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.
Some worry that consent-based federation would lead to isolation, but this doesn't need to be true. For the end user, nothing at all would change; it would be just as easy or hard to join an instance as it is now, minus the funneling into a centralized, poorly-moderated vanilla flagship.
And what about new instance spinups? Their prospects could actually improve from the current status quo, if an allow-list fediverse was structured into instance alliances as described in the fedifam concept. New intra-fam spinups would automatically federate: https://kolektiva.social/@ophiocephalic/110793531238090472
Fedifams could then form trust-treaties with other fedifams, smoothing federation out from the fam into the broader fediverse in whatever manner of comfort or caution is preferred (such as limited or probationary federation): https://kolektiva.social/@ophiocephalic/110985194948458666
We accept and support new spinups by fellow travelers were are already in community with. The servers which entirely come in from the cold are mostly those belonging to the creatures of the dark-fedi, which cause many of the moderation problems for those of us on proportionately-sized instances (and most of the other problems are caused by the disproportionately-sized ones, who will be joining the Zuckerverse).
By assuming agency for who we choose to federate with, rather than existing in a state of constant reaction against those who would try and force us to federate with them, we can defend our federation both from the fascists, racists, transphobes and pedos of the defediverse, and from the horrifying and corruptive threat of the Zuckerberg entity, and its collaborator instances.
An intentional federation would be a more decentralized one, as we could fully affirm a collective choice to keep instances small. That's not just an abstract idea; a more decentralized fedi would be a more democratic one: https://kolektiva.social/@ophiocephalic/110707707012210965
And it would also be a more community-centered one. Currently, the Mastodon network in particular is being driven by an approach which denies the prospect for a riotous polyculture of small and distinct communities in favor of a growth-oriented monoculture in which "servers are not... communities" ( https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/111628882009671820 ) and "it doesn't matter which one you use" ( https://www.theverge.com/23658648/mastodon-ceo-twitter-interview-elon-musk-twitter ), an outlook which Zuckerberg must find favorable.
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.
A better vision for a near-future fedi requires an exercise of both the technical and social imagination, and another thing that Meta's collaborators appear to find elusive: a moral center.
Instead of a regression into another Zuckerberg-controlled nightmare of hate speech, harassment, "brand engagement" and dehumanizing surveillance, we can push forward into an intentional federation based on consent and community, which centers the non-negotiable requirement of safety for everyone who otherwise has the most to lose from the betrayal of this online space of refuge and resistance.
It’s an abuse of the fediverse and antithetical to #decentralization to use Cloudflare. And ironically your comment comes in response to broken functionality manifesting from links to exclusive venues appearing in an openly public forum.
yes yes yes. Ive been saying this for at least a year or more and am writing about this again in my current paper. Im 100% behind this. My new theme is promoting the idea of civic learning networks that are based on decentralised federated instance models that also integrate with the open social web.
Bluesky seen in the US news. Something is changing, I can feel it in my bones. When other microblogging services start to show outside, it's a game changer. I wish in the future it's no longer just X and we have a chance seeing Mastodon posts too.
It’s no secret that most people have been increasingly concerned about Internet centralization over the last decade or so. Having one party (or a small number of them) with a choke hold over any important part of the Internet is counter to its nature: as a ‘network of networks’, the Internet is about fostering relationships between peers, not allowing power to accrue to a few.
As I’ve discussed previously, Internet standards bodies (like the IETF and W3C) can be seen as a kind of regulator, in that they constrain the behaviour of others. So it’s natural to wonder whether they can help avoid or mitigate Internet centralization."
「 Spritely is a framework for building distributed apps that don’t even have to know that they’re distributed. The project is spearheaded by Christine Lemmer-Webber, who was one of the co-authors of the ActivityPub spec that drives the fediverse 」
I know that we have a telegram chat for announcements but I think it would also be a good idea to also have a matrix space where we can also get announcements and maybe even also chat and get support.
One of the reasons I think we should is that not everyone has Telegram and it requires a phone number to sign up to, but a lot of people have Matrix and even if they don't it's easy to sign up to. Another reason is that telegram isn't a great platform due to it being a centralized corporate platform which is now allowing/forcing ads on it, some of which for very sketchy blockchain services, which obviously isn't great and is a pretty big reason people would want to avoid it.
(I posted this from #Mastodon so it could reach further and also so I could mention people).
"People who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. Which is exactly what is happening with #Meta and the #Fediverse."
"...if Meta joins the Fediverse, Meta will be the only one winning. In fact, reactions show that they are already winning: the Fediverse is split between blocking Meta or not. If that happens, this would mean a fragmented, frustrating two-tier fediverse with little appeal for newcomers."
“What I wish to challenge here is a rarely examined prejudice that sees population aggregation at the apex of state centers as triumphs of civilization on the one hand, and decentralization into smaller political units on the other, as a breakdown or failure of political order. We should, I believe, aim to ‘normalize’ collapse and see it rather as often inaugurating a periodic and possibly even salutary reformulation of political order… The ‘collapse’ of an ancient state center is implicitly, but often falsely, associated with a number of human tragedies, such as high death toll. To be sure, an invasion, a war or an epidemic may cause large-scale fatalities, but it is just as common for the abandonment of a state center to entail little if any loss of life.”
— James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States
#Decentralization#SocialMedia#P2P#PeerToPeer#Spritely#Veilid#Privacy#Cybersecurity: "There are many technologies used behind the scenes to create decentralized tools and platforms. There has been a lot of attention lately, for example, around interoperable and federated social media sites using ActivityPub, such as Mastodon, as well as platforms like BlueSky using a similar protocol. These types of services require most individuals to sign up with an intermediary service host in order to participate, but they are decentralized in so far as any user has a choice of intermediary, and can run one of those services themselves while participating in the larger network.
Another model for decentralized communications does away with the intermediary services altogether in favor of a directly peer-to-peer model. This model is technically much more challenging to implement, particularly in cases where privacy and security are crucial, but it does result in a system that gives individuals even more control over their data and their online experience. Fortunately, there are a few projects being developed that are aiming to make purely peer-to-peer applications achievable and easy for developers to create. Two leading projects in this effort are Spritely and Veilid."
Welcome to the last update of the year. We’re happy to be finishing on a high, with the CloserNet testnet and the community helping us check our fix for what we hope will prove to be the last major bug in basic data handling. We were making an assumption that nodes were being ordered by closeness to our node, whereas this was...
With the current testnet flying high, MaidSafe finish 2023 on a high and 2024 is something to look forward to if you value security and privacy for your data....
It's 2023/2024 and Roseanne Barr is now more attractive than Madonna.
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/a995411c-72c6-4a7b-af8d-b0d59aa67987.jpeg...
Safe Network Update 14 December, 2023 (safenetforum.org)
Welcome to the last update of the year. We’re happy to be finishing on a high, with the CloserNet testnet and the community helping us check our fix for what we hope will prove to be the last major bug in basic data handling. We were making an assumption that nodes were being ordered by closeness to our node, whereas this was...
Safe Network Update 03 August, 2023 (safenetforum.org)
With the current testnet flying high, MaidSafe finish 2023 on a high and 2024 is something to look forward to if you value security and privacy for your data....