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".
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.
The threat of absorption into the Zuckerberg surveillance entity is a menace, but also an opportunity. However, the prospect itself needs to be reviewed. Opinions are being voiced that Meta will not, in fact, federate at all.
Some of these claims are good-faith efforts to critically regard the well-established propensity of the corporation to lie through its teeth at every opportunity. While true, there are clear and ongoing indications that Meta has both the intention and the motive to proceed.
First, Meta has planted an engineer in the W3C ActivityPub working group. This may be a precursor to custom additions to the spec which could facilitate advertising and behavioral surveillance protocols.
An additional confirmation of intent is the fraudulent "CSAM-scare" influence operation fronted by Facebook's ex-"Chief Security Officer" and another "Security and Safety" bigwig previously at Facebook. Resources are being expended to mold the network into a semi-centralized, surveilled and shovel-ready data mine suitable for ingestion into the Zuckerverse.
But fedi-folk are smart, and the July disinformation attack was met with a critical eye. It would be tempting to assume that the community's general dismissal would have been the end of it. That is not the case.
At this link, you can read the transcript, or listen to an audio recording, of an early August meeting attended by the Stanford operatives, a co-author of the ActivityPub standard, and a prominent fediverse developer, as they discuss their plans to impose centralized algorithmic surveillance onto the network.
Now to the question of motives. This has also been called into question. Why, after an early July Threads launch with over 100 million "signups" (all of which carried over from existing Instagram accounts), would Meta care about our puny little nothing of a network?
According to one analytics firm, that usage number had dwindled to 576,000 by early August.
Suddenly the fedi, with an estimated DAU of 1.8 million, doesn't seem so puny. But beyond any question of numbers, there is a crystal clear benefit to federation, one which would fit a well-worn pattern for the Zuckerberg entity - openwashing.
A recent paper by @Mer__edith , @davidthewid and Sarah Myers West discusses the openwashing ploy utilized by Meta and other tech giants, in which "AI" and other exploitative technologies are obfuscated by a thin veneer of democratization.
Meta currently has a big problem with regulators - particularly in the EU - demanding more interoperability from their social media operations. ActivityPub federation with their throwaway Threads side-project buys them a low-cost, low-risk figleaf. Perhaps we can term this particular variant "interop-washing"?
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.
It would be a mistake to interpret the current lull in interest, and the odd nature of the Threads launch, as reasons to relax. On the contrary, this is the perfect moment to act on the protective impulses that engendered the FediPact.
Moreover, the push towards centralization, surveillance and algorithmic harvesting by Facebook-linked authoritarians, which is meeting no resistance from those at the top of the development and administrative hierarchy, makes urgent action nothing less than a necessity for everyone of a marginalized or targeted identity, all true believers in FLOSS, and radicals of every stripe.
This is the time to convene, prefigure, and build a Free Fediverse.
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
Consider also the prospect of a Free Fediverse comprised of numerous confedis, which could provide answers to the questions we face now in regards to moderation and safety.
Confedis could form treaties of trust with each other, easing the introduction of new instances into the broader network. This would become especially important if, as some are suggesting, a complete block of Facebook and its collaborator instances requires a switch from blocklists to allow-lists.
A fediverse of confedis would also enable reform of the development of blocklists. Today, a few hardy souls take matters into their own hands through informal projects, bearing the cost and effort without any guaranteed support from the rest of the network. Others observe the state of play and, rightly or wrongly, perceive a concentration of influence.
Now imagine a Free Fediverse of confedis. Instance admins within a confedi deliberate together on blocklist/allow-list decisions; then, periodically, a fediverse moderation council convenes with a representative from each confedi, reproducing the democratic process to insure the safety of the entire network.
It's urgently important to think creatively on the moderation and blocklist issues. At this very moment, Meta collaborators are in firm control of the Mastodon and ActivityPub development projects, and are proposing schemes to enable third-party data collection, algorithmic moderation processing, and other backend telemetry hooks which could eventually facilitate surveillance, advertising and "AI" harvesting.
These proposals hinge entirely on the assumptions of the continued growth of a small number of mega-servers, too large to moderate without algorithmic governance, and under requirements to conform to the moderation dictates of the Zuckerberg entity.
These developments raise the stakes for all of us who affirm our right to nurture and maintain community beyond surveillance capitalism and the growth-at-all-costs pathology. Whatever Meta does next, we simply have no choice now but to develop an alternative paradigm which centers human-scaled communities and the culture and tech which facilitates them. It's not sufficient to simply sign off on the FediPact and wait to see what happens next.
The confedi concept could provide a way forward; and there are lots of smart people on the fediverse who could help to build out and co-create an idea like this together. Let's collaborate, stretch our imaginations and build a Free Fediverse!
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.
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.
great collection of resources, writing, etc for supporters of a Fedi that's free from the clutches of surveillance capitalists. Thanks to @ophiocephalic for putting it together :)
Congressional Report Finds Meta and Tax Prep Companies “Recklessly” Shared Taxpayers’ Data – The Markup (themarkup.org)
I swear, almost every single day there is a new piece on how terrible this company is.
Meta cut election teams months before Threads launch, raising concerns for 2024 | CNN Business (www.cnn.com)
Keep in mind, this company had 23 Billion dollars in profits in 2022:...
FediPact gets a mention on the BBC! (article titled Threads: Meta sets out planned new features) (www.bbc.com)
Nice to see the Pact getting a little bit of press :)...
FreeFediverse.org wiki <3 (freefediverse.org)
great collection of resources, writing, etc for supporters of a Fedi that's free from the clutches of surveillance capitalists. Thanks to @ophiocephalic for putting it together :)