Does anyone know if a graphic or animation was made to visualize a consent-based network or communal #fedifam#freefediverse network to help visualize this concept? I want to make one, but I wanted to see first if it already exists! @ophiocephalic@thenexusofprivacy maybe you all would know?
thanks! I may have mentioned this but I'm writing an article about the free fediverse movement and the politic of openness, and the role of safety and security in challenging surveillance capitalism. But alongside that I am interested in making some kind of animation to help people better understand the idea! I feel like it may be useful :)
@Crash_thepose@thenexusofprivacy
That's intriguing! Generally (and as you're probably already aware), the consensus-based communal structure needs to devolve more power down to the most local and participatory organizational unit, and less power out to the larger and probably more representational concentric rings. Animation could be a much better way to illustrate that than a static graphic. Do keep us posted!
"Meta's fediverses", federating with Meta to allow communications, potentially using services from Meta such as automated moderation or ad targeting, and potentially harvesting data on Meta's behalf.
"free fediverses" that reject Meta – and surveillance capitalism more generally
The free fediverses have a lot of advantages over Meta and Meta's fediverses, some of which will be very hard to counter, and clearly have enough critical mass that they'll be just fine.
Here's a set of strategies for the free fediverses to provide a viable alternative to surveillance capitalism. They build on the strengths of today's fediverse at its best – including natural advantages the free fediverses have that Threads and Meta's fediverses will having a very hard time countering – but also are hopefully candid about weaknesses that need to be addressed. It's a long list, so I'll be spreading out over multiple posts; this post currently goes into detail on the first two.
Opposition to Meta and surveillance capitalism is an appealing position. Highlight it!
Focus on consent (including consent-based federation), privacy, and safety
Emphasize "networked communities"
Support concentric federations of instances and communities
Consider "transitively defederating" Meta's fediverses (as well as defederating Threads)
Consider working with people and instances in Meta's fediverses (and Bluesky, Dreamwidth, and other social networks) whose goals and values align with the free fediverses'
Build a sustainable ecosystem
Prepare for Meta's (and their allies') attempts to paint the free fediverses in a bad light
Reduce the dependency on Mastodon
Prioritize accessibility, which is a huge opportunity
Commit to anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and pro-LGBTQIA2S+ principles, policies, practices, and norms for the free fediverses
"instances are valuable for the relations and interactions they facilitate locally AND for their ability to connect you to other parts of the network."
By contrast, @evanprodromou notes that "Big Fedi" advocates typically see instances as typically see the instance as "mostly a dumb pipe." But The Networked Communities view aligns much better with the free fediverses' values – as does the "Social Archipelago" view @noracodes sketches in The Fediverse is Already Dead. Not only that, it's good strategy!
The free fediverses should work together with people and instances in Meta's fediverses and on Bluesky whose goals and values align with the free fediverse
Many of the Meta advocates I've talked to share the free fediverses' long-term goal of building a sustainable alternative to surveillance capitalism -- and the same is true for people on Bluesky. So there are likely to be situations where some of the people and instances in Meta's fediverses and Bluesky wind up as situational allies to the free fediverses.
A few areas where collaboration could be very useful:
A key principle of organizing is meeting people where they are.
Moderation on decentralized networks is a shared challenge.
Bringing concepts similar to Bluesky's custom feeds to the fediverses, and more generally focusing on human-focused and liberatory (as opposed to oppressive) uses of algorithms in decentralized social networks designed from the margins.
Meta's fediverses, Bluesky, and the free fediverses are all vulnerable to disinformation.
We have recently been advocating the activation of a function which is present but usually off in Mastodon and other fedi services called Authorized Fetch. As we plead with the major development projects to take safety more seriously and make it a default, we have learned that Meta itself didn't think twice about it and has activated it in their own ActivityPub implementation against us.
We know this because of news that a fascist has devised a way to evade it and force federation with Threads. They promise to then turn their technique upon us and coerce unblockable federation with fascist and cryptospam instances: https://soapbox.pub/blog/threads-server-blocking/
While Authorized Fetch remains important to activate, it is clear that even it - which remember, provides better defense than that currently implemented on most of our home servers - is inadequate to the threats facing us as the Zuckerberg incursion progresses. If we're serious about protecting our communities and expressions from absorption into surveillance capitalism and the accelerating miseries of fascism, we need to talk about a stronger grade of defensive weaponry.
To this end, @are0h has fired a first volley: https://h-i.social/@are0h/111653850819592308 Every fedi community which serves as a refuge for those targeted and under siege should be thinking like this. True safety only awaits us in a transitive approach to defederation, and further on, in an intentional federation based on the allow-list.
A note also on the gaslighting we face from Meta's colluders; the latest being the embarrassing spectacle of ActivityPub co-author Evan wagging around a "small fedi". @thenexusofprivacy has a good rebuttal to this cringe exhibitionism here: https://privacy.thenexus.today/the-annotated-case-for-a-big-fedi/
Evan has seen fit to misappropriate the "small fedi" idea, then build a blog post around warping it into a smear, with a long list of patronizing and fictional mischaracterizations. But what is truly small is the thinking that the fedi's future is surveillance, algorithmic ingestion, centralized servers too big to moderate, and huge psychotic corporations like Meta. In fact, that is social media's catastrophic past, the one we're all here to reject.
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.
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.
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 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.
For those interested in the prefiguration of dual power, there is a perfect opportunity right under our noses - the fediverse. Moreover, such praxis may not be so much of a choice, as a necessity. The forces of authoritarian and capitalist recuperation are coming for this network.
So far, it remains largely out of the control radius of corporations, government security services and the fascists poisoning every other online environment. But there are well-resourced elements both without and within working to change that.
Consider the contrast with major capitalist services. This recent story explains how the "U.S." government has attempted to extort a price from TikTok in exchange for allowing it continued operation in the country - its conversion into a domestic mass surveillance tool under the control of state security and military agencies.
Meta will federate for the same reason that Google pays Mozilla tens of millions a year to keep Firefox alive. But that comparison only takes us so far, because in this case, it's more like Google dishing out the money only on the condition that Firefox disables ad-blocking and sends telemetry to Google.
So, we have multiple, recent and ongoing indicators. We have motives and strategies which fit a type. Every signal beams in the same direction, and there are none which contradict it. Meta is coming.
And the ActivityPub protocol and major fediverse development projects are firmly under the control of facilitators who are smoothing the way. This is a blog post by one of the primary Mastodon developers, with a proposal to add in backend hooks for the algorithmic surveillance and telemetry collection demanded by the Facebook Mafia.
How could the communalization of the fediverse manifest tangibly? One idea that pops up over and over from different corners is the organization of instances into alliances. Here is a thread proposing the formation of the fedifam construct.
In brief: Instances allied into fedifams could share resources and mutually support each other in many ways, such as:
🐸 A common charter of moderation principles
🐸 Hosting infrastructure and setup support
🐸 A crowdfunding mechanism
🐸 An open-source administration platform
🐸 A commonwealth of blocklists or allow-lists
🐸 A framework for new instance initiatives from within the fedifam to spin up
A Free Fediverse beyond surveillance capitalism should prioritize deepening its commitment to decentralization by keeping the maximum user count of its instances small.
This addresses practical needs. Smaller communities are easier to moderate, on a human scale which doesn't involve algorithms or invasive third-party data collection. Smaller communities disperse targets for threat models like spambots, and enhance network resilience. And smaller communities are better at scaling democracy, so that we can avoid being pulled back into the circumstance now plaguing the fediverse of mega-server admins unilaterally imposing their will on everyone else.
However, keeping things small can result in problems of its own. Smaller communities means more people grappling with the complexities of trying to set up, administer, moderate, and - not to mention - fund operations. A system of mutual aid, beyond the current haphazard status quo, is required.
As an approach to solving these problems, and to instilling a ethos of solidarity devoid of the for-profit "monetization" impulse, consider the concept of the fedifam. :fediverso: 👩👩👧
The fedifam would be a family or alliance of instances. Communities could align into fedifams based on whatever conditions of identity, philosophy or interest are relevant to them. Instances allied into fedifams could share resources and mutually support each other in many ways, such as:
🐸 A common charter of moderation principles
🐸 Hosting infrastructure and setup support
🐸 A crowdfunding mechanism
🐸 An open-source administration platform
🐸 A commonwealth of blocklists or allow-lists
🐸 A framework for new instance initiatives from within the fedifam to spin up
Yes, there was a fuckup; in fact, a fuckup compounded by another fuckup. But the wellspring of the disaster actually wasn't Kolektiva, it was mastodon-dot-social, that mega-server with hundreds of thousands of silo'ed users, open registration and next-to-no-moderation; that irresistible honeypot for spammers and scammers, that 500-pound gorilla with a bullseye painted on its ass.
@folkerschamel
Amazing for someone on masto-dot-social to unilaterally pronounce that the fediverse looks the same for all users. No, it most certainly does not. In fact, it looks very different for people who are being targeted for abuse and elimination in this moment and are banding together for protection and survival, than it does for technocrats scheming over protocols and architectural abstractions. Very different indeed
Zuckerberg is not just absorbing certain of the fediverse's communities, but also certain of its technologies. We'll need replacements, but that's an opportunity to break the current state of developmental stagnation in the predominant microblogging service and ActivityPub. And more important still than protocols and apps are those who create them. Essentially, the Facebook Fediverse gets the techbros, but the Free Fediverse gets the catgirls - which means we win!
Prominent voices advocating for collaboration with the Zuckerberg surveillance entity sure do talk up decentralization a lot, when they're not advocating the subjugation of the fediverse to a single vertical silo of 100 million users. The irony, of course, is that they tend to be admins of instances with tens or even hundreds of thousands. And two of the most prominent control multiple mega-servers, which means they're not just overseeing centralized instances, they're hoarding them.
In contrast, by default Pixelfed servers are limited to a maximum of 1000 users. Though a deep dive into the parameters can override this, its status as a default is an affirmation of the decentralizing ethos. "Thou shalt keep thy instance small."
The microblogging space of the fediverse hasn't been allowed to develop an equivalent consciousness, as the agenda has been set by mega-server admins who drove the conversation around topics like "smooth onboarding". But these aren't evil people; the problem is that they have no real vision.
A comment circulated recently - receipt unfortunately not saved - suggesting that the development of fediverse tools to useful to organizing community would be an effective alternative to the "how to funnel in granny" mentality, because then there would be incentives for entire communities to migrate in together; surely a more holistic view of "onboarding" than fretting over how to pick up confused and wandering individuals one at a time. That is the kind of exercise of technical and social imagination we need.
To become viable, the Free Fediverse will need to define itself by not just what it stands against - corporate enclosure by the Meta monstrosity - but by what it stands for. Real and actual decentralization - not just shallow lip service towards it - can be one of those foundational values.
This value can then be encoded into the technology, as it was with Pixelfed; because, let there be no doubt, Zuckerberg is not just absorbing certain of the fediverse's communities, but also certain of its technologies. We'll need replacements, but that's an opportunity to break the current state of developmental stagnation in the predominant microblogging service and ActivityPub. And more important still than protocols and apps are those who create them. Essentially, the Facebook Fediverse gets the techbros, but the Free Fediverse gets the catgirls - which means we win!
Real decentralization - lots and lots and lots of quite small communities, distinct yet federated - has already proven itself to be a better facilitator of good moderation, and will enable another important value to be addressed shortly. But on the moderation issue, a timely real-world example of why decentralization matters is instructive.
There has recently been a calamity visited upon our instance, Kolektiva. Among all of the discussion following its disclosure, there was not a full analysis of its chain of causality. Let's take a flyover of the recent timeline.
April - A massive spambot wave first hits mastodon-dot-social, then spreads quickly through the entire fediverse. Kolektiva, and many other servers, temporarily limit dot-social until the invasion is under control.
Early May - Another spambot attack hits masto-dot-social, and of course, everyone else. This time, an error is made, and a Kolektiva admin defederates rather than limits dot-social. All Kolektiva users irrecoverably lose their follows and followers from dot-social. There is disquiet.
Mid-May - In an attempt to restore the lost follow-follower data, a Kolektiva admin recovers a snapshot backup of the database from before the defederation, an operation which occurs with what turns out to be "spectacularly bad timing".
Yes, there was a fuckup; in fact, a fuckup compounded by another fuckup. But - beyond noting that both mistakes were attempts to do right by the users of the instance - the wellspring of the disaster actually wasn't Kolektiva, but mastodon-dot-social, that mega-server with hundreds of thousands of silo'ed users, open registration and next-to-no-moderation; that irresistible honeypot for spammers and scammers, that 500-pound gorilla with a bullseye painted on its ass.
The mother of all instances has repeatedly proven itself to be a problem for the rest of the fediverse, as in the examples above, when the admins of literally every other server federated with it were put in the position of having to locally address a crisis not of their origination, each an opportunity to make mistakes they would not otherwise have needed to risk.
Smaller instances are easier to moderate, larger instances more difficult. And if masto-dot-social is any indication, a large enough instance becomes a lost cause - take a look at dot-social's local feed and see if you agree. Decentralization distributes moderation agency more effectively, both to admins and even to users. And by scattering targets, it creates network resiliency against threats like spambots and crypto scams. Decentralization isn't just a foss-nerd buzzword, it yields tangible benefits for those seeking safer community online.
@MediaActivist
Thank you and reciprocation to your vision as well! There are so many possibilities for autonomous media and culture, sustained and distributed in a parallel context beyond capitalism.
E.g., envision a radical media fedifam which supports the internal spin-up of new project instances. A current problem of the fediverse is that it's easy to set up an individual account, but there are technical barriers for collective projects that want to commit to a more serious presence with their own instances. This could include not just the microblogging, but also video (PeerTube), podcast (Castopod & Owncast streaming), AP-federated blogging etc. A collectivized approach to infrastructure and tech support could make that a lot easier, and that's infrastructure that could be under autonomous control, so resilient from deplatforming
Those who advocate for the surrender of the fediverse to the Zuckerberg surveillance entity have been busy mischaracterizing adherents of the FediPact alliance in various ways. More needs to be said about this, but for the moment, let's unpack one of their more persistent slurs, the claim that we are "gatekeeping".
The term itself is one they have inherited from Silicon Valley crypto-fascist propertarians who, themselves, have seized power by overseeing the construction of a number of rigidly gatekept "walled gardens"; and the corporation they are so eager to collaborate with and invite in to colonize the fediverse is one of the most draconian of those gatekeepers.
But why accept this metaphorical territory on which to battle? Beyond the "walled gardens" and "marketplace of ideas" of neoliberalism, anarchist thought provides an alternative lens for viewing the predicament - the ZAD.
Within the Zone To Defend - the acronym derives from the French equivalent - there is safety, autonomy, solidarity, and yes, real freedom - freedom to express and freedom from the poisoned expressions of those who seek to weaponize speech to declare others inferior, excluded, and unworthy of existence.
However, as often when ideal meets reality, a contradiction is encountered. The presence of a "zone" infers the dialectical presence of space which is not the zone. Ultimately, our autonomous zone is one we would like to see grow to be boundless, which would be the fulfillment of its natural condition.
But provisionally at least, our zone is situated in the world as it currently is; a world in which we are surrounded by enemies on all sides. We do not ourselves choose the boundaries, but we acknowledge them, as we must. Unhappily, the Zone To Defend is bounded, and at the boundaries, we make our stand.
The defense of the zone is necessary, not just to guard the terrain, but more importantly, to defend the souls who have taken refuge and find community within it. This is a conviction the Meta collaborators don't appear to be able to grasp. They hunker down in the topography of protocols and MAU analytics, unable to catch sight of the actual people nestled in its hills and valleys.
In fact, the boundaries of the ZAD are not calculated, but rather emerge spontaneously from the defensive needs of those within. Their struggles, traumas, defeats and victories form the positions, shapes and composition of the barricades. Those who point this out are sneered at; as in, for example, the recent blog post of a prominent mega-instance admin and pro-Meta activist, who rolled his eyes at the "almost religious overtones" of our argument. Speak of people rather than protocols, and one will be waved off as a woo-dazed fanatic.
The communards of the Zone To Defend don't want to live in a bounded world, but they have to. And certainly, there is no interest in swinging open the gate now, as they observe the approach of perhaps the most dangerous of enemies - a totalitarian empire which has claimed its power by enabling and profiting from exactly those elements and forces which the ZAD exists to shelter them against.
Sorry Zuckerbros, but we will be keeping our gates.
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!"
The Free Fediverse resource website is being continually updated with links to information, statements and thoughts on the upcoming incursion of the Zuckerberg surveillance entity into the fediverse. Feel free to hop over and check it out, or recommend a link to me here!
Detailed announcement in the toot at the top of this thread!
For anyone mobilizing to defend their own account, the fedi community they administer, or the entire fediverse against the Zuckerberg incursion now underway, the Free Fediverse website has a plethora of links to helpful resources.
🐸 FediPact: Info on the pact and how to find an instance you can trust
🐸 Developments: Information on blocking Meta, account migration, and authorized fetch
🐸 Articles: An ongoing history of the Meta scheme to take over the fedi
🐸 Essays: Thinkpieces on the threat and how to save the fediverse from corporate enclosure
🐸 Nightmares: Tons of articles on Meta's many crimes against humanity
The most enraging of the Zuckerbros is actually Gargron, exactly because he's so quiet. Say what you will about the others, they're at least in the discourse. About the only thing Gargron tooted on the day of the NDA betrayal was a snap from a concert he attended. The federation is burning because of him, but he's having a ball.
It's a complete failure of leadership - and he has claimed leadership, even calling himself a "benevolent dictator". But there's actually no such thing, and these techbros who talk up decentralization, while sneaking around with a corporation which has spent 15 years trying to singularly enclose the internet, have ceded their claim to lead.
However, this is actually a golden opportunity for the fediverse to route around the damage of these Mastodon megaservers. What galls most is the spectacle of 3 mediocre white guys unilaterally deciding the destiny of hundreds of thousands, extolling the virtues of open standards and interoperability while dragging everyone else in the community around by the hair.
We don't need "new leaders", what we need is to horizontally distribute leadership so that everyone has some of it, and all network participants possess agency and an active stake in their own community.
Some have waved away the Anti-Meta Pact, noting that most of the participating instances are very small. That's not a bug, it's a feature. It's exactly what the fediverse should become - a network of countless small communities, distinct yet together. By default, Pixelfed limits instance user count to 1000. It's a good idea, and whatever we replace Mastodon with should implement something similar.
The #FreeFediverse will look back some day and see the megaservers, and the Zuckerbros that dominated them, as a aberration on the path to actual decentralization and democratization.