proton offer a free tier) or Tor browser to mask your IP and you’re using a non personally identifiable email address that goes a long way towards protecting yourself.
Beyond that, never posting identifying info about yourself such as the place you live, including the State, will protect you even further.
But I do agree that using an E2EE service is the best way to communicate.
Centralized platforms are much more dangerous, the various FOSS federated platforms are auditable and don’t contain inherent spyware. You can also use certain sites as a proxy, or start your own VPS+lemmy instance to use as a secure proxy for yourself. The restrictive nature of sites like reddit means they can ban you for taking basic security precautions, which they do regularly.
The decentralized nature of federated social media is the only advantage it has. But it’s kind of a wash. The big social media platforms have resources and weight they can throw at resisting state level surveillance. The operator of the Mastodon instance you sign up for probably doesn’t have a lawyer on retainer let alone the army of legal experts Facebook or X could throw at the problem. That said you can always change instances or use multiple ones to begin with.
Sure, there are things you can do to be safe on Lemmy/the fediverse, but most of those things aren’t inherent to the platform, they’re just good safety practices, and most importantly none of them are mentioned in this “PSA” about “safety”.
I don’t disagree with you. Realistically if you’re serious about security and a state level actor is in your threat model, you probably shouldn’t be using social media at all, but especially not platforms that focus on followers and public posts rather than one-on-one or small group connections. At least not for day to day usage.
I mean this is great except for hexbear and .ml, wtf lol
When I first checked Lemmy this morning, I quickly found three threads from trans communities full of people afraid for their freedoms and even their lives because of the results of the eletion, and another that was a circlejerk about how the election didn’t actually matter. That’s pretty much it in a nutshell.
edit: To clarify, the dismissive circlejerk was on lemmygrad. I actually think lemmy.ml isn’t bad, just a mixed bag sometimes. Lemmygrad.ml is significantly worse, and Hexbear is worst of all. Don’t go there for anything but vibes-based politics that will sacrifice any ideal and any person if it means they can be smug (as smug as the worst liberal) on the internet.
Lemmy lacks the resources to protect anyone; use things that we already have, like tor, instead.
Ah… well… the Tor Project currently receives funding from the US Department of State, and has in the past received funding from DARPA and the US Naval Research Laboratory… (Tor sponsors list)
the federal government currently accounts for well over half of the Tor Project’s overall funding.
Privacy group demands answers about government’s influence on Tor
Just fyi
These are all large trans spaces, and Hexbear has a couple of impressive mutual aid groups thats helped many trans people.
