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?
Well, if you want publicly available discussions, I think a lemmy community would be well suited, since you can block people from posting or commenting stuff there, but block reading does not work. If you want that it is not public, I would say one of the most convenient and save places would be a matrix space. It is like discord just not a service, but a protocol (well matrix organisation does host an own instance) that allows having private e2e encrypted chat rooms and even video call using jitsi. I just fear, that getting people into the space is a bit more difficult compared to the invitation systems of discord using bots.
Sure, I understand Matrix fine. On the contrary, I don’t get why people find it harder to switch to than Discord?