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?
Do you really need 2 separate communities? Seems like that would just split your fledgling user base.
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.
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)?
No, it’s just not a commonly used word.
Hmmm. Not so sure.
Merrion-Webster online:
Theories about the origin of copacetic abound, but the facts about the word’s history are scant: it appears to have arisen in African-American slang in the southern U.S., possibly as early as the 1880s, with earliest known evidence of it in print dating only to 1919.
An Americanism first recorded in 1915–20; of obscure origin;
Wiktionary
Stephen Goranson says "there is good reason to think that Irving Bacheller invented the word [with spelling “copasetic”] for a fictional character with a private vocabulary in his best-selling and later-serialized 1919 book about Abraham Lincoln in Illinois, A Man for the Ages, and its currency increased by use in the 1920 song “At the New Jump Steady Ball”.[1] Alternatively, it has been speculated that it may have originated among African Americans in the Southern US in the late 19th or early 20th century, perhaps specifically in the jargon of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, who certainly helped popularize it in any case.
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.
Ok. I was going to suggest subscribing to the kbin mag on a couple Lemmy instances to get it into All.
Very good point, thanks much!
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
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
Just remember that the posts and comments on Lemmy are pretty much public. The government might not need to subpoena any information except maybe
- IP address, which your instance’s admins (and possibly the community mods) have access to
- 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.
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.
I’ve not seen any real organizing yet but the spirit is there. See: !workreform@lemmy.world and slrpnk.net
Thanks!
Universal link: !BadInternetBills@kbin.social
