I’m working on an activism campaign kicking off next week opposing some bad internet bills in the US – here’s the kbin magazine I just set up, and I might set up a Lemmy community as well if that makes sense. Once things get going, we’ll be sharing links including information and actions people can take.

Have there been other activism campaigns on Lemmy or kbin, and if so what to learn from them?

Or, any thoughts on what could make an activism campaign successful here?

Just remember that the posts and comments on Lemmy are pretty much public. The government might not need to subpoena any information except maybe

  1. IP address, which your instance’s admins (and possibly the community mods) have access to
  2. DMs, which your instance’s admins and possibly the other party instance’s have access to

You should let the people in your campaign know as well if you use Lemmy for communications.

Jon
creator
link
fedilink
22Y

It’s a great point. This kind of legislative activism is frequently done in public on Twitter, Facebook, etc. as well so the risks are low in general but it’s still something to make people aware of. It’s a real contrast with anything that’s direct action, where the fediverse is a non-starter.

Good to know.

Do you really need 2 separate communities? Seems like that would just split your fledgling user base.

Jon
creator
link
fedilink
1
edit-2
2Y

It turns out that crossposting to Lemmy works better from Lemmy communities. So, a Lemmy community is useful. Since I had already crated the kbin magazine and there’s no way to delete magazines (!), looks like we’ll experiment to see whether or not having two of them makes sense. Here’s the Lemmy community I created, I’m using it for now to cross-post from other communities so that there’s a single place to go for everything. !bad_internet_bills@lemmy.sdf.org

CommunityLinkFixerBot
bot account
link
fedilink
12Y

Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !bad_internet_bills@lemmy.sdf.org

Jon
creator
link
fedilink
12Y

Yeah, the current thinking is just to have the one magazine for now unless people have good reasons why that won’t work. Of course a lot depends on whether there are any active bugs federating between the two systems but I think right now things are copacetic.

Also, hashtags in kbin posts are recognised by mastodon/mblogs? At the moment, they’re not from lemmy (don’t know why). So posting out from kbin might also help in getting traction with the mastodon/mblog crowd.

One problem lemmy/kbin have at the moment for activism, is that smaller communities can get drowned out in the feed. You can of course sort by “New”, or “Hot” but might miss things, unless you’re actively checking the specific community. Same problem with mblogs too I guess.

Something interesting in the works in this regard is a Lemmy pull request to add “Best” as a feed sorting option, which ranks posts relative to their communities, and therefore should make communities equal on your feed. (See Pull Request). It isn’t finished yet but might not be far away.

Jon
creator
link
fedilink
22Y

Not sure about the hashtags, good question. There will also be separate posts on Mastodon – here’s an early example, guaging awareness – and it’ll be interesting to see what gets traction where

copacetic

New word for me (looked it up). Is that regional at all (like a US thing)?

Jon
creator
link
fedilink
22Y

It used to be a slang term people trying to sound hip would use, but that was many decades ago – 1930s or 1950s I think.

I’ve not seen any real organizing yet but the spirit is there. See: !workreform@lemmy.world and slrpnk.net

Jon
creator
link
fedilink
12Y

Thanks!

Universal link: !BadInternetBills@kbin.social

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it’s welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Icon by @Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de

  • 0 users online
  • 402 users / day
  • 865 users / week
  • 2.42K users / month
  • 5.78K users / 6 months
  • 1 subscriber
  • 3.11K Posts
  • 120K Comments
  • Modlog