My latest FOSS Academic post is a doozy.

My latest FOSS Academic post is a doozy. It's "Reading the Digital Safety Act with My Mastodon Admin Hat On":

Reading the Digital Safety Act with My Mastodon Admin Hat On

Back in 2024, I published a reading of the Online Harms Act from my perspective as an admin of a Mastodon instance. The Online Harms Act was a proposed Canadian bill meant to regulate social media to prevent harmful content, particularly hate speech and child abuse materials. While the Online Harms Act ultimately did not come to pass (due the proroguing of Parliament later that year), the Carney Liberal government is bringing much of it back with a new Digital Safety Act. In this post, I am also giving the new Act a look from the perspective of a Mastodon admin.

FOSS Academic (fossacademic.tech)

I'm reading Canada's proposed Digital Safety Act. My conclusion is that the proposed regulations could be very burdensome to non-profit, community-run social media, including AoIR.social.

I'd love feedback on this, particularly from Canadian fediverse admins.

#mastodon #fediverse #Canada

@rwg@aoir.social usually there's a carve out for smaller instances. If this affects all social networks regardless of size, this makes my business as a purveyor of hosted forums essentially untenable.

Watching closely.