Questions raised at the Assembly:
- How can we enable MOC community to continue conversations and sharing after our discussions and reading groups? How do we encourage people on other social media platforms to create a mastodon account?
- Cross-platform posting – how do we utilise DGI’s and MoC’s existing following on Twitter and transport this community onto Mastodon?
- How do we engage with other Fediverse platforms such as Hubzilla? How do we feel about scraping? Should we remain a single identity across platforms or it is better to have multiple?
- Security – how do we make sure that Mastodon’s open-source structure does not lead to hate speech and is using a single identity across all platforms safe? What will be our approach to moderation?
- What should we ask the organisers of the upcoming Hackathon in Amsterdam?
Notes
Mastodon runs on the protocol called ActivityPub (https://activitypub.rocks) and it is part of Fediverse (https://fediverse.party). Mastodon is federated which means it has different servers which can interact with each other. If we have an existing Mastodon account – we can link it to an account in another social media platform within the federation.
Nika: When diaspora started – the question was how can one person have the same identity in different places. Rather than registering in each platform – you have one identity and different mirrors everywhere. We want to be careful with our time and resources as each platform requires attention. So can we just be part of those platforms in a mirror presence and not invest into each platform. We do not want to be in a situation where we must hire individual people to manage each individual platform.
Michael: when you have a new software – it is difficult to build a new participant base. Perhaps we should try to get people from Twitter to Mastodon. We could also set up a newsroom on Hubzilla.
Xenia: there are many tools which exist for cross-platform posting, e.g. there is a tool to connect your twitter account to your mastodon account. However, It is scary when you are using the same identity on every social media platform. Compartmentalisation is a good practice in terms of security.
I wrote a paper on mastodon and how it can be an empowering tool for communities. It is important to highlight that there is a risk on mastodon that since its open-source – people can create accounts on your server and then do hate speech. Xenia will send her paper to Nika in which she describes solutions for moderation on mastodon.
Also, we are organising a Hackathon conference in Amsterdam called ‘Internet Without Borders’: activists in the field of cyber-security will talk about online surveillance.
Nika: we should create a working group to create a plan of what we want to ask at the Hackathon conference in Amsterdam. Then we can send it to Xenia prior to the conference.
Xenia: perhaps an exploration of cross-posting tools for mastodon can be a good challenge for the Hackathon conference. For example, this tools works: https://crossposter.jaxbeach.social/statistics.
Steve: Can we have a unique # (hashtag) for each room in mastodon? Currently in your newsfeed you can only see people who you follow. By each room having a # – one could search people by which rooms they are in.
Christian: There is already activity in the Museum of Care mastodon. How can people share additional information after they have attended a session? Can we solve this problem by setting up a server?
Nika: We should encourage everyone to create a Mastodon account.
