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Early results are encouraging: experiences organizing against the surveillance-industrial complex in the ATmosphere and the fediverses

Part 3 of The time is right

Jon

• 8 min read
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A post-it note with the word "organize". On the left, a keyboard; to the right, a pen; above, a notebook.
Image credit: Organize post-it note by Nick Youngson via Alpha Stock Images, licensed under Creative Commons 3 CC BY-SA 3.0

Part 3 of The time is right: Organizing against the surveillance-industrial complex in the ATmosphere and the fediverses

"If we organize, the ATmosphere and the fediverses can have a big impact in the linked fights against different aspects of the surveillance-industrial complex. The density of people here who care about these issues is high, and we've got some very useful community-controlled infrastructure, innovative technology, and a developer ecosystem that understands the value of providing tools for organizers and communities."

– The time is right, July 29

A month after the first post in this series, early results are encouraging. It's clear that in the right situations, the ATmosphere and fediverses can have a lot of value right now to organizers, journalists, activists, and politicians who are interested in resisting surveillance and/or trying to hold Big Tech accountable – at least in the US, and very likely other geographies as well.

People are very engaged on these topics, and custom feeds are a great way of tracking the discussions, so even though the potential audience is obviously much much smaller than TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube it's big enough to have an impact. A few examples:

  • The KOSA/KIDS Act (curated and (much more active) KOSA/Bad Internet Bills custom feeds are great way to follow the very active discussions, and proved extremely useful leading up to the Senate Commerce Committee hearing in early August. A lot of organizers and key organizations leading the fight have a strong presence here; calls to action from Fight for the Future and Free Speech Coalition got thousands of likes and reshares, comparable to the best-performing posts on centralized Xitter or Threads; TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube have much larger audiences, but decentralized social networks are a very valuable complement. And even though correlation isn't causation, but it's still good news that after a wave of calls and emails, the SCREEN Act unexpectedly failed in committee (although KOSA moved forward as expected so the battle is far from over).
  • The Flock and other ALPRs and (much quieter) Flock/ALPRs curated feed are great ways to track the wave of resistance to Flock, Axon, and other ALPRs happening all across the country. A lot of local anti-surveillance and DeFlock groups, independent journalists reporting on city council meetings, Indivsible/DSA/ACLU affiliates working on this issue, and national privacy and civil liberties organizations have accounts on decentralized social networks ... so there's a steady stream of useful information, and great opportunities to make connections. So even though most local online organizing happens on Signal, Slack, Discord, email lists, and Facebook groups, decentralized social networks are a very valuable complement.
  • And with the proposed Seattle surveillance pricing ban (see the Seattle Fair Pricing feed for highlights), Washington Privacy Organizers has connected with the bill's sponsor, other advocates we weren't previously in touch with, and journalists covering the story ... classic use cases for social media activism, but now very difficult to do on centralized social networks like Xitter. on surveillance pricing in Seattle.

Don't get me wrong, there are still some very rough edges, and decentralized social networks are a complement to other kinds of online organizing. Still, if you're an activist, organizer, politician, or journalist interested in one of these issues, it's a great time to get involved.

And if you're working on resisting data centers or some other aspect of the fight against surveillance capitalism, please consider putting together a custom feed (or maybe more than one, if you want to focus geographically or volume is so high that a curated version would also be useful). You can do this even if you're not a programmer; here's a quick writeup of how I've approached it so far.

There certainly are a lot of possibilities here!

"When we use social media in our organizing, what are we actually doing? Is it worth the time we put into it? And is there a way of doing it that actually builds something?"

– It’s time for movements to rethink social media, Mehran Khalili, August 13

Looking beyond the short-term opportunities, it's also worth highlighting the longer-term possibilities. Organizing on community-controlled infrastructure (like Blacksky and independent fediverse instances) is quite a contrast with today's parasocial media, directly controlled by the very surveillance-industrial complex we're trying to fight. As Khalili discusses, best practices on centralized parasocial networks today revolve around getting the word out widely to recruit or mobilize, and then shifting to spaces the organizers control. While the two specific examples Khalili discusses shifted people to Action Network and Discord, he also notes "it could as easily have been a mailing list, a forum, a group chat or a room with chairs in it. What matters is that it wasn’t an algorithmic feed."

That approach works here too; as I said earlier about organizing against Flock, the bulk of the local organizing on Signal, Slack, Discord, etc – and in person. But in the ATmosphere and fediverses, we also have lots of options for organizer-controllable spaces that aren't oriented around an algorithmic feed. A few examples:

  • Communities built with Blacksky's Acorn, Bonfire, and Newsmast are interesting complements to forums (NodeBB and Discourse), group chats (Roomy spaces, Precinct Connect), blogs and newsletters (Leaflet, pckt.blog, Offprint, Ghost, Beehiv, Buttondown), and link aggregators (Piefed, Lemmy).
  • Custom feeds let organizers prioritize news, actions, and causes that are buried by the algorithms on Instagram, Facebook, Xitter, etc.
  • The ability to use an ATmosphere account as an "everything account" for all of the above as well as sense-making software (Blacksky Assembly, Semble, Margin), livestreaming (Streamplace) and end-to-end encrypted communications (Germ), etc etc etc could be very use for collaborating with an organizing team.

Admittedly, this is all still early-stage software, so there are plenty of limitations, usability challenges, and infrastructure reliability problems. It's still not clear how long it will take until different pieces are at the point where they're useful for organizing scenarios that require broad adoption.

Still, there certainly are a lot of possibilities here!

Very good progress overall – but still a lot of work to do

"One way of looking at is that today's decentralized social networks are prototypes at scale."

– If not now, when? Mutual aid and organizing in the fediverses, the ATmosphere, and whatever comes next, April 2025

The prototypes have improved significantly in the last fifteen months, and have gotten to the point where they're clearly useful in some interesting scenarios. That's very good progress overall! And with projects like Acorn, Bonfire, and Newsmast building on earlier work from Glitch and Hometown, and Bluesky PBC and Mastodon pivoting, we're starting to see more of a focus on communities – a great match for organizing that isn't parasocial.

All that being said, it seems to me that we're still not there in terms of the "flywheel" effect I talked about in The time is right. The overall idea continues to makes a lot of sense:

"[A] lot of people who currently aren't active on decentralized social networks are also pushing back against Big Tech, age verification, AI data centers, and mass surveillance. So if we become a great place to organize against surveillance capitalism and the surveillance-industrial complex (and build tools that are useful for all kinds of organizers), we'll attract a lot of people, and accelerate movement away from Big Tech's centralized social networks."

And hopefully I've made the case that the ATmosphere and fediverses are already a pretty darned good place for at least some kinds of organizing against surveillance capitalism. So if it were easy for newcomers to get involved with this kind of organizing on community-controlled infrastructure here, that could certainly be a big draw – especially if they're looking for alternatives to centralized social networks.

Alas, it currently isn't easy straightforward for newcomers to get involved. Challenges start with deciding where to start up an account. Well-moderated community-controlled platforms like Blacksky, Latinsky, Northsky, or good small-to-medium-size fediverse instances are the best experience, but how can newcomers find out about them? Once somebody sets up an account, how to tweak initial settings to cut down on harassment and reply guys, find the right people / feeds / hashtags / channels to follow so that you get connected to what's happening, a client that fits well with your interaction style? Custom feeds are a new concept to most organizers; there are good tutorials out there, but how do people even know how to look for them? And so on and so on...

The good news is that we don't have to solve the general "onboarding" problem; a good collection of resources including getting-started guides, peer-to-peer help from more experienced people, and leveraging existing tools technologies can all be helpful for individual campaigns even if they don't scale. That said, there's clearly still a lot of work to do on this front – as well as usability, safety, and a whole host of other issues.

What next?

September is likely to be a busy month on all of these fronts, so a chance to refine tactics and experiment with new ones.

  • KOSA and other bad internet bills are likely to be back on the table once Congress returns from recess, Meta and their Big Tech and anti-LGBTQIA2S+ allies are clearly goingn to try to push through a package of KOSA, the App Store Accountability Act age verification bill, and industry-friendly AI legislation. Meta's sweetheart deal from state Attorneys General will give them added ammunition ... but, fierce grassroots organizing stopped KOSA in 2022 and 2024, and if we keep the pressure up we have a good chance to do it again. KOSA/KIDS Act (curated), KOSA/Bad Internet Bills, and the Bad Internet Bills Lemmy community custom feeds are good places to follow the action. For now, stand by for the next round of action alerts!
  • Local organizing against Flock, Axon, and other ALPRs is in high gear in cities across Washington and the rest of the country ... and organizers are broadening the scope to include other surveillance technology like drones, fusion centers, and real-time crime centers (RTCCs). Flock and other ALPRs, Flock/ALPRs curated, and Newsmast's Vehicle Plates channel are a good way to track what's happening. To get involved at the local level, https://noalprs.com has links to literally hundereds of groups who did events for the recent week of action, and if you can't find anything there look around for local DeFlock, Get the Flock Out, police accountability, anti-surveillance, Indivisible, and DSA groups.
  • The Seattle surveillance pricing ordinance will have a votes on amendments in mid-September, with industry trying to weaken the bill, and then a final vote later in the month; see the Seattle Fair Pricing feed for ongoing updates, or follow Washington Privacy Organizers on Blacksky, Bluesky, or pnw.zone.

And there are also some adjacent areas that also seem like good opportunities for decentralized social network organizing. A few examples:

  • As Christine Lemmer-Webber points out in What happened to the fight for the Internet?, there are bad internet bills all across the world. California's AB 1709 social media ban. the Massachusetts Social Media Act. the EU's trilogue discussions on Chat Control in late September, Canada's C-34 social media ban. These are all situations where key organizers, civil society organizations, journalists, and non-profits are in the ATmosphere and fediverses. How to adapt the US-centric (and monolingual) approaches discussed in this post to these other situations? If people are working on these or similar issues elsewhere, I'd love to find out more and compare notes!
  • As the broader Surveillance Pricing feed highlights there are similar discussions happening in Congress as well as cities and states around the country. How to adapt Seattle-centered tactics to work in other cities? What are the opportunties at the state and federal level?
  • As MediaJustices Brobots vs. the People campaign highlights, the techbro faction of the surveillance-industrial complex is spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the midterms. Are there ways to leverage decentralized social networks to complement the in-person tactics discussed in The BroBots Vs. The People Toolkit?
  • Looking at the midterms more generally, while the top priority is on-the ground efforts (see Sarah Taber's excellent thread here for some great ways to get involved, including signing up as a poll worker), are there ways the ATmosphere and fediverses contribute to non-partisan voting rights and election protection work?

If you've got thoughts on any of these topics, please discuss! A few options:

And you see upcoming posts in the series by following @nexusofprivacy.net, @nexusofprivacy@gotosocial.thenexus.today, @thenexusofprivacy@lemmy.blahaj.zone and/or subscribe to the Nexus of Privacy newsletter