New: SocialHub and the Substrate of Decentralised Networks
SocialHub, one of the primary forums to talk about the #fediverse and #ActivityPub, has been struggling how to continue the operation. Decentralised networks need a coordination layer, but how to build this in a decentralised manner?
https://connectedplaces.online/socialhub-and-the-substrate-of-decentralised-networks/
Thank you for this @laurens. Iâm thinking of writing some kind of âlast willâ for the SocialHub to very much distinguish the collective approach here, setting up teams and tools from the start to share privileges, and the authoritarian-libertarian approach set forth by Thiel and consorts. The recent attacks Iâve been sustaining and the general misunderstanding about how power is shared here and what this forum is about must be clarified to a larger public. Iâm also very aware that, as I step down from a position of (unintended) power, a new energy will infuse in the direction of more solidarity rather than more competition, which I hope has not much to do with Hobart or Thiel, whose ideas the Fediverse has been, or at least is supposed to have been fighting from inception.
Yes, a good article addrressing important subjects. I would like to emphasize that the challenge of SocialHub represents the same challenge faced by the fediverse at large. The âthere is no shared visionâ is one of major fediverse challenges I identified in 2022.
The paradox of decentralization is that the further things decentralize the more we have to rely on quality technology standards to facilitate that. The social landscape we want is one where inclusive progressive and forward-looking movements can freely interact and engage, and express themself. So decentralization, where people can be who they want to be, and a culture that fosters cohesion and unison that binds and unites, offers safe places for belonging, creative spaces for collaboration and cocreation.
Such is the original promise of the ActivityPub protocol. To provide the robust technical foundations and interoperability that leads us into the future of social networking.
This promise will not be met, unless we solve the paradox and learn to collaborate more effectively beyond the scope of our own direct initiatives. I joined SocialHub as facilitator in 2019 to gain first-hand experience with the difficult grassroots fediverse environment. And found along the way that âcommunityâ is an inadequate organization form to support of the end-to-end development lifecycle at an ecosystem level. And that in fact no organization form existed that was a good match for our chaotic fediverse environment. This I made the focus of my current activities at Social coding commons: elaborating a chaordic organization formula for a sustainable social web that is able to evolve.
In this organization form autonomous and independent parties within the grassroots ecosystem are able to cocreate and exchange services in a commons based value economy. Instead of unsustainable FOSS, they evolve Sustainable open social systems (SOSS), where Sustainability-at-all-times is key.
good timing lol
As always a very thoughtful post, thanks @laurens! And @how, I think it would be great to write something about the collective approach of SocialHub, highlighting the difference in philosophy from the authoritarian-libertarian approach. I agree that thereâs a long tradition in the Fediverse of fighting those ideas and ideologies; rejecting Gab is a high-profile example, and more recently the Anti-Meta FediPact; SocialHubâs Community Values are another good example, albeit with a lower profile.
Then again there are also factions that actively embrace those ideas or argue for âneutralâ or âapoliticalâ approaches. Even here on SocialHub, the fascist-friendly talking point about decentralization supposedly requiring a centralized substrate has shown up several times â including as framing for discussions about the future of SocialHub.
Of course that doesnât mean that people advocating this view are necessarily doing so with the intention of helping authoritarians. But people like Hobart and Thiel are very good at using apparently politically neutral âinsightsâ to warp peopleâs thinking by disguising their pro-authoritarian framing. It should be obvious that a centralized substrate defeats the entire purpose of decentralization, but Hobart simply claims that itâs âinevitableâ resulting in a âparadoxâ. Hmm, a paradox, that sounds interesting! And decentralized communications really are hard and often messy, so maybe a centralized substrate would be better ⊠hmm ⊠and then the next thing you know, somebody who thinks heâs on right side has bought into a fascist-friendly talking point about the inevitability of dominance structures.
The good news is that centralization isnât inevitable! And a rebooted SocialHub has a great opportunity to play a key role in a decentrialized substrate that reflects these collectivist principles. Which would really be a great outcome!
I disagree. A shared SocialHub vision is potentially achievable; a shared fediverse vision isnât achievable.
At the fediverse level, there is never going to be a shared vision that accommodates both Meta and the anti-Meta Free Fediverse. There is never going to be a shared fediverse vision that accommodates both fascists and anti-fascists (or white supremacists and Black people, misogynists and women, anti-trans bigots and trans people, eugencists and disabled people, harassers and their targets, etc etc etc). And so on and so on and so on.
So yes itâs a challenge that thereâs not a shared vision for the fediverse but itâs not going to change.
But SocialHub can potentially have a shared vision on these issues. Or, SocialHub can decide that its shared vision is to be âneutralâ on these issues, a place where folks who disagree about the vision of the fediverse can still interact. Figuring this out will be a key part of the transition.
(And @devnull this applies to activitypub.space too.)
Again, I donât think itâs realistic to expect unison or uniting at the fediverse level. Is there unity on Meta, and how to resist their plans to capture? Nope â the Free Fediverseâs approach of rejecting Meta is very different than the âOpsn Social Webâ philosophy of including Meta. And even here SocialHub, although I think people are fairly united that Meta is evil, thereâs a huge split on how to deal with them and with organizations under their influence like SWICG and Social Web Foundation. SWICG taking control of activitypub.rocks highlights the importance of resolving this.
That said, I think it is possible for SocialHub Next Generation to unite on issues like this â and to unite with other forces in the Fediverse that take a similar position.
And I very much agreed about the safe spaces for belonging and creative spaces for collaboration and cocreation. @angus and @how I hope this is also something you talk about in the transition, because (through no fault of either of yours) itâs a place where this iteration of SocialHub has left a lot of room for some very necessary improvements. Who belongs on SocialHub Next Generation? Who will feel safe there?
hmm i just ran into at least two bugs. @julian@community.nodebb.org (aka @devnull ) replied to my post, and I replied him from my neuromatch.social account (running Glitch) â [you can see his post and my reply here](Jon: "Do people from Meta participate in these discussiâŠ" - Neuromatch Social ). When I looked at it from neuromatch I realized that it was confusing to show that link preview. So I edited it here on SocialHub ⊠but the update didnât propagate to Glitch or to [the NodeBB version of this thread](New: SocialHub and the Substrate of Decentralised Networks | ActivityPub.Space)
And also, I am not seeing Julianâs post or my reply here. That could mean they didnât federate here (which is a bug), or that they did but somehow vanished after I edited my post or something else. So thatâs a bug too.
UPDATE: 24 hours later they did federate here.
Anyhow, Julian said heâd like to think that ActivityPub developers can maintain apolitical when discussing concepts common to AP development ⊠I think this is a key point to discuss here on SocialHub as well. Hereâs my response:
Do people from Meta participate in these discussions about the direction of ActivityPub and the Fediverse? Do people whose orgs are funded by Meta participate in these discussions? Do we approach these discussions with a goal of accommodating Meta, or do we reject Meta?
Does the former CTO of Truth Social (whoâs an ActivityPUb developer) participate in these discussions?
Is it important to make the environment inclusive and equitable enough that Black and Indigenous people participate in these discussions and their views are listened to? What about disabled people? Trans, queer, and non-binary people? If it is important, how to start moving in that direction?
Do ActivityPub developers adopt fascistsâ talking points?
And so on and so on and so on âŠ
These discussions are all inherently political.
At world scale we have a United Nations and fundamental rights that belong to all humans. That is also a result of shared vision of, in this case, how the world should be for people to be able to live in unison and harmony on our planet.
In the case of ActivityPub there was an implied shared technical vision formulated in the specs, and on the fediverse - the installed base of ActivityPub - we are subsequently diverging further and further away from that through protocol decay. The protocol decay is caused by not recognising the shared vision. It constitutes ever growing accidental complexity, and it will kill interoperability if left unchecked.
Shared vision is also the start for formulating shared language, and avoid Babylonion speech confusion that is in so many fediverse related discussion because people have different mental framework and expectations wrt the protocol stack.
There are many visionary aspects. In this case I refer to a vision on the versatility and extensibility of the protocol, so on a technical perspective. I think part of the enthusiasm of devs new to AP who read the spec for the first time is due to how it does not start as a typical dry and intricate W3C formal spec doc to wade through. The Overview reads like a getting-started manual that may leave the dev with a âWow, I can get going right away!â. I like how that is written, myself a lot too.
In hindsight, and as opportunity to improve, I think that it helps shift focus too much to implementation and coding right away, without spending a couple lines of text to first address âWhat do I get when implementing this spec, and what I can I do with that?â. The email analogy is made in the intro, with nice diagrams, but in a context where the mindset is already switched to implementation mode. Plus, its an analogy only. What is the conceptual architecture of AP? What are key concepts, use cases, capabilities that are fundamental characteristics of the protocol?
âActivityPub is a universal social web protocol based on the actor model, to span up social graphs of addressible actors that can exchange extensible activities with each other as semantic messages in well-defined vocabularies. It provides implementers of ActivityPub ways to access a heterogeneous social networking environment, where their domain-specific use cases become interoperable building blocks to provision rich social apps and services to their user base.â
And it might clarify the relation to Activity Streams..
âActivityPub protocol relates to W3C ActivityStreams in the following ways: a) to define messaging format and extensibility mechanism, and b) to provide a small set of social web primitives that represent common activities in existing social media, as a starter kit to build upon.â
Just making this up on the fly, but if these were âholy textsâ from the start, we would have a totally different fediverse. By leaving things so many things open for interpretation and choice, thinking a vNext would tackle these issues, we instead got a nasty on-the-wire tech debt situation.
Having definitions as above helps sets constraints.
any.What is totally lacking in the W3C specs are any considerations beyond direct technical concerns. So yes, ActivityStreams - modeled after typical existing social media platforms - has Block in the technosphere. But it does not have a manifesto on the kind of social networking environment it envisions to emerge in the future, in the sociosphere. For instance that the âsocialâ in social networking starts on the basis that we can feel safe online. That might translate into safety-first design practices. It is great that now we have a Trust and Safety task force and IFTAS, but on the fediverse we are for the foreseeable time retroactively patching up safety with band-aids.
One insight I had as a result of our discussion on substrate last week, was that activist causes led to the creation of ActivityPub and that these causes also arenât part of shared vision right now. They should become native to fediverse. Where everyone should be either razor sharp in perceiving them, or not have to think about them as they have become internalized and become natural part of online culture.
So obvious activist causes that motivated AP were âsocial network for the people, by the peopleâ, breaking the dominance of Big Tech platforms, anti-capitalism and corporatism. In 2020 @darius gave an AP conference talk âLetâs play and win our own gameâ that delved into this subject. It contained many great suggestions. But unfortunately it did not lead to these points becoming anchored in our movement, part of our vision. People play their own game individualistically as it goes in chaotic grassroots environments, but not in concerted effort. Having no deep views on the culture we want to foster.
If you bring things into vision here, then considerations come into view on e.g. how on one hand unwanted corporate capture can be held at bay, while at the other hand people should be able to earn a decent living with the apps and services they bring to the people via the fediverse.
It might lead to scrutiny on the whole process with which we develop fediverse. Like is W3C with its corporate-favoring organization structure the right place to host the specifications? Why are the specification only technical in nature and how do we add socio-technical and socio-cultural elaborarations?
Another insight I had concerns the role of DEI and anti-racism / anti-fascism. De-facto the current fediverse constitutes ârich microbloggingâ (just a domain-specific set of social networking use cases, based on the conceptual architecture). Modeled after existing platforms. And with that we see very similar social dynamics taking shape on the fediverse.
For Social experience design I renamed 2 anti-patterns to make them friendlier and more inclusive: Oversplaining (âmansplainingâ) and the Reply sigh (âreply guyâ) reaction they cause. People on the fediverse are very sensitive about them. So why then, when it comes to typical activism on the fediverse, do we do this all of the time? OF COURSE fascism shouldnât be accommodated, same as Human Rights shouldnât violated. To fellow fighters on the same cause? Often very forcefully with implied âbetter listen, or else..â undertone. I think the reason is the poor tools we have at our disposal. We donât have safe collaboration space, only Wild West global public square where we are all alone connected to a social graph, and the only way to get interaction is to raise ones voice in public. The way to get things done as an activist is to wield influencer tactics and get a following. On the current fediverse âactivist voiceâ prevails, but it is not a part of a process that leads to internalizing and anchoring of activist causes into culture. The only weapons the activist has are their activist voice and the band-aid protection mechanisms retroactively created over time.
My vision on DEI is that it becomes totally natural. Embedded in culture. You might compare âfediâ culture to a country, where at the borders there is protection to give safety guarantees against enemy invaders, so that internally a society and rich culture can blossom. Which requires also a vigilance e.g. to address racism by the population to create and foster these conditions. Detailing this vision gives opportunity to define strategies we can follow.
I perceive two important parasocial dynamics that are the result, namely that constructively discussing sensitive topics between peers is like âwalking on eggshells through a minefieldâ, and where inadvertantly a mine is triggered the high price is often that âwe divide ourselves to be conqueredâ by hitting the block button in anger. This creates the opposite culture we want, unsafe for anyone, where only the brave dare to raise their voice, and there are no reconciliation paths where on the basis of common human decency and manners, people can come in the clear or even explain a misunderstanding.
For a fedi that is able to fend off fascism (the country border) and make a fist (healthy society and culture) we need safe collaboration environments and make activist causes intrinsic to fediverse evolution. To summize the process as a function wrt strategic activism focus:
Activist protection and defense â DEI culture and habits
For the grassroots standardization process Iâm looking into for SX I defined âCALM cultureâ as inducive to âConstructive activism-led movementsâ. Here activism can be strategic and becomes constructive where it is part of an end-to-end process. The fedi activist uses âactivist voiceâ only where and to whom it is appropiate, and has channels and a funnel to help more people become allies in construction space, cocreating our future.
Do people from Meta participate in these discussions about the direction of ActivityPub and the Fediverse? Do people whose orgs are funded by Meta participate in these discussions? Do we approach these discussions with a goal of accommodating Meta, or do we reject Meta?
Does the former CTO of Truth Social (who's an ActivityPUb developer) participate in these discussions?
Is it important to make the environment inclusive and equitable enough that Black and Indigenous people participate in these discussions and their views are listened to? What about disabled people? Trans, queer, and non-binary people? If it is important, how to start moving in that direction?
Do ActivityPub developers adopt fascists' talking points?
And so on and so on and so on ...
These discussions are all inherently political.
@jdp23@socialhub.activitypub.rocks asserting that a shared fediverse vision is impossible is a safe bet (humans be humans after all.)
However I like to think that ActivityPub developers can maintain apolitical when discussing concepts common to AP development.
@jdp23@neuromatch.social @julian @jdp23@socialhub.activitypub.rocks Just a regular Joe here, not a computer guy. Maybe I can bring some clarity from a userâs perspective. Meta is run by a Fascist sympathizer (to put it charitably) - they need to GTFO including all the satellites. Truth Social is Nazi, Goebbels, GTFO. If a dev is spouting Nazi shit, GTFO. Others who are not Fascists all should be included in because itâs the right thing and benefits all. None of this is political. The political stage is over
Totally agree about Meta and Truth Social. The challenge is that not everybody sees it that way.
Some very influential people in the fediverse advocate working with Meta
somebody from Meta is on the SWICG standards group that's responsible for ActivityPub, and I saw a discussion of "embrace, extend, and extinguish" get shut down as off-topic
On SocialHub, several people suggested closer ties to an organization that's reportedly funded by Meta and to SWICG (which has Meta participation)
a guy from that organization reportedly funded by Meta speaks at and helps organize fediverse events
when the former Truth Social CTO got kicked out of the fedidevs chat room last year, there was a lot of pushback. It's good that he's gone, but it's not good that there was so much pushback!
And so on and so on.
None of this is political.
That all seems political to me! Not in the sense of supporting a particular party or particular candidate, but still ... the "apolitical" view is that people like Meta employees and the former Truth Social CTO should be allowed to participate as long as they don't spout Nazi shit in the discussions here.
Obviously I don't see it in that "apolitical" way, and I'm far from the only one ... but many others do.
@lawyersgunsnmoney @julian @jdp23@socialhub.activitypub.rocks
I just posted about about the many aspects and nuances that are involved in having a shared vision for the evolution of the fediverse. We canât have really productive discussion if we donât have more clarity there.
This boils down to how you define âshared fediverseâ and the question âWhat is the fediverse really?â
If the shared fediverse is a huge church where the cult of normal, everyday people dance in happy embrace, then No, that is an irrealistic utopic vision.
But if the shared fediverse is analogous to the infrastructure of a country, the roads and bridges used by society, allowing people to meet and live live together? Letâs see..
This infrastructure needs good infrastructure planning, where politics is involved. Needs a lot of construction tools to connect the cities and industrial areas, but also the remote neighborhoods so that people there have the same ability to participate.
Can we enforce the behavior of people on these infrastructure roads? We sure can. We designed a set of rules and regulations for safe driving. Drivers get taught these rules, must pass an exam, before they may legally drive a car. And if road rules are broken thereâs a combination of technology, road cameraâs and sensors, and law enforcement, police and justice department to call people to account. Criminals entering the road network are always pursued as soon as soon as they are detected. We all agree that criminals should not be on the road network, but thrown in jail to get their deserved punishment.
Importantly what we do allow on these roads is diversity. Not just road vehicles in all shapes and sizes, but ethnically, culturally and ideologically very different people driving them. There is a good degree of tolerance, and that is a requirement for a functioning society of the country as a whole. Of the shared fediverse in our case.
In the infrastructure analogy of my previous post, and referring to CALM culture and the recognition that the fediverse originated from people with activist causes, I think both Meta and Truth Social are clearly criminals to be kept off the streets.
Problem is that so much that is needed to guarantee a safe and capable infrastructure just isnât there. The only thing we can do if we see Goebbels speeding by over the potholes is shout loudly that he should be in jail. Only to have someone else say âYou didnât look well, that wasnât Goebbelsâ, and a 3rd person exclaims âEven worse, it was Hitlerâ.
In theory. But in practice, universalism does not work. Everything and everyone who ever tried to impose their truth on others have been imperialist, colonialist, fascist, patriarchal, and so on. People pretending to be apolitical are indeed siding with those dominant narratives who try to come across as universal.
I guess the shared vision â in the context of ActivityPub â can ever emerge through shared discussion. But discussion is highly fragmented. Weâve been trying to centralize it here on the SocialHub with seldom success. FEPs are pretty good because they emerged from here, thanks to @pukkamustard and then @helge, @silverpill and others. But even as we speak, FEP discussions are scattered across the Fediverse and are not relayed here.
When I say centralized I do not mean forcibly concentrated in a single space, but I mean rolled out in public in a way that anyone anywhere can participate through the Fediverse. Would people averse to the political stance of the SocialHub deem important to share a common discussion space for FEPs (and other ActivityPub-related discussions), they could very well sit in their own space and participate in the common space. Protocol decay demonstrates the lack of coordination and the lack of will to coordinate, because we do have the tools at our disposal, and dogfooding them.
I was just making the point that shared vision is possible, and it is multi-faceted and nuanced, but can be elaborated and defined.
And I was making the point that shared vision is only possible in a specific context.
@jdp23@neuromatch.social @julian @jdp23@socialhub.activitypub.rocks Whomever is influencing the Fedi to allow in the Meta/Truth Social propaganda should be identified publicly and their positions should be broadcast so they can be shamed. Who are they? Why are they influential? What are their agendas? They are either Quislings or Useful Idiots. We have spectacularly lost the infowars to the Fascists and the Fedi is a big target. Zuck and Devin Nunez arenât here for yucks. Itâs not academic or political, itâs a hostile insurrection
@lawyersgunsnmoney from https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/24/as-the-open-social-web-movement-grows-a-new-nonprofit-launches-to-expand-the-fediverse/ about a year ago:
"Co-founded by the co-author and current editor of ActivityPub, Evan Prodromou, a new nonprofit organization called the Social Web Foundation will focus on expanding the fediverse....
"âThe fact that Threads has joined the space has made it really interesting for other companies,â Prodromou says...
"The Social Web Foundation (SWF) has some backing from Meta "
Evan's also the guy who shut down the SWICG discussion of "embrace, extend, and extinguish" as off-topic.
SWF is the only example I know of where there's direct funding involved. But, other influencers say positive things about Meta and including them as part of fedi as well. FediForum organizer (and former SWF advisor) Johannes Ernst told the Washington Post that "Meta is actually at the forefront" of an industry transformation to "open networks." Mastodon's Eugen Rochko described Threads' adoption of ActivityPub as "a huge victory for our cause". đ€·đ»ââïž
@jdp23@neuromatch.social @julian @jdp23@socialhub.activitypub.rocks Thank you very much! I missed this post earlier. I remember Rochko espousing that shit when the attempted threads embrace, extend extinguish gambit hit the Fedi. I fucking raked my instance admin mercilessly over the coals for going along with it and heâs since decided to use both halves of his brain with a public reversal. Fuck him sideways. Meta = death to the Fedi, especially now with Fascists running the US and gaining elsewhere
Yesterday I saw a video by Xin Yao given at a DDD conference formulated a similar paradox to the one we face with decentralization of the fediverse. This is the paradox between the decoupled software systems that engineers want, versus the deeply connected software that managers want to get most businesss value.
The video is well worth a watch, and inspired me to write some notes on..
â Autonomy vs. Connected ecosystems â 
âThe paradox of decentralization is that the more a technology ecosystem decentralizes, the more need there is for cohesive coordination to assure that the foundational technologies can support that decentralization, without the ecosystem falling apart.â
In the diagram above âsoftwareâ can be replaced with fediverse or federated software and âbusiness complexityâ with social network complexity (where it comes to integrating domain-specific solutions from autonomous parties in the decentralized developer ecosystem).
The current fediverse developer ecosystem represents a technosphere that not only does not give due attention to Strategic design (along a shared vision for the âFuture of Social networkingâ), but also has very weak grasp of the social complexity that exists within our ecosystem, which hinders formation of a healthy substrate and grassroots standardization process that solves the decentralization paradox.