On Discourse and Decentralisation
The Community Group for #ActivityPub is drafting an open letter calling for respect and collaboration between the people working on the different protocols in the open social web.
I'm signing the letter, and with it, I have some thoughts regarding discourse, decentralisation and why I think this space matters.
https://connectedplaces.online/on-discourse-and-decentralisation/
@fediversereport The only version of the events of that meeting I've heard was that the letter wasn't really even discussed and that it was supposed to be done at the next one. Do you have a different version of events you're basing what you wrote here on?
I also don't think "bikeshedding" is an accurate way to describe the comments Evan Prodromou has made about the statement and it seems unfair to single him out when he seems to have been far from the only person who had reservations about it.
@fediversereport really excellent post!
i had some thoughts while reading this article and i took some notes but forgot to post them earlier. iâll try to keep this post focused on two things:
Social media has rapidly become load-bearing infrastructure of how our societies operate nowadays
to me at least, part of the tension is that i despise âsocial mediaâ and i especially do not think it should be load-bearing infrastructure for society. to be clear, i think that social communications are important, and publishing and consuming information is part of that, but the defining characteristic of âsocial mediaâ is as you point out the control that gatekeepers exert over the flow of information â that âsocial media services are just such technologies for shaping publicsâ, as your quote from henry farrell puts it. it is worthwhile (and perhaps necessary!) to build alternative paradigms outside of social media.
The tools we use in our societies to make sense of the world are in the hands of a few fascist oligarchs, and it turns out that this has pretty bad consequences. The open social web is a way to counter this all. All this is to say, Iâm not interested in âdecentralisationâ in itself as a goal. Iâm interesting in building an ethical internet, where the tools we use as a society for sense-making are not captured by oligarchs.
âfascist oligarchs control societal toolsâ is indeed a problem that is important to counter, but i think putting âdecentralizationâ as simply a means to an end is a somewhat inherently compromising position. thereâs a sort of implication that centralization is fine as long as fascists arenât the ones in control. well, maybe so⊠but the way i see it, itâs more that centralization is exactly the problem. achieving meaningful decentralization is a political act precisely because it is the distribution of power. i donât think you can separate those, because otherwise the whole thing is just an exercise in how inefficient you can be. it will always be simpler and more efficient to delegate everything to a single trusted entity with the power to do what is to be done⊠but you really cannot trust a single entity with that much power. even with the best of intentions, it is a vulnerability. the mitigation for that vulnerability is redundancy â in much the same way you might maintain backups or replicas in case of failure.
That Blacksky used ATProto to build their own community platform indicates the value of the protocol in contributing towards a more ethical internet. Whether you want to call the process by which this happened âdecentralisationâ is secondary. I think âdecentralisationâ is a good description for how Blacksky and Bluesky exist independently on the same protocol while being interoperable, but if someone disagrees with that, so be it. What counts exactly as âdecentralisationâ is not a particularly interesting question to me, that the Black community now has their own platform they have ownership and control over is what matters.
i think that the âvalueâ being described here is a lot more incidental. itâs less about the particulars of what is and is not âdecentralizationâ, and more the recognition that there is an equivocation happening here â having options is not the same kind of âdecentralizationâ as having distribution. i think the question we need to ask is âwhat are we decentralizingâ and not âare we decentralizedâ. when you say that blacksky has âownershipâ and âcontrolâ, it is important to analyze those factors across more than one axis.
this is going to be a bit of a weird analogy, but imagine that two bakeries open on the same street. on one hand, you get to choose which bakery you buy bread from. on the other hand, you donât get any say on where they obtain their flour, or how that flour was made or used. if they make the same type of bread and you have a gluten sensitivity, how much does it matter to you that either of the bakeries is owned and controlled by a friendlier entity? unless one of the bakeries starts making gluten-free bread, youâre not going to have a good time eating their bread. and ultimately, if all bakeries must follow the same recipe by some mandate or regulation, then thatâs not going to meaningfully change for you. if the bakeries get all their ingredients from the same supplier, and you are allergic to one of those ingredients, you are worse off than if the bakeries could make substitutions to accommodate your diet. thus, the âvalueâ of âanyone can start their own bakeryâ is tempered by various factors â such as the bakeries being on the same street, using the same ingredients, following the same recipes, and only being able to make bread (or possibly other baked goods). want a vegetable? youâre in the wrong place. this is what âusing atproto to build your own community platformâ is like, if the end result is replicating the same architecture and using the same lexicons and so on. it might be good for that community to have a platform, but you still have to wonder what youâre implicitly making harder or easier by design, or if there are better alternatives to the platform model.
This work has been done without any major funding sources, depending largely on volunteer effort who spend their time working on this because they believed this mattered. The reason Iâm stating this explicitly is because the discourse around ActivityPub and ATProto felt to me to have an undercurrent of resentment
maybe? iâm not sure if âresentmentâ is the right word here, but there is absolutely a difference between what you can do as a loose collective with no funding vs. what you can do as a corporation with tens of millions of dollars in funding⊠which is also important because funding like that comes with a lot of strings attached. itâs valid to be concerned about what is going to happen when the clock runs out and those strings are pulled tight.
These existential [threats] and a rapidly changing world also requires updating our understanding of what it means to build a resilient open social networks that can handle these threats. Discourse that focuses on whether a network is âdecentralisedâ or not is too theoretical, and placed too far outside of the current threats.
the contention being raised is that you cannot simultaneously accept venture capital funding and build something truly âresilientâ to the threats we face. this is because the threats we face include capital itself. the discourse about being âdecentralizedâ can be theoretical at times, but it speaks to a very practical consideration: power and trust. do you trust that an entity accepting funding will remain uncompromised in what it works to build? are there dependencies or chokepoints at which you can exert power? the aim of âdecentralizationâ is (or ought to be) to reduce or minimize the extent to which any power can be exerted by a single entity (or coalition of entities). for all the talk of âcredible exitâ, it would be far better to not have to reach that point.
spreading people out over thousands of servers might not provide enough defence against a government determined to shut social media down. All the while Apple and Google maintain near full global control over the apps we can install on our phone. While their CEOs are cozying up to fascism, they have a powerful control mechanism to shut down access to the distribution of social media apps, the main way to access the open social web.
what about millions of sites? billions of sites? this again goes back to the idea of gatekeepers. if the âmain way to access the open social webâ is through âsocial media appsâ, youâve already lost. itâs one thing to pressure apple and google into banning mastodon, bluesky, tusky, ivory, fedilab, metatext, subway tooter, ice cubes, and so on. can a government feasibly ban firefox, safari, chrome, internet explorer, edge, opera, librewolf, arc, zen, lynx, curl, and so on? itâs more likely that a government would reach for dns censorship by pressuring resolver services (although enumerating all âsocial websitesâ is going to be challenging, and getting multiple providers to comply similarly so), or even full internet throttling or blackouts (which has happened before across the world, notably during times of protest). there is much to learn from past incidents, even as we look to a rapidly changing future.