Since #Facebook/#Meta is apparently going to start testing #Fediverse/#Mastodon integration for their #P92/#Barcelona/#Threads “platform” soon, let's do another round of reminders of what this entails and why their instance and IPs should be blocked now with extreme prejudice.
Interesting new details have emerged concerning planned machinations for Meta's takeover of the fediverse. The information was revealed at a "data dialogue" in San Francisco on the subject of "Meta’s Threads Interoperating in the Fediverse".
It seems that the plan is to gradually roll federation out in stages over the next year. The most telling reveal is in the screenshotted toot by Meta advocate Evan:
"Also, as far as I could tell, the most important use case for them is that a creator could move from Threads to their own server, even if they get de-platformed. I think the major motivator here is Mark Zuckerberg having to go testify in front of Congress twice a year or whatever, and getting grilled by conservative Congresspeople about de-platforming. Being able to say, you can get kicked off Threads but keep your followers, is a big win in this situation."
If correct, the impression here is that Meta is interested in ActivityPub's account portability, so they can offload problematic fascists to the fediverse without too much disgruntlement. They see the fedi as a dumping ground into which they can externalize toxic users without having to either moderate them on their own server, or provoke them by wiping out their social graph.
In Zuckerberg's scheme, our community is to become a landfill for fascism.
"A nationally recognized online disinformation researcher has accused Harvard University of shutting the project she led to protect its relationship with mega-donor and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg."
The notes and accounts from the FediForum in late September suggest that some of "the people who move the fediverse forward", as the conference promotes itself as platforming, are also acutely interested in moving forward the agenda of Meta.
The forum's notes tell the tale. Though a number of topics, including many of genuine benefit, were touched upon, digging through the sessions turns up a path of breadcrumbs that leads straight back to Palo Alto.
Inspiringly, the forum also paused for a moment of self-reflection, in a session essentially grappling with the question, "Why did we only invite white people to the workshop we organized?" https://fediforum.org/2023-09/session/3-c/
Again, the list above is selective, but piecing the mosaic together reveals a picture for a proposed future-fedi that looks a whole lot like something Mark Zuckerberg could work with.
But the central figure, of course, is the surveillance - and this part of the puzzle is already under construction.
The FediForum dedicated no less than four sessions in support of a plan by the IFTAS thinktank for a realtime centralized "AI" surveillance system for the fediverse.
The centralization scheme is being developed in partnership with an entity called Thorn - a for-profit "AI" surveillance privateer which pretends to be a "for the children" NGO. Thorn is hot news lately due to its blatantly corrupt involvement in the EU Chat Control plot, which would destroy the free internet and online privacy in Europe but create a huge business opportunity for Thorn.
The blocklist system IFTAS proposes is called CARIAD - "Consensus Aggregated Retractable IFTAS Allowlist Denylist".
CARIAD's blocking data will be aggregated from two sources. The first is the Facebook Mafia spider-holed at Stanford, which fabricated the CSAM-scare influence operation that roiled the fedi a few months ago. More on them here: https://kolektiva.social/@ophiocephalic/110772380949893619
The second is "an aggregation of at least ten of the largest ActivityPub service providers"; this would seem to be a sugar pill to win over Mastodon gGmbH and a few other megaservers.
The system itself is somewhat similar to that proposed in the Nivenly FSEP plan which has proven so controversial over the last couple of months; except that, instead of centralizing blocklist control with WelshPixie, CARIAD centralizes control with Meta-linked authoritarian techbros.
Other aspects of the IFTAS surveillance scheme are outlined in the slide deck. They include centralized realtime image and video scanning utilizing Thorn's "AI". Transgressive accounts would be auto-reported to authorities. It should also be noted that Thorn technology employs Amazon's facial recognition algorithms.
As a further comment to this prospect, consider that we are now observing how the moderates currently in power in the so-called United States seem to be gift-wrapping policies (KOSA, the border wall, the criminalization of protest and homelessness) for the reactionary extremists who may well succeed them.
Technologies such as Thorn's should be evaluated in the same light. They may - or may not - only detect CSAM for now. But how will they be repurposed if there are drastic political changes in the US or other "democracies"? What beliefs, convictions, sexual or gender identities will come to be mandated as equivalently deviant? Europol already has some ideas: https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/29/europol-sought-unlimited-data-access-in-online-child-sexual-abuse-regulation/
The workshop notes also reveal that some of the FediForum sessions concerning the IFTAS system featured multiple participants straight from Meta. There's no need to speculate further. The Zuckerberg entity seeks to impose this surveillance technology on the fediverse before federating.
The September FediForum and the solutionist machinations it platformed provide further detail for our understanding of Facebook's designs on the fediverse. The water is gradually being brought to boil, and it remains to be seen if the frogs of the FediPact 🐸 can leap to action in time.
Observing fedi-folk from various marginalized communities snipe at each other over the past week has been devastating and tragic. No conspiracy theory here, but if there were some nefarious plot to weaken the fediverse, provoking a conflict like this one would be an effective way to go about it.
The purpose of this post isn't to further stir the shit. But it's worth taking a look at origins, alternatives and possible consequences in light of the ongoing threat of authoritarian and capitalist recuperation looming over the fedi.
Fact: There's nothing magic about a blocklist. There are numerous of them in use on the fedi. You yourself can make one by popping open LibreOffice and typing a few server names into csv cells. If someone wants to make a blocklist which is transphobic - or for that matter racist - they're free to do it. They would be a piece of shit for doing it, but nothing's stopping them, and nothing stops anyone else from loading it into their personal account or their server config if they're an admin.
The critical issue with The Bad Space isn't the content of the blocklist, or even the nature of its "trusted sources". It's what those who are funding its compilation intend to do with it.
The Bad Space is at the center of a plan called FSEP - the Fediverse Safety Enhancement Project - sponsored by two organizations, The Nivenly Foundation and IFTAS.
The Nivenly Foundation's mission statement cites goals such as "bring[ing] sustainable governance to open source projects and communities" and "building an equitable future for technology communities", laudable goals. Their team is comprised of several tech industry executives who are or have been employed at corporations such as Google, Microsoft and Twilio.
Their endeavors include sustaining the Mastodon instance hachyderm.io and an AI project.
IFTAS - Independent Federated Trust and Safety - is a fediverse-focused organization which "aims to serve as a valued resource for trust and safety in a complex social media landscape". Moderation is their concern. Their team consists of tech industry executives and movers in the non-profit and open-source communities.
FSEP presents The Bad Space as "providing an easy way to keep blocklists up to date from a central location" in a manner which "can be integrated into existing platforms to enhance the overall experience on ActivityPub-enabled applications by automatically limiting the opportunity for bad-faith actors to interact."
It proposes "integration of The Bad Space’s features into backend functionality" by "allowing blocklists to be automatically imported during onboarding" of users and instances. It affirms "For MVP, only one deny list provider needs to be supported in this list (The Bad Space)."
"MVP" is "minimum viable product" - presumably FSEP version 1 - with a later goal of allowing a choice "from one of several vetted providers".
The issue here should be clear enough. FSEP is a plan to centralize control over blocklists.
From here, we could easily dive in to why it might be a Bad Idea to make The Bad Space, specifically, the locus of that centralized control - not least because, though some of its "trusted sources" are solid, a few are in fact broadly untrusted by a majority of the fediverse.
But the point here isn't to join in the dunk on The Bad Space. FSEP would be problematic regardless of where it centralizes its control. The problem is that FSEP centralizes control.
The purpose of this thread is not to suggest malign intentions on the part of anyone involved. We ourselves have advocated for better ways to federate deny- or allow-lists. The concern is the method.
There is a type of social engineering at work here which is unmistakably redolent of big-tech solutionism. These approaches may seem fit for the top-down hierarchies of large corporations, but they won't work on a network whose essential character is defined by its decentralization. The week's debacle is a result of this mismatch.
Notice the comment of @mekkaokereke , "We will make the Fediverse safe for people of all backgrounds." Everyone with a soul will agree with the goal. But it's a different statement than to affirm, for example, "We will all make the fediverse safe together." Who does and does not comprise "we" in a project of this nature?
Compare the FSEP initiative with the independent project Fediseer developed by @db0 , intended initially to federate "endorse" and "censure" functionality on Lemmy. Both are crowdsourced, there is no "blocklist author". In fact, there is no real blocklist in a static sense, but rather a dynamic pool of classifications.
Approvals and disapprovals are affirmed through a human-based "chain of trust". Sets of classifications can be subscribed to in a granular manner. The system also allows for another principle sorely lacking in the blocklist-based approach - grace.
In the event that a temporary issue is resolved, censures can be withdrawn, and those changes can automatically federate. It's a far cry from the quasi-moralistic condemned-for-all-time scarlet letters regularly dispensed by some of The Bad Space's "trusted sources".
Fediseer represents the kind of horizontalist, agency-distributing creative thinking the fediverse needs to solve its blocklist problems. (It should also be noted that @db0 is collaborating with The Nivenly Foundation on another project, and the reference here to their Fediseer work shouldn't be construed as forming any connection between @db0 and the critique of Nivenly in this thread).
And those problems do need to be solved. As we have noted before, Facebook and its associated operatives are coming for this network. They intend to target weaknesses in the blocklist system to claim that the only possibility for sustainable moderation on the fediverse is corporate-centralized algorithmic surveillance, complete with functionality to auto-report subversive elements to the "appropriate authorities".
In a meeting held in early August, the imposition of algorithmic surveillance onto the fediverse was discussed by several participants, including a representative of IFTAS. Their organization was presented as a possible vehicle for the standardization of third-party surveillance-capitalist moderation schemes. It should be noted that there was a mention of possible disagreement within their organization on the propriety of this idea.
The fediverse has real moderation problems, and one way or another, changes are coming to the ways in which they are addressed. Two possibilities present themselves.
We can continue to watch as solidarity and any sense of mutual purpose drain away, while self-appointed central-authorities assume control of the best practices on how to do a fediverse. Or we can proactively affirm and act upon the recognition that democratization, decentralization and the horizontal distribution of agency remain the only hope for preserving the fedi as a safe site of resistance and prefigurative possibility.
Announcing Free Fediverse, a website resource for all of us fighting to save our communities from absorption into surveillance capitalism!
There are lots of stories, thinkpieces, links and statements flying around and disappearing quickly, and it would be handy to have a place to store and reference them all. Free Fediverse is that place.
Free Fediverse is a wiki-based site linking to resources of the following categories:
Links to and information on the FediPact
Essays on the Meta threat to the Fediverse
Articles on P92 in mainstream media outlets
Announcements from instance admins on joining the pact
Links and information for development projects beyond corporate enclosure
Articles on Meta's many crimes against humanity
Free Fediverse will continue to be updated. Just hit me up to suggest a link for any category. More links to FediPact instance statements are very welcome!
The website has no ads, trackers or analytics. Ferdi the Free Fediverse Froggy sez "hop on over!"