Like the focus on European as this is true - the #Fediverse mirrors the federated European dream and clearly moves away the US tech imperialism (soft power) of the #dotcons something that is a #EU agender.
My thoughts/feelings are pragmatic on a good outcome.
https://www.thesocialdilemma.com/ documentary shows “the problem” from a Silicon Valley standpoint. It seems to me that these people, and I would expect the EU policy makers in their majority, seem to ignore grassroots digital movements – namely free software and ActivityPub – approaches that do work in practice to address the issues they are exposing in the film. As always I find the account of Jaron Lanier a bit more down-to-earth than the mostly sensationalist views of most of other commentators there (especially their blatant ignorance of anything beyond Silicon Valley).
I expect the audience to come from such a perspective as they are very much imbibed by big tech lobby talk and only since a few years do they start looking around for more, and more importantly different approaches. What we’re trying to do is to avoid talking about the mainstream dominance – since it’s already part of the assumptions – but instead talking about the forces of decentralization and the Fediverse (with a strong focus on ActivityPub). What’s at stake here IMO is to demonstrate that the current discourse has been biased towards granting these big tech corporations the will and capacity to solve the problems their existence have been causing, but we very well know that no technological solution will solve the social issue of staring at screens instead of living your life: this is something that must be addressed with more (participation to) democracy, not more isolation. And that is something neoliberal governments do not seem to be understanding given the catastrophic failure to bring people together in these times of COVID-19 crisis… My hope is that the European institutions are just at the right level to tip the balance towards re-weaving the social fabric – which, arguably, has not been done so far with the focus on growth and liberal market policies. I am aware we’re talking about spitting in the ocean, but who knows, I still believe in the butterfly effect.
I actually do this, but this is hurting the federation. I do this because personnally I do not want anything that I do not choose to contemplate, otherwise it is counter-productive, generating too much screen time and falling back to the dark patterns of addiction.
Now large instances are unavoidable without chosen subsidiarity: citizen engagement at local level, away from screens, and into their local community. Maybe a tax on too many users might work… An increasing tax, à la Snowdrift: the more users, the more you have to pay. That would definitely help taming big tech.
Valid points, and some of them I have addressed directly at Center for Humane Technology (CHT are drivers behind the documentary). The Humane Tech Community I represent is the grassroots part of the coin, fully independent of the Center.
CHT addresses the root of the problem in the heart where you find most of the rot. They are very strategic and able to directly talk to world leaders. Their concern is much bigger than these things. In fact they are huge: “An unraveling of the social fabric of society and civil wars”.
An important point. The lobbying power must be addressed. Ultimately it is not in the interest of the EU to go along with that, and is detrimental to their goals. You can’t make a fist towards Big Tech, if you are on their life support.
slide 5 Web2.0: Social media emerged which was inclusive/empowering to non-technical people
yep, this was balanced in the negative by the #openweb having a fatal case of “herding cats” with its development and agender being pushed by #fashionista#encryptionist#geekproblem and #process
AP by going the “standards root” made it out of this mess and gained a wide user base of “cats” and increasingly normal human beings
In this history on balance, we “failed” as much as they seceded.
The EU implementing AP could help to reset the resulting capture of the WWW (which made the internet human) which is good to remember was a European project The birth of the Web | CERN
This afternoon NGI0 has a meeting with the EC and some EU representatives to “synchronize about the Webinars”. The agenda remains unclear but I suppose they want to know where we’re at so they can target their audience more precisely.
Once this is done we can report here and gather slide comments to prepare for another meeting[1] to finalize the slides by the end of the week. I already put some // inline comments // in the slide deck, but I feel I have a lot more to say and it would generate too much text to read at once.
Regarding the platform, @rhiaro is making the bbb.w3.social available to us!
It’s a complex issue with different agenders its easy to say things that are not true, and rather wishful thinking on these subjects. I would keep this in but not push it.
Once we have distilled all the valuable insights in this thread we might consider closing it, and starting a fresh, more on-topic and targeted new thread, where we focus purely on slide content improvement.
I can imagine that for @CristinaDeLisle (and all of us) keeping up with the walls of text must be really hard.
Bringing to your attention one of the EC website locations where our Fedi Apps may find a proper mention:
And in particular in the solutions section (see also my feedback on slide 8), where there are already a bunch of Linked Data-based entries: Solutions | ISA²
thank you very much for the offer.
It would be so nice to showcase all the 10-20 ActivityPub projects which are mentioned in the thread but it is currently unclear to us if that is wanted.
Personally I’m not affilliated with this event.
So, just hope, an organiser will contact you …
It would just be so nice if they would do it in your rooms so that policymakers directly get a fedi handle and see what would be possible.
Thanks for the great work, as other people here I am trying to understand the choice for a targeted audience here. I mean further then existing collaboration with DG DIGIT is there other reasons to not address DG CONNECT as previously suggested by as @mathewlowry .
Indeed as @hamishcampbell we would need to have webinars that would be really more concerned with community organization and users experiences rather than focusing on explaining protocols that is really not related to eu domain of concern or experience.
Maybe it would be good to think this as a 2 folded process keep up with existing technical presentation and organize another moment speaking of what fediverse is to decentralisation, and the people who inhabit it.
Both will be there, as well as COMM who controls public communication of the EC. More were invited, e.g., EDPS and JRC, etc., and also national institutions. It’s not a limited event at all.
The focus is not technical but rather historical and institutional. There’s already a fairly good amount of interest within European institutions and national institutions to embrace ActivityPub, we simply want to activate those processes and facilitate integration at all levels.
As I expressing this morning: the first webinar is very much introductory and aimed at civil servants and policy makers ; the second webinar is a bit more technical and will probably introduce current research and future work ; while the ending workshop will put interested parties in motion to implement services.
Is there a way to see who was invited and by what means?
I disagree I read all propositions as very technical but given the context it feels the only possible way.
The most important issues encompassing community organization, moderation, federation, diversity of speech and view points, targeting hate speech etc… I mean what is actually important still needs to be addressed; so indeed it feels difficult to present those issues however fundamental they are for EC representatives.
