When it comes to the wellbeing of the fediverse, Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi are big thinkers, tireless researchers, community practitioners, and thoughtful human beings.
Unlike traditional social media, the fediverse operates without a central authority. This creates a unique set of challenges and opportunities for how it’s governed.
Luckily, there are thoughtful stewards who want to see decentralized social media succeed in the most human — and humane — fashion. Two of the most prominent are Erin Kissane, a writer and researcher working on new networks, and Darius Kazemi, a senior engineer at the Applied Social Media Lab at Harvard University.
Earlier in 2024, the pair researched and wrote a 40,000-word report on governance in the fediverse. Now they are deep in other projects designed to move the fediverse forward, including Erin’s new studio devoted to network work and Darius’ Fediverse Schema Observatory (software built to enhance the ecosystem’s interoperability while being sensitive to user data). You’ll hear about these projects and more in the latest episode of our Dot Social podcast.
Highlights of the conversation include:
Mentioned in this episode:
🔎 You can find Erin at wreckage/salvage or learn more about her via her personal site. She’s also posting on Mastodon and Bluesky.
🔎 Darius’s home on the Internet is at Tiny Subversions. He works at the Applied Social Media Lab at Harvard University and he posts on Mastodon.
✚ You can follow Mike at @mike@flipboard.social and @mike@flipboard.com
💡 To learn more about what Flipboard's doing in the fediverse, sign up here: http://about.flipboard.com/a-new-wave
This transcript was generated by AI, which may affect its accuracy. As such, we apologize for any errors in the transcript or confusion in the dialogue.
Unlike traditional social media, the fediverse operates without a central authority. This creates a unique set of challenges and opportunities for how it’s governed.
How do you create welcoming spaces? How should these places operate? How does collaboration and consensus happen such that the whole system thrives and moves forward?
Today’s guests are deeply invested in not only how the social web works, but how it can work best for the most number of people, in the most humane way.
Welcome to Dot Social, the first podcast to explore the world of decentralized social media. Each episode, host Mike McCue talks to a leader in this movement; someone who sees the fediverse’s tremendous potential and understands that this could be the Internet’s next wave.
Today, Mike’s talking to Erin Kissane, a writer and researcher working on new networks, and Darius Kazemi, a senior engineer at the Applied Social Media Lab at Harvard University. Among their many various credentials, in 2024, Erin and Darius co-wrote a 40,000-word report on governance in the fediverse. Individually and together, the pair are big thinkers, tireless researchers, community practitioners, and thoughtful human beings
We hope you enjoy this conversation.
Mike McCue:
Erin Kissane. Darius Kazemi. Welcome to Dot Social. It's so good to have both of you here.
Darius Kazemi:
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Erin Kissane:
Thank you. It's so good to be here.
Mike McCue:
You've both been dedicating a significant portion of your professional lives to building new networks of people, connecting people in new ways, in open ways. You know, obviously you've done a lot of work on the fediverse. We're going to get into a lot of that, but I thought a good place to start is how you two specifically bought and processed the results of the US election.
Erin Kissane:
That's a starter? Oh, sure. I mean, I think processing is the right term for me. I mean, I guess what I want to say right away is that I think there is a human temptation, no matter what happens to like, when there's any kind of disruption, to say, Ah, this proves my point. I was right all along, and I understand that's a coping mechanism. I also do think that focusing on making better networks for humans and better ways for people to connect, to avoid manipulation, to get better information, those all feel like issues that are just as hot as they were before, and in many cases, hotter now.
Darius Kazemi:
I guess I wasn't particularly surprised by the events of the election, not that I was had any money riding on it or anything like that, or even had a, you know, strong sense that it would go one way or another. But more like I had a strong sense that it was a coin toss. And so for me, it was like, you know, well, I'm not surprised that it landed on tails, even though I wanted it to land on heads, so, you know. And so for me, the work is all about like, you know, even if, even if it's not, wasn't going to be immediately urgent this next four year block. You know, the way politics tends to work in the US is swinging back and forth like a pendulum anyway. So it's just going to be the next election that's going to be the one where we're having this conversation instead. So it's like, okay, it's happening in 2024 instead of 2028 or 2032 there.
There does seem to be a a case for, certainly for moving off of Twitter, I would say, given all of the of Elon Musk's political ties and so forth, if you're of a certain political leaning. But to me, the work right now is kind of the same as the work before, except that, like, I'm going to have to adjust how I want to bring everyone else. Like, you know, I have to have to change my tactics for bringing people in, knowing that they are in a different place now than maybe they were two weeks ago.
Mike McCue:
It does seem as though the flight from Twitter X has picked up. I think Bluesky said that they had gotten a million or a million and a half users since the election who've now signed up. And does seem as though there's a lot of engagement happening on Bluesky front, I've noticed a lot of people on Threads talking about Bluesky. What's your guys take on on the Bluesky, sort of migration that's happening now? And how do you factor that in as you think about the broader fevers?
Darius Kazemi:
There's many, many factors that go into it. I think the big one is what Erin wrote about in her shoe shopping essay, which is, you have to pick where you're going to land. Basically the fediverse provide presents you with a difficult, complex decision straight out the gate before you get into it. And that might be more honest of the fediverse to do that, but I think people are going to look at that, and they're going to look at something like Bluesky, where it's just, I click on this link and I sign up like any other website. And that's just an easier proposition for people. They're going to do that.
Erin Kissane:
Yeah. I mean, obviously I will agree with the part where you, you said that what I said was right, but I think, yeah, no. I mean, I'll be honest and this, this gets me into trouble in some conversations, but I'm, I'm just glad to see people getting both yes off of Twitter, but also getting a little deeper into their thinking about networks and into their thinking about what matters in a network experience. So you know, maybe it's a small percentage of people who leave X and who land on Bluesky who then take an opportunity, or get an opportunity, or have the headspace even to think about sort of what that means, you know, what is the trajectory for Bluesky? Obviously, we don't know yet. There are certain risks that are on the table, but I think getting people thinking about taking more control of their network experiences about trying new things, and about, you know, just demanding more of the platforms. And I don't mean demanding by, you know, yelling. That doesn't work anymore. I think maybe it did for a while, the what Nathan Schneider and others call the affective voice of just being really loud about what you want. I think platform executives have sufficiently insulated themselves from that that that's not a way to make change anymore, right? But, you know, so I, I really do believe in some of the the sort of the core value of the fediverse, for reasons that we'll probably get into later on. But I'm not sad to see people wind up on Bluesky, and I'm not sad to see them wind up on Bluesky instead of a Meta product. I think it's a step away from the mega platform. Yes, billionaire led, but also, importantly, like driven by opaque algorithms and shaped by people who are not available to us, whose philosophy is also either opaque or frankly terrible. So, you know, I'm glad to see people getting to some place that is a little bit safer, even if it's just safer right now. You know, I don't think that we have an obvious place that will be permanently great for everyone. If we did have that, I'd just be yelling about that, you know, I'd just be pulling people one by one and saying, Go here, this is perfect for everyone. I don't think we have perfect for everyone. I think we have better for now. So I think Bluesky is better for now, for a lot of people for, you know, mostly the reasons that Darius said, but also, you know, we're social creatures. We follow the flock. So when we see people flocking to Bluesky who are part of our community, you know, tabletop role playing, or whatever it is, we go there.
Mike McCue:
There is a lot of excitement. I think that people have to when, when you look at Bluesky as a new user, it there's like the Starter Pack concepts, and there's custom feeds. So there's like, new ideas that are coming into the world of social media from a user point of view, that are pretty exciting.
Erin Kissane:
And which I'm honestly delighted to see, you know, like, I think the best thing here is to try a bunch of things and pick out the things that turn out to be the best for humans, the best for having a coherent society that is moving in an overall good direction for all of us as a species and all of the other species like I think that's good. I would love to see folks who are working on activity, pub based software, learn from what's happening on, you know, Bluesky and other parts of at proto and I'd like to see the opposite. I think it's, I think that kind of cross pollination is really good.
And I try to kind of steer away from defining the fediverse right now, defining the social web, there's a lot of territorial claims that happen, and I just talk about the social internet and the open social internet, and hope that that kind of works out. Yes, the mega platforms are also part of the social internet, but they're not open. And open is not a term that's, you know, an all positive thing. I talk a lot about shelter and privacy and those things, but I do think interop is is an important factor among many.
Mike McCue:
Darius, how do you as a developer, when you look at this now, do you feel like this creates some new opportunities or interesting new things to think about, especially with the work you're doing on the fediverse schema front?
Darius Kazemi:
I've been thinking so I have a project you alluded to called the Fediverse Schema Observatory. It's basically meant to observe the kinds of data that get passed around by different software that uses ActivityPub, because it's not there's like, a Venn diagram of overlap, but it's not all the same. And so there are rough edges where one piece of software can't interpret the information from another piece of software. And I want to provide some data around that so we can, like, figure that out and move past this bumpy era. There's no there's nothing that says that we can't have an observatory for other protocols as well. I would love to, once I launch the feta verse activity, pub version of this, to if someone who's a really interested in in AT proto and Bluesky wants to, wants to take the source code and build an app, proto version of it, that would be amazing. I would love that. And we've actually even seen problems in the at protospace Recently, where there's been like collision name space collisions, which is like, basically, for the non technical listener, is basically like two different people sitting in two different rooms decided to call something the same thing, and now no one knows if that thing respond refers to thing a or to thing B, and and so, you know, a scheme observatory might be useful for mitigating that sort of thing, or at least helping people make decisions about how to move forward about that kind of thing.
And I think the interesting thing about Bluesky for me is whether or not they really actually go open and in the in the technical sense, and interoperable in a technical sense. I've known a lot of the people on that team since before they were at Bluesky. There's a lot of great people on the team, and I consider them fellow travelers in the space in terms of, like, we basically want the same things, even though we take different tactics for getting there, right? I Bluesky is designed to be very modular, which is interesting because it means they can say, Oh, well, there's so many people who host their own PDS for Bluesky, which is basically like, I host my own data, sort of the equivalent of a Mastodon server, kind of, except that the feed, which Bluesky calls a relay, is still extremely expensive to run and maintain, and as far as I'm aware, Bluesky is pretty much the company Bluesky is pretty much the only source of that feed right now. And so if everything but the central feed of information is decentralized, but the central feed of information is or it's effectively so that you need to, like, get outside investment to be able to to to fund the hardware to run an alternate feed. You know, how decentralized is that? I don't know how there's also questions about bridging and interoperability and so forth. I'm curious to see what happens along those lines. There's, there was recent work on, from Ryan Barrett on Bluesky-Mastodon or Bluesky-ActivityPub bridges that met with a lot of consternation from the ActivityPub community, I think in part because people don't want someone, a software developer, to come in and just introduce context collapse into their network. So it's just like, Oh, great. All these people are now going to be seeing my content and they have no context for it like that feels unsafe to me. There were other arguments against it too. But one of the things that I'm trying to do with the observatory as well, in addition to launching this particular piece of software, is also to provide a model for how to socialize software into the fediverse. So right now, it's in the middle of a six week comment period where I'm collecting feedback from people on it, I'm going to start introducing a limited number of beta testers pretty soon to to the software as well, to get feedback from them and and one of the outputs of this is not just going to be the software itself, but I want it to be a guide for people who want to build interesting tools and things like bridges and so forth. You know, how do you get broad public consensus and move forward and really like examine your own project to make sure it's keeping people safe?
Mike McCue:
When you guys look at the work now that is even more urgent, what do you see as the priorities? Where should we be focusing the most?
Darius Kazemi:
I actually have a list, a running list, that I maintain of that so glad you asked. for me, I think getting well, one of the things actually bringing Bluesky back into it, one of the things that you keep seeing people asking for on Bluesky is the ability to have truly private messages and and private groups. And I think some people asking for that mean end to end encryption. But I think for a lot of people, they just mean private, you know, and like in the colloquial sense, one of the things that we've had, like conflicting proposals on in the fediverse for a long time now is how to handle groups. No one can really come to consensus on what a group discussion should look like. What's a private group? How do you invite people to a private group? How do you kick them out? How do you govern a private group and so on, and how much of that needs to happen at the protocol level versus not? And one of the things that I would really like to do, one of my plans for the next year, is to start bringing people together, both virtually and in person, to hash these things out.
It's, it's how things got done. In the early days of the ARPANET was when there were multiple file transfer and data transfer protocols that were in play. People got together at MIT and said, you know, basically worked out their differences and came up with something called FTP. FTP actually predated it, but the FTP that came out of that meeting was much closer to what we have today, and that was in 1972 and we still use FTP today. I want to just do the consensus building. I think we need to have we need to have people who are willing to do the political work the way that this stuff works. Again, going back to the ARPANET rough consensus and running code, I think we do a pretty good job of having running code on the feta verse, but the rough consensus part usually leads something, leaves something lacking there. And so I'm hoping to bring historically inform and historically informed perspective to this, and actually do some of the party hosting required to get that rough consensus between parties so that we can move forward on things like private groups. Long form text is something that I'm actually working on more in the short term. I'm trying to bring together people in the January, February timeframe, to from WordPress and from basically from producers of long form text like WordPress to consumers of long potential consumers of long form text such as Mastodon, and bring them together and say, Look, can we agree on things like, how do you show long form text in a micro blogging, you know, context and then and then. And can we all agree that if we format our data this way, it's going to look this other way when it's read by a consumer?
Long-form text is an interesting one, because it is something that has long been a potential, unique thing that the fediverse can bring to users, from like, a user experience standpoint, that we haven't really delivered on for these consensus reasons. So that's one thing groups have already gone into detail on. I also think groups are going to be private. Groups are going to be really important as people look for ways to self organize in the next four years, yeah,
Erin Kissane:
Yeah. I want to, I want to underline that, you know, I, I during the Biden-Harris administration, I was also still thinking about shelter and refuge, because I remember the past, and I will say I, the previous four years have felt to me like a respite, not a return to an eternal norm or an inevitable arc. So forms of refuge, forms of shelter, some of that stuff is technical. Yeah, we need end-to-end encryption. We need private messages. We need groups. We need things that are not entirely public. We need to give people a gradient of intimacy that they can understand in human terms. You know, a lot of this stuff is technical. A lot of it is product design, which is also something that can be difficult to muster when you are working in an underfunded, open source system, which the ActivityPub world, largely is. Which leads me to the next thing, which is sustainability. People, most of what happens on the fediverse. You know, there are, of course, there's Flipboard. You know, there are. Are other services that come from, you know, a unified product, something that comes with a more traditional product design, and then plugs in to the fediverse, which is great. And then we also have a lot of, you know, tiny Mastodon servers, or tiny many other kinds of servers run by people who are good-hearted volunteers. And those people, many of them, are doing their best to provide places of shelter and refuge for people who are likely to be targeted by the second Trump administration.
They are also, in many cases, targets themselves. Those people are at risk of burning out. They need to have financial sustainability. They need to have emotional, human support. They need all of those things to keep going. So that is very much top of mind.
You know, Darius mentioned, I wrote a post about, you know, finding how difficult it is to if you're not in the fediverse already, to find a good home on the fediverse. So that's where I'm immediately putting my attention right now, because it's something I already had going that now feels quite urgent for people who, you know, I've seen people on Bluesky talking about the fact that they might go back to Mastodon like for another round, even though they didn't necessarily find it conducive the first time, because there is more privacy available there. But where should they go? So that's my very first step, and this week, I'm kicking off interviews with server runners about just sort of to open up and be really transparent about how they do governance, how they do moderation, how they do the kind of, you know, governance by local norms that the fediverse can be so extremely good at, and which I think is going to be crucial for the well being of a lot of people in the next four to however many years. So that feels, that feels very important. That feels hot to me, but I don't want to lose the idea of sustainability. You know, there's something like IFTAS independent, federated trust and safety, does all of this really essential trust and safety infrastructure work, IFTAS needs more support, IFTAS needs institutional support, that it isn't necessarily getting right now, that I would like to see we need to shore up these really important cultural and social parts of the fediverse if we want it to be a good refuge and not have, you know, people come in and find the refuge they need reconnect with their people and have the server shut down two weeks later, or two months later, or a year later.
I think also making legal and data protection concerns front and center. Where does your data live? A lot of Mastodon data lives in Germany. That seems like a good idea right now for a lot of reasons, but we also have a lot of server runners living in US jurisdictions. So I think education work on, you know, what is the liability? What kind of protections are there? Are you keeping your data encrypted and genuinely safe? We saw something, I think it was last year, where a server runner had run in with the FBI, and they happened to have their server data unencrypted on a local machine open when that, I believe it was a raid happened. I'm not sure that anything. Yeah, I don't know if we can know what happened there, but it seems like the kind of thing that server runners are going to have to think about more seriously about.
So Darius and I did a really deep dive in what now feels like the old world. At the beginning of this year, on fediverse governance, and we got to talk to all of these incredible people doing really good work, running servers in really thoughtful ways, in a bunch of different ways. You know, we had a lot of wide range of approaches, but one, one question that I tried to ask toward the end of the interviews is like, well, if things don't go well this fall, what what happens? And there wasn't really it was a question a lot of people didn't really answer because I think it was really hard to think about, but I'm hoping that they have been thinking about it since, and I know that there are people working on that on the fediverse.
And then the last thing I want to say is the risks of open networking, the way that things can seem like they are private and then turn out not to be who can actually read your messages, who can see them. What is the permanent record where copies of your of your posts going? You know, I think there's work to do on continuing to communicate that, especially to new folks who are coming in, but telling people things is a much weaker. Form of communication than building it into the interface. To use Bluesky as an example, you know, they had that extended closed beta, and people came in knowing that the closed beta had an expiration date, knowing that things were going to be open in public, but the affordances of the product made it feel like a safe place, like a place with privacy sort of built in. And as a result, humans did what humans do, and they posted a lot of things that they didn't really want to be out into the indexed forever, permanent record of the world, even though the Bluesky team was posting almost daily warnings saying maybe you don't want to post that thing you just posted because it will be public. So I think that folks working on any kind of social internet services, platforms, products right now should be thinking about not just saying with our mouths, this isn't really private, but also building it into the interfaces, building in roadblocks, building in mornings, because I don't want to see people come from the mega platforms into these new spaces and then wind up doing themselves harm because they don't necessarily understand the honestly, genuinely befuddling layers of interactions of some of these systems that produce unexpected results, you know what? But I blocked that person! What do you mean that they replied to me? But I can't see it, but you can see it. How is that happening? Yeah, so that's, that's my list.
Mike McCue:
I do think that is something that is really essential. It's just simply setting expectations and creating some norms around servers. You guys seem, particularly, you know, capable of, of sort of delineating, you know, this, I've heard people talk about, for example, um, sort of a nutrition label, you know, for, for, for feta servers. So you can look at and say, I know what I'm getting. I'm, I'm going to be bridged into Bluesky if I join this server, you know, and I can opt out, or I'm not going to be bridged anywhere. And I have total control over where my, you know, where I federate to as a user, right? There's, there's these different choices. Is there? Is there a, sort of a norm that we can align around as a social web to help make people have better sense of like, these are hiking shoes and these are dancing shoes. They're two different kinds of shoes, right? Let's start there.
Erin Kissane:
The frustrating but probably realistic answer is that we will have multiple norms, because that's how these networks work. But I do think it will be helpful to define certain sets of information that is useful to people who are looking for a place to go. And that's really what I'm digging into, starting this week with with server runners, is you know, what is it about your server that makes it a good place? What do you mean by good? What do you mean by place and which users are you prioritizing? Which members of the fediverse are you putting the most time into, like, making a good experience for what I am hoping to come out with is not just a set of interviews that people can read and be like, Oh, these seem like great people. I will go there. Like, that's great. But that's the first order thing. The second order thing is that I would like to come out with a set of more structured data that could be then extended and, you know, right now, the things that are gathered and rolled up into most, for instance, directories of Mastodon servers extremely limited, you know. And on the other hand, a lot of servers are not going to fill out an 18-page form. That's not going to happen. So you have to find a balance. But I think there is something there. I think there is, you know, what is the minimum viable set of information that people need to make an informed choice about where to go?
Darius Kazemi:
Yeah, I like the nutrition label analogy, because I think nutrition labels are both useful and imperfect, and I think that's probably where we're going to land, is with something that is useful and imperfect. So yeah, I I would love to see something like that.
I think interestingly, I think Mastodon made took a crack at the problem a couple years ago when they introduced their rules system, which was like free form text, but it's codified rules, and so that, like, when someone reports something, they can pick which rule or set of rules was broken. And like, specifically point to that. Like, interesting experiment. I also think that it mostly because it was free form, people just did what they always do, which is, like they didn't think about norms beyond the ones that they normally put in there. So it's usually stuff like, you know, no hate speech, no you know, no spam, no whatever, right? And, and what Erin is talking about is more like, like, also like, federation policy, what we called in our paper, federated diplomacy, right? Or, you know, what are your, what are your paths to escalating if there's a problem or something, right, like, there's, there's a million things that it could be. And I am excited for, for for us. I hope we can get to a place and that the work, through the work that Erin and others are doing, to to like, come up with that minimum viable the nutrition label, because the nutrition label does not have, it is not a you can't look at a nutrition label and understand what the food is itself, right? I also wanted to, when I think about sustainability, you know, I just want to say, for people who aren't used to how open, a lot of people think, a lot of people look at Wikipedia, for example, and they think, Oh, how wonderful. A bunch of people get together, and they sort of randomly throw effort into a big bin, and then it magically becomes Wikipedia. And that's not the case. There's immense amounts of bureaucracy and funding and so forth that go into that. It is similar with open source writ large, where it's not just a bunch of individual contributors who, in their spare time write code and put it out and, you know, close issues and stuff like that, and fix bugs most opens, I mean, maybe not most, but a lot of, certainly most major open source projects are de facto sponsored by some kind of company because it's in their best interest to do so, usually that's in kind, by letting an engineer work 50% of their time on, you know, React, because they work at Facebook, and Facebook invented and uses React, etc. You know, the reason why I am able to put all the time that I am in right now is because my employer, I went to my employer and said, I want to spend 80% of my time on fediverse stuff. Can I do that? And they very kindly said, yes, that's on mission for us. So that's essentially an in kind sponsorship from my employer there. That would have been unfathomable five years ago. I don't think there was any organization out there in the world that would have looked at the fediverse and said, yeah, that's worth me putting 80% of an engineer's salaried time on so it gives me hope that there are, you know, starting to be people who can, who can do the sort of traditional open source double dipping of their, of their employed time on this stuff. But that's not, that's not even 100% of where that kind of funding comes from. You know, there's all sorts of nonprofits and so forth that, you know, Knight Foundation does a ton of open source funding and all that kind of stuff. And then the question is, you know, how much of that goes to federated social media versus any of the other things that it could go to? So just wanted to, like, flag that in terms of sustainability, that it's, you know, it's not just a big, oh, everyone is, you know, donating their time to this thing and creating this, this massive structure out in the commons, like, there's, there's flows of money and resources that need to happen and and basically we need more organizations willing to to do that sort of thing. Groups like IFTAS that Erin mentions are awesome, and also they need funding, you know, right?
Mike McCue:
On the sustainability front, you know, there's a lot to talk about there as it relates to business models and business models that are helpful versus harmful. You know, there's also, you know, philanthropic funding and other kinds of ways to ensure that, you know, this world continues to get funding. You know, one, one thought that I've had as a sort of aside from all both of those two areas has been for private companies like Flipboard and others to allocate a certain amount of equity to some sort of organization where, you know, if there are private companies that ultimately are successful building, You know, in and around and on the fediverse, that there could be dollars that could ultimately flow back into the ecosystem, to the individual server owners, to to the, you know, to indie projects. You know, I remember that salesforce.com when they went public, they took 1% of their equity, or some small percentage of their equity, and they allocated it to a philanthropic kind of effort or organization, and it turned out to be quite a bit of money. And you know, you could imagine, like, if we did this for the web, if everyone who started on the web took 1% of their equity and put. It into a large, shared, you know basket that you know you'd have a significant amount of funding for all sorts of projects, right? Of course, you have to figure out how to do governance and all that and so on. But what do you guys think about something along those lines?
Erin Kissane:
Europe does that by imposing higher taxes and distributing it, some of it out. And I should note that a lot of set of verse projects are European in origin. And when I talk to my colleagues who are based in, for instance, France or Italy or Germany, and they're like, Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, that's, that's government funded. We get government grants. It's very easy to spin up a co op. It's a, it's a, it's an institution. It's part of our society. So I do have to, you know, I'm coming out of a very American perspective, but, yeah, I mean, I would love to see redistribution of some of those profits back into the ecosystem. Because I do think those of us who've been working on the internet in any way for multiple decades have a sense of how fragile a lot of these kinds of infrastructure are, not just on the social internet, but all over the place. So yes, I think that would be not just a nice thing to do, but a really wise thing to do. It does not strike me as particularly concordant with sort of what we're seeing, which is Wile E. Coyote-ing, out into thin air, faster and harder on the AI will save us, bet. But it would be nice to see some some future conscious thinking. And I appreciate it when I do see it.
Darius Kazemi:
I would point out anyone listening who tends to look at fediverse projects out there in the world, scroll down to the bottom of most information pages, and you will see the name NL net on there as a sponsor, Because NL net is the European fund, the ngi Net Zero fund, that you know, again, it's basically, yeah, European tax money, taxing corporations, and then the EU, sort of funneling that back through from with a relatively light touch grant process that lets people actually do really innovative stuff, separate from any kind of like, particular corporate motivation.
Mike McCue:
One of the challenges with sustainability and with investment in this space has also been that it's fragmented. How do we know how well it's doing? How do we know where investment will help it do better? These are like broader questions that a lot of people with money will ask. Tell me what you guys think that there's a moment now of opportunity to bring to bridge the AT proto the AT proto users and the ActivityPub users into a coherent, open social web. You know, Ryan's done a lot of great work on that bridge. Of course, it's in an opt in basis now, which, to me, sort of makes it almost effectively useless. What's your take on that? Do you feel like? You know, what I worry a little bit about is that, you know, just as people are leaving X right there, there, there's this like sort of potential for division between the ActivityPub world and the AT proto world. Even though they both have the same spirit, right? They're both oriented around the same goal. It seems as though that we could be potentially looking at a place that just ends up getting more fragmented. Do you worry about that and and do you feel like there's an opportunity for a bridge, you know, a different approach around opt in versus opt out to help better unify the use social web?
Darius Kazemi:
That's a really great question. I don't envy Ryan's position as someone trying to build a bridge. You know, as someone who just introduced some software of my own, I sort of designed it from the ground up to be as unobtrusive and unobjectionable as possible, even even though that caused the software to be potentially less useful. On the other hand, picking those, adding those constraints, actually really helped me make the project, I think, even more useful in a lot of ways. And now I'm now, I'm looking at ways that we can, people can donate their data to my project in an opt in way that is, anyway, all that is to say I wouldn't have been thinking along those lines had I just said, Well, I'm going to assume that all public data is up for grabs, and I'm just going to go grab it.
Like one way to look at a bridge is to say that it invites context collapse, right? Like we are literally taking words from, you know, communication from one sphere, and injecting it into. Another sphere, and vice versa. And it's like, you know, who, who like that that can be very unsafe for people, especially if they don't opt into it. Even if they do opt into it, it can still be unsafe, because there's the question of informed consent versus just consent, right? I'm this is one of the problems that I think could be solved by what Erin was talking about earlier. Maybe that nutrition label, right? Like, and you were even saying it yourself too, right, like, the label says we bridge into whatever right, like, I would love. I've been lobbying for a label that says, like, you know, wouldn't it be cool if there was a consortium of researchers on the fediverse, who you know, all abide to certain ethical principles, and then individual servers can then opt in and say, Look, all of our data will go to researchers in this consortium because we agree with their mission and what they're doing, right? Like, there's a big discussion in the research community on how do you research the fediverse in a safe way, as opposed to Twitter, where it's just like, well, as long as we agree by the terms of service, we can grab whatever, because it's one set of terms of service, even if that's not morally right, it's probably legally right. So all that is to say, like, I do think maybe some of this governance labeling stuff that we're talking about might be a good way of doing this.
Yeah, it's a tough position to be in for the bridging thing. In particular I don't like I think you need broad consent and I but I think you also need to be able to get that consent in a semi automated way. Which is why I think that labeling is important, which is why I'd like people to be able to signal, like I consent to this kind of thing, sort of broadly ahead of time.
Erin Kissane:
I do think that server level bridging or federation decisions are in some ways easier to think about if we were to bundle those things into server choice, then you can begin to imagine, yeah, like, there's, these are hiking boots and these are indoor slippers, and they do different things. And maybe you want a pair of hiking boots and you want a pair of cozy slippers. I live in Oregon. I have three pairs of ring boots, you know, like, we should make those options available. And I think it's good to have an opt out, an opt out inside of a server level opt in, which is what we basically have with the Threads Federation controversy. You know, we wound up with some servers don't federate with Threads, and some do. But if you're on a server that federates with Threads, you can still individually opt out. There's a way to do that. I think that's probably not a terrible model. And I think it would also let people make that choice, and, you know, align themselves with other people who are ranking the same kinds of choices for probably, in some cases, the same reasons. I do think there are a lot of people who are on the fediverse because they did not feel like it was a good idea for them to be on big, sort of featureless planes that were all indexed and that we're all surveilled and all of those things. And I respect that that is a foundational aspect of the fediverse, just as much as the like full interop everything open. You know, these are the federal versus heritage is multiple, and I think finding ways to respect that without putting every choice in front of every person all the time as an individual. Now, follow this now to opt out of this one, it's a different mechanism. This one gets a flag. This one gets a label that when you follow an account, like, that's that's a lot to ask. Like,
Darius Kazemi:
I'm actually really inspired by the Starter Pack idea on Bluesky, or just the idea of being able to, like, find custom feeds and that sort of thing. I think it would be really cool to be able to just say I'm going to subscribe to like, Erin. Erin Kissane published her her privacy settings, you know that she personally uses, and I would like to just download those and import them into my account. And now, even though I don't really understand privacy, I trust Erin to have reasonable settings, and I'll just use hers, right? And I'd love to, you know, like, I'd love to have, that's one of the things that I like about, that I like about AT proto and the Bluesky universe is that it was designed to be what's in an engineering term called composable from the start, right? Like, it's all little bits and Legos that you can kind of like, take and put in different places, whereas ActivityPub is not that same kind of beast.
Erin Kissane:
I think Bluesky is going to be a really interesting I mean, it already is a really interesting experiment. Like, as a network nerd, it is fascinating to see all of the unanticipated effects of the new things they're trying. And they're trying a lot of new things, and they're trying them really quickly. So, you know, as a set of experiments, super interesting and informative, but I think that it's possible that Bluesky as a network finds a way to constitute place as well, and to let people there, especially once they do, find a way to have some kind of account privacy, which I know is going to be hard, but the day they really do want to, you know, their team has said it's something that they want to pursue. I believe them when they say it's hard, like I know just enough about the protocol to believe that it will be difficult. But I think that looking at something like what Rudy Fraser has done with black sky, which is a feed and now also a labeler. I think that there are ways to constitute place that are happening, even now on Bluesky, that become really interesting. I think we as a species, as a social species, as primates, you know, we need to be able to do some things as groups and not as atomic individuals with 800 Power User Settings, and I think finding ways to share those and, you know, balance that thing, where you don't want mindless flocking behaviors with bad, unintended consequences, because we've tried that, and it's not good, but You also don't want everyone locked in their own box. You know, not sure how to find anyone else. So I think that both ActivityPub and the atmosphere are trying in their own ways to find you know, how do we make place? How do we make it so that we can think together and share our whatever it is, our privacy settings, our Starter Packs, our block lists, you know, our servers with their nutrition labels, whatever it is. I think that this is the same struggle. They are starting from different perspectives, different points of view, as protocols. But I think that, you know, we're human, nature remains the same, and I think we need a lot of the same things. So I think it's going to be a really fruitful space in the next few years to see, you know, what do we come up with? How do we find ways to, you know, structure things that the human brain can intuitively understand and not find constantly surprising, not find our privacies and our, you know, ways of having shelter constantly eroded and changed underneath us, which has been the experience of the mega platforms, you know. So that's I didn't mean to get optimistic. That was not at all my plan. But that is where I am optimistic about all of these things in in the next while. And we, we sure, we sure need those things.
Mike McCue:
Those are very, very, very wise words. I think that there is there, you know, there is a lot of shared vision for you know, I think you encapsulated, you just summed up that vision that a lot of developers, whether they're on activity, pub or at proto share, and it's incredibly exciting to see that there is this movement happening. When you look at that, what should people be looking at now for the work that each of you are doing, you know, along these lines, what are some of the next things that you're excited about? You know, personally working on here, my
Darius Kazemi:
My big exciting stuff is, like, really nerdy and behind the scenes, and mostly I'm, like, getting a lot more involved in standards discussions, and again, like I said, trying to build that rough consensus to go along with the running code and providing tools to adjudicate, to help adjudicate technical differences in these meetings and so forth. So you know that's I really want to move that whole process along and get the developers in the fediverse ecosystem talking to one another in productive ways and and get getting the whole ecosystem moving forward, I have a bunch of other projects that I would like to do. One of the things that I definitely have on the radar is to finally sort out the governance of my Hometown fork of Mastodon, so that I am no longer benevolent dictator for life, and I'm hoping to kind of like hand that off, at least in part to the community, in part because Hometown has done gotten about 50% of its goals reached, which is like Mastodon has incorporated about 50% of our feature base in the last five years. So, yeah, so I am, I am, but I, you know, I want to keep that going. And also, you know, I guess read our paper if you want to know the downfalls of BDFL style, running of a project. But I want to avoid that stuff. So that's another goal for 2025 for me.
There's like a great piece of software out there called Fedify, which is, which is the software that I wish had existed six or seven years ago when I wrote my initial Federation software. It like, it's basically, for my money, it is, like, the kind of software that we need, which is, which is, it's hard to write something that's like, I'm already writing an app, and I want to federate it how can I plug, like, what's a library I can download to federate my app? But Fedify gets pretty close to that, and I'm really excited about it. So I want to, like, you know, make that happen, or help. I mean, help make that happen. Obviously, it's the dev of Fedify who's making that happen, but I want to, like, really promote really promote that and get people excited about it, and, yeah, see what other weird and wonderful stuff can happen out there. I want more. I want more interop between different, not just, I just, I don't want fediverse to just be a bunch of micro blogging services, right? Like, I really, I'm really excited that WordPress is, has a has a plug in that more or less works, that you can federate your WordPress blog and, and I want to, I plan to be contributing to that over the next six months as well. Yeah, I just, I want the I as always. I want the web to get weirder and wilder and, and I'm hoping to move some of that stuff along in a fediverse context.
Mike McCue:
Erin, how about for you? What are you working on next?
Erin Kissane:
Yeah, I mean, I'm going to be rolling out the sort of things I learned and resources I can build for getting people to good homes on the fediverse, you know, as soon as possible, that feels like this sort of critical next move. I'm also throwing in volunteer time on some other fediverse projects, the Bonfire Networks folks are doing some really interesting things that's very sort of governance first. And I think, based on, you know, a real sense of human needs for things like shelter, but also being able to tell what's happening. So getting to throw in with those folks is really good. I can't talk about some of it yet, but hopefully soon. And, you know, I just want to keep digging into the I mean, if you want to talk about something that's even harder to find any kind of traditional funding for, is like, Well, what about critical network thinking outside of the academy? And what about, you know, like design work for these projects? It's, it's, it's a weird niche, but I'm really committed to it increasingly so just going to keep plugging away on those things. And, you know, divide my time between that kind of landscape thinking, between making resources to help people in really pragmatic ways, sort of find their way. I want to do some sort of cultural network mapping. I sort of pulled all of my, it turns out, many kinds of network projects together and decided to call it a studio a couple of months ago. So now that's what I'm doing. I have a new network studio, and getting to work with with different orgs has been really heartening and good, and we, we need good and heartening things right now. So I'm really grateful, and I'm also super grateful to the people who have gone in with me as sort of members of that collective. There's so much to do, Mike, there's so much to do. So just trying to kind of keep, keep those plates spinning, deal with the hottest things first, and then just keep plugging.
Mike McCue:
Well, you know, one of the best things for me in joining the fediverse, joining Mastodon, you know, I don't know, two years ago, is getting to chance to meet people like you guys, and to see the work that you guys are doing is so inspiring. And I'm just so grateful, both as a citizen, as a fellow builder, as someone who's also really, you know, excited and committed to the fevers. I think your guys passion and thoughtfulness and hard work and sense of purpose right now is is a great thing to see and and now more important than ever, and more urgent than ever. So I'm so excited that you guys got a chance to talk to me and spend time on on all of this. I. Um, thank you and thank you for all the work you guys are doing.
Darius Kazemi:
Hey, thanks for having us.
Erin Kissane:
Thanks so much for having us on.
Well, thanks so much for listening! You can find Erin on Mastodon @kissane@mas.to or @kissane.bsky.social
Darius is @darius@friend.camp
You can follow Mike at @mike@flipboard.social and @mike@flipboard.com
Big thank you to our editors, Rosana Caban and Anh Le.
To learn more about what Flipboard's doing in the fediverse, sign up via the link in this show’s notes.
Until next time, see you in the fediverse!