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.
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.
It’s getting a bit repetitive, but once again this week we can report that the NodeDiscoveryNet testnet is still up and running. A bit rough round the edges and in need of refinement, sure, but the foundations are feeling very solid. This stability is no longer a surprise, but after many years of excitement as we’ve...
I am pleased to share a new article, written with Haleh Asgarinia, Andrés Chomczyk and Dave Lewis, on the ethical and legal challenges brought by Web decentralisation. This is the result of a fantastic collaboration funded by our work on the PROTECT MSCA ITN.
The big contradiction of the #Fediverse is that people want e. g. #Mastodon to be more popular and accepted than e. g. #Twitter or #Threads but yet they are ANTI EVERYTHING; No companies, no this and that, no federation, "I will fucking block you all" for even looking at the mainstream popular culture.
@rolle I share this sentiment. Its wild to me that so many admins block out of fear and conspiracy as opposed to objective, verifiable investigation and evidence. Emphasis on the evidence part. I look forward to #Threads joining us. Ive heard of it referred as a place for the normies to join. I agree with it, not everyone cares about #decentralization. But that doesnt mean I dont want to connect with them!
NodeDiscoveryNet is looking to see how our network discovery is coming for nodes.
We’ve recently made a change to use only manual kbucket inserts, as the default appeared to be overzealous and including a lot of erroneous connection info in our routing table.
We’ve also made some other improvements to reduce messaging, along with other wee client and node improvements.
Instead of being screamed at for attention by "influencers" (whatever THAT means), here on Mastodon/the fedi, I have great, regular conversations with REAL PEOPLE (that's the key here! REAL people!) about music, TV, science, and tech stuff, and I see art and photos of animals and things in space. It's just nice.
One of the changes we’re working through this week concerns the updated version of libp2p, which brings some welcome improvements to AutoNAT - detecting and enabling nodes that are behind a firewall or router to join. We will soon be able to distinguish between global and private IP addresses, which was an issue before....
Well, I did it. Contacted 6 of my friends on Twitter who aren't here and I thought were the most likely to come over- the top ones I miss who aren't already here. One told me he couldn't figure it out, he's on Bluesky now. Still waiting to hear from the others, but expecting similar things. I think the feeling of starting over is too much for people? They're used to it? They like the high follower count? I don't fully get it. Whatever you want to call "engagement" or whatever, it's WAY more here. Even with separated instances, hashtag and search weirdness, it's STILL better here than Twitter or anywhere else. The only reason I wasn't here faster is because I just didn't know about it until November 2022.
Although I truly appreciate and enjoy all that Mastodon has to offer, it's certainly clearly lacking the critical mass appeal, and I find myself really missing some of what I left at Twitter.
I hope Meta's upcoming Threads makes up for that while still allowing us to enjoy what makes Mastodon so great.
In 2020, I published This is Fine: Optimism & emergency in the p2p network(https://newdesigncongress.org/en/pub/this-is-fine). It laid out a clear argument that the #fediverse is irreparably vulnerable because of its p2p nature and political naivete:
"Anyone with administrator access to an Instance can read anything that travels through that Instance’s infrastructure – including direct messages. The level of risk correlates with the number of cross-Instance interactions between users. If users from different Instances communicate, an attacker need only compel one Instance to reveal the direct messages between all of the interacting accounts. [...] In a peer-to-peer network without encryption, there’s no structure, no agreed-upon governance, and absolutely no protection. Compromising or compelling an Instance or its staff means that all of network traffic is laid bare to its assailant. [...] The decentralised community seeks to antagonise a powerful status quo whilst making tradeoffs that do not acknowledge how societies directly threaten their communities."
Today, Kolektiva - a anti-colonial anarchist instance - announced an FBI raid of one of their admins, which included the seizure of an entire copy of the Kolektiva instance.
This is literally the kind of situation I warned about nearly three years ago.
What do we do about this? Honestly, I have no idea. I've spent three years so far trying to get developers and advocates to care about this. I founded my own research firm, New Design Congress, specifically to get platform designers -- especially in the decentralized community -- to come to terms with this reality, that all infrastructure are expressions of power, and are at their very core political.
We've been blown off consistently, especially by people who ought to know better and who now either steer massive emerging projects, or act as major ideological activists for these platforms.
New Design Congress spent three years sending proposal after proposal to funders like @mozilla, Reset.tech, @EC_NGI, the @PrototypeFund, and others. We've been knocked back every time. We have never received direct support or advocacy from civic society organisations who champion the rebuild of a equitable Internet. We have only been able to continue our work and grow thanks to our NDC community and a handful of extremely forward thinking private organisations -- or, shamefully, organisations who have already been subjected to the precarity of decentralization.
@melroy#kbin Do you know if you can follow a magazine of another instance, for example this (without create another account, are not federated the magazines?) https://kbin.social/m/kbinStyles
@laravista YES YOU CAN! That is the power of federation. On the right side of the panel, you see the handle name (@kbinStyles@kbin.social). Copy and paste that in the search (using the search button in the navbar). You will automatically follow this magazine now.
Eine Warnung an alle #Content-Owner: jedes #Video, das nur bei YouTube vorgehalten wird, ist langfristig verloren. Das hier ist nur ein kleiner Schritt von vielen, sie YT zu einem #walledgarden umwandeln werden.
Bitte spätestens ab sofort Alternativen wie beispielsweise #PeerTube zumindest parallel nutzen!
Und bitte auch weiterhin #AdBlocker zu deiner eigenen IT-Sicherheit weiternutzen!
I actually don't disagree with many of the points in this article about #Mastodon and #decentralization from @arstechnica Explaining how decentralization works to most people is a struggle, and getting them to care about it even more so.
I think the average person needs some semblance of centralization. What's important is that the folks who DO care about decentralization find ways to weave it into a mostly transparent experience so "normal users" don't have to care.
Forgive my transgressions if this is the most idiotic thing to be said.
Anyone who has been on fediverse apps is no stranger to the algorithm vs. no-algorithm debate. There certainly is no lack of discourse on the topic.
So I had a tiny insignificant thought about this. Why couldn't we all have a personal decentralized algorithm that allows us to curate our own feed to our personal preferences?
Now I get that hashtags give us a way of curating our feeds. This makes sense to me, but most of the complaints I hear are that it's a lot more 'work' finding topics of interest.
I'm not a software engineer so this might be an uneducated observation. If anyone cares to enlighten me on how/why this would or wouldn't work that would be awesome.
FWIW, I'm pretty satisfied about not having a centralized algo curating for me.
Safe Network Development Update 13 July, 2023 (safenetforum.org)
It’s getting a bit repetitive, but once again this week we can report that the NodeDiscoveryNet testnet is still up and running. A bit rough round the edges and in need of refinement, sure, but the foundations are feeling very solid. This stability is no longer a surprise, but after many years of excitement as we’ve...
NodeDiscoveryNet [07/07/23 Testnet] (safenetforum.org)
Now live, come and try Safe Network out and help test it at the same time....
Safe Network Dev Update 06 July, 2023 (safenetforum.org)
One of the changes we’re working through this week concerns the updated version of libp2p, which brings some welcome improvements to AutoNAT - detecting and enabling nodes that are behind a firewall or router to join. We will soon be able to distinguish between global and private IP addresses, which was an issue before....