Werd I/O

As regular readers know, I care a lot about growing the open social web: the rapidly-growing decentralized network of interoperable social platforms that includes Mastodon, Threads, Ghost, Flipboard, and many other platforms, both emerging and established. This is for a few reasons, including but not limited to:

Support for strong communities

• Support for niche interests and diversity: Smaller, independent communities can flourish without the pressure to appeal to mass audiences, leading to richer, more diverse conversations and interactions. But these aren’t silos: any member from one community can easily follow someone from any other.
• Community-driven moderation: Instead of top-down moderation, communities set their own rules and guidelines, which can lead to healthier and more relevant interactions. Community health isn’t subject to a single corporation’s policies and motivations.

Better developer experience

• An easier way to build social apps: Shared libraries, tools and protocols let developers get started faster. And developers no longer have to worry about their social products feeling empty: every new product can plug into communities of millions of people.
• Developer stability: Developers don’t need to ask anyone for permission to build on open social web protocols. Nobody will suddenly turn off the open social web and charge developers to access it: just like the web itself, it’s open and permissionless, forever. The result is a less risky playing field for new entrants.

Respect for users

• Decentralized governance: Users have more control over their data, identity, and interactions, without reliance on a single corporation or platform.
• Freedom from corporate algorithms: No algorithm-driven feeds prioritize ads or engagement-maximizing content, allowing for more authentic and community-driven interaction (and significantly less election interference, for example).
• Data ownership and portability: Users have greater control over their data and are not at the mercy of corporate interests. The open social web has the potential to connect every social platform, allowing anyone to be in conversation. And users can move from provider to provider at any time without losing their communities.
• Reduced surveillance: Federated systems are often less focused on advertising and surveillance-based business models, reducing targeted ads and invasive data collection.
• A more ethical ecosystem: It’s far easier for developers to build ethical apps that don’t hold user data hostage.

I’d love to be more involved in helping it grow. Here are some ways I’ve thought about doing that. As always, I’d love to hear what you think.

Acting as an advocate between publishers and vendors.

Status: I’m already doing this informally.

Open social web vendors like Mastodon seem to want to understand the needs of news publishers; there are already lots of advantages for news publishers who join the open social web. There’s some need for a go-between to help both groups understand each other.

Publishers need to prove that there’s return on investment on getting involved in any social platform. Mastodon in particular has some analytics-hostile features, including preventing linked websites from knowing where traffic is coming from, and stripping the utm tags that audience teams use to analyze traffic. There’s also no great analytics dashboard and little integration with professional social media tools.

Meanwhile, the open social web already has a highly engaged, intelligent, action-oriented community of early adopters who care about the world around them and are willing to back news publishers they think are doing good work. I’ve done work to prove this, and have found that publishers can easily get more meaningful engagement (subscriptions, donations) on the open social web than on all closed social networks combined. That’s a huge advantage.

But both groups need to collaborate — and in the case of publishers, need to want to collaborate. There’s certainly work to do here.

Providing tertiary services.

Status: I built ShareOpenly, but there’s much more work to do.

There are a lot of ways a service provider could add value to the open social web.

Automattic, the commercial company behind WordPress, got its start by providing anti-spam services through a tool called Akismet. Automattic itself is unfortunately not a wonderful example to point to at this moment in time, but the model stands: take an open source product and make it more useful through add-ons.

There’s absolutely the need for anti-spam and moderation services on the open social web (which are already provided by Independent Federated Trust And Safety, which is a group that deserves to be better-funded).

My tiny contribution so far is ShareOpenly, a site that provides “share to …” buttons for websites that are inclusive of Mastodon and other Fediverse platforms. A few sites, like my own blog and Tedium, include ShareOpenly links on posts, and it’s been used to share to hundreds of Mastodon instances. (I don’t track links shared at all, so don’t have stats about that.) But, of course, it could be a lot bigger.

I think there’s potential in anti-spam services in particular: unlike trust and safety, they can largely be automated, and there’s a proven model with Akismet.

Rebuilding Known to support the Fediverse — or contributing to an existing Fediverse platform.

Status: I just need more time.

My publishing platform Known could be rewritten to have a new, faster, cleaner architecture that is Fediverse-first.

It’s not clear to me what the sustainability model is here: how can I make sure I continue to have the time and resources to work on it? But I do think there’s a lot of potential for it to be useful — particularly for individual bloggers and smaller publishers — once it was built.

And of course, there are many other open source Fediverse platforms (like Mastodon) that always need extra hands. The question remains: how can I find the time and resources to be able to make those contributions?

(I’ve already tried: funding as a startup, consultancy services, donations, and a paid hosting service. If you’ve got other ideas, I’d love to hear them!)

An API engine for the Fediverse

Status: idea only, but validated with both experts and potential customers. Would need to be funded.

ActivityPub, the underlying protocol underneath the Fediverse, can sometimes be hard to implement. Unlike many web apps, you often need to set up asynchronous queues and process data in potentially expensive ways when both publishing and reading data from other instances.

So why not abstract all of that away? Here smaller communities and experimental developers can rely on shared infrastructure that handles inboxes and queues automatically behind a simple RESTful API with SDKs in every modern language. Rather than have to build out all that infrastructure to begin with, developers can start with the Fediverse API, saving them a bunch of time and allowing them to focus on their unique idea.

It would start out with a free tier, allowing experimentation, and then scale up to affordable, use-based billing.

Add-on services could provide the aforementioned anti-spam, and there could be plugins from services like IFTAS in order to provide real human moderation for communities that need it.

Suddenly, developers can build a fully Fediverse-compatible app in an afternoon instead of in weeks or months, and know that they don’t need to be responsible for maintaining its underlying ActivityPub infrastructure.

A professional open social network (Fediverse VIP)

Status: idea only, but validated with domain experts.

A first-class social network with top-tier UX and UI design, particularly around onboarding and discovery, built explicitly to be part of the Fediverse. The aim is to be the destination for anyone who wants to join the Fediverse for professional purposes — or if they simply don’t know what other instance to join.

There is full active moderation and trust and safety for all users. Videos are supported out of the box. Images all receive automatic alt text generation by default (or you can specify your own). There is a first-class app across all mobile platforms, and live search for events, TV shows, sports, and so on. Posts can easily be embedded on third-party sites.

You can break out long-form posts from shorter posts, allowing you to read stories from Ghost and other platforms that publish long-form text to the Fediverse.

If publishers and brands join Fediverse VIP, profiles of their employees can be fully branded and be associated with their domains. A paid tier offers full analytics (in contrast in particular to Mastodon, which offers almost none) and scheduled posts, as well as advanced trust and safety features for journalists and other users from sensitive organizations. Publishers can opt to syndicate full-content feeds into the Fediverse. This becomes the best, safest, most feature-supported and brand-safe way for publishers to share with the hundreds of millions of Fediverse users.

Finally, an enterprise concierge tier allows Fediverse VIP to be deeply customized and integrated with any website or tool, for example to run Fediverse-aware experiments on their own sites, do data research (free for accredited academic institutions and non-profit newsrooms), build new tools that work with Fediverse VIP, or use live feeds of content on TV or at other events.

What do you think?

Those are some ideas I have. But I’m curious: what do you think would be most effective? Is this even an important goal?

I’d love to hear what you think.

I was lucky enough to sit down with Mike McCue, CEO at Flipboard, and 404 Media co-founder (and former Motherboard Editor-in-Chief) Jason Koebler to talk about the future of media and its intersection with the future of the social web.

Savvy journalists at forward-thinking newsrooms are not letting this happen to them. Instead, they’re doing the work that arguably has been most critical all along: building direct connections with their audiences. It’s common to do this through email lists and subscription models, but the open social web offers a new, more equitable ecosystem for quality journalism to thrive.

Two people on the frontlines of this movement are Jason Koebler, a journalist and co-founder at 404 Media, and Ben Werdmuller, the senior director of technology at ProPublica. In this episode of Dot Social, the two talk about their fediverse experiences so far and why they’re hopeful for publishing in the future.

I loved being a part of this conversation. You can watch / listen over here.

I thought it would be fun to revisit Known, the open source publishing platform that powers my site.

How it works

Known allows a team or community to publish news on any topic to a single, searchable stream of content that’s easily accessible from any device. It is not a full CMS, and nor is it designed for independent publishers to sell subscriptions; instead, it’s optimized for publishing to a single feed.

Every Known site is a single feed of content that any number of users can publish to. You can have one user, as my site does; you could have thousands, if you wanted.

The stream can also be filtered by hashtag, author, or content type — so you can choose to only view content on a certain topic, or only photos, or some combination thereof.

Each stream, filtered or not, is shown as a standard web page by default. These can be themed, but it’s also easy to view different interfaces. RSS and JSON are available for every screen you can view as a web page, and it would be easy to add low bandwidth HTML, for example. (I once added an interface type that displayed everything as a Star Wars crawl. It got old fast.)

When you log in, you get a little menu bar that lets you publish different kinds of content. It’s a little bit like Tumblr’s bar, but here, every type of content is powered by a plugin. You can download new content types created by other people, or you can write your own. On my site I’ve created a kind of blog post called an “aside”, which I’ve decided to make a distinct content type.

Hit the button, and you can compose right on the page.

Known supports an idea called POSSE: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. You can elect to syndicate a post to a third-party site by enabling the toggle for that site below the compose window. In this illustration I have two example webhooks, but people have written plugins for Mastodon, etc. (In the beginning, Known had plugins for Twitter, Facebook, and so on, but all those APIs locked down over time. The promo image, which you can see above, includes Foursquare and Flickr as options, which is a clue about the era it originated from.)

You can also compose using any application that supports the Micropub standard. I tend to write all my blog posts in iA Writer.

Known supports Webmention, so when you publish a post that links to a site, that site will be notified. You can even use webmention to respond to someone else’s post elsewhere and have a conversation across the web.

It’s free and open source, and intentionally runs on the same LAMP stack as WordPress. Be warned though; as the screenshots suggest, it’s now a little old.

A little history

Known was originally called Idno. (“What does it stand for?” someone once asked me. “I d’no,” I replied. This is the level of humor you can generally expect from me.)

I wrote the first version of it when my mother was recovering from a double lung transplant: she was in need of community but absolutely didn’t want to discuss her condition on Facebook. I’d previously written Elgg, an older open source social networking platform, so I decided to think about what a social community platform might look like in the era of the mobile, ubiquitous web. What would it look like for a community to publish to a place where it could continue to own its own content, on its own domain? (It seems like a quaint exploration now, but remember that this was 2013.)

I became friends with the indieweb folks, and met Erin Richey at an IndieWebCamp. We decided to collaborate on the project. It was her idea to submit it to Matter, where we took part in the third accelerator class. Along the way, we did some focus group testing (Erin’s instigation) and chose Known as a permanent name.

It was a startup for a couple of years; there was a paid, hosted version; a Known-powered site even won an award for KQED. But it wasn’t the kind of thing that excited investors, and we weren’t making enough money for it to be sustainable. Ultimately, I allowed myself to be acquihired by Medium, which allowed us to pay Matter back, and we both settled into new jobs. The day before my first Medium paycheck, I spent my last five dollars on gas. (Erin and I welcomed our actual child — a human one — two years ago. So there’s a coda.)

But there are still users out there, myself included, and the open source project is still alive. It’s been slower over the last few years, because I haven’t had much time to devote to it. (The main thing I’ve been looking at is a command line exporter to allow people to more easily take their content into WordPress, as well as some experiments with ActivityPub.) But it remains a core part of the operating system that powers my identity online, and the identity of others.

Lately I’ve been thinking that there’s a place for this model of publishing. The internal architecture needs to be overhauled; the Bootstrap-driven default template needs to go; but I think there’s really something to the model of letting communities publish to a simple, queryable feed of content that syndicates out to the world.

Perhaps it’s finally time for Known 2, with an easy upgrade path from the original? If you’re intrigued by the idea — or if you’re a Known user — I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I’m worried I’ve become cynical about technology as I’ve gotten older. But maybe technology really is worse.

Someone asked me the other day: “what [in media and technology] are you excited about right now?”

We both agreed that it was a surprisingly difficult question. And then came the follow-up:

“Do you think it’s just because we’re older now, or is the web really less exciting?”

And to be honest, I’m not sure.

I used to be so excited. If you sneak a glance at my high school yearbook, you’ll see that I wanted to be a journalist. Telling stories was my first love. It’s still where my brain feels the most comfortable. I love the flow state of writing more than doing just about anything else. That’s why I keep writing here, and why my long-term plan is to pivot from a technology career to one where I get to write all the time.

But in 1994 or so, I got distracted by the web: what an amazing medium for stories. Many of us share the experience of trying out a browser like NCSA Mosaic, discovering voices from all over the world, and getting stuck into writing our own HTML code without having to ask anyone for permission or buy a software license to get started. I vividly remember when we got the ability to add our own background images to web pages, for example. For a long time, I was a master at table-based layouts.

In the UK, where I grew up, you were effectively forced to pick your university degree at 16. You were required to choose three or four A-level subjects to focus on for your last two years of high school; then you had to apply to do a particular degree at each university, knowing that each degree had subject requirements. If you wanted to study English at university, you needed to have chosen the English A-level; good luck getting in if you hadn’t.

Specifically because I was distracted by the web, I put myself on the Computer Science track. Even then, I kept a Theater A-level, because I couldn’t imagine a world where there wasn’t some art and writing in my life. Most British universities correspondingly dismissed me for not being focused enough, but Edinburgh took me, so that’s where I went. Even while I was doing the degree, I built a satirical website that got over a million pageviews a day - in 2001. I blogged, of course, and although I haven’t kept a consistent platform or domain for all that time, I’ve been writing consistently on the web since 1998.

It was a platform I got to approach with a sense of play; a sense of storytelling; a sense of magical discovery as I met new people and learned from their creativity.

The web sits apart from the rest of technology; to me, it’s inherently more interesting. Silicon Valley’s origins (including the venture capital ecosystem) lie in defense technology. In contrast, the web was created in service of academic learning and mutual discovery, and both built and shared in a spirit of free and open access. Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Cailliau, and CERN did a wonderful thing by building a prototype and setting it free. As CERN points out on its page about the history of the web:

An essential point was that the web should remain an open standard for all to use and that no-one should lock it up into a proprietary system.

That ethos is how it succeeded; it’s why the web changed the world. And it’s why someone like me — over in Scotland, with no networks, wealth, or privilege to speak of — was able to break in and build something that got peoples’ attention. It’s also why I was interested to begin with. “The internet is people,” I used to say; more than protocols and pipes, the web was a fabric of interconnectedness that we were all building together. Even in the beginning, some people saw the web and thought, “this is a way I can make a lot of money.” For me, it was always a way to build community at scale.

And then Facebook — it always seems to be Facebook — became the first web company to reach a billion dollar valuation, in a year that happened to also see the launch of the iPhone. Building community at scale became finding customers at scale. There was a brief reprieve while global financial markets tumbled at the hands of terrible debt instruments that had been built on shaky foundations, and then the tech industry started investing in new startups in greater and greater numbers. Y Combinator, which had started a few years earlier, started investing in more and more startups, with higher and higher checks ($6,000 per founder for the first cohort, compared to half a million dollars per startup today). The number of billion-dollar-plus web startups grows by the hundreds every year.

The web I loved was swamped by a mindset that was closer to Wall Street. It’s been about the money ever since.

It’s so rare these days to find people who want to build that interconnectedness; who see it as a mission and a movement. People in tech talk excitedly about their total Compensation (which has earned its own shorthand acronym, TC), and less so what exciting thing they got to build, and what it allowed people to do. Maybe they’ll give you a line about what they allow for the enterprise or increasing some company’s bottom line, but it’s usually devoid of the humanist idealism that enchanted me about the early web.

I realized some time ago that the startups I personally founded in this era couldn’t have succeeded, because my focus was all wrong. I wanted to be paid to explore and build this wonderful platform, and was not laser focused on how to build investor value. I still want to be paid to build and explore, try and make new things happen, with a sense of play. That’s not, I’m afraid to say, how you build a venture-scale business.

So, let’s return to the question. Given this disillusionment, and my lack of alignment with what the modern tech industry expects of us, what am I excited about?

My cynicism has been tempered by the discovery that there are still movements out there that remind me of the web’s original promise — efforts that focus on reclaiming independence and fostering real community. Despite the commercialization of the web, these are still places where that original spirit of openness and community-building thrives.

The Indieweb is one. It’s an interdisciplinary group of people that advocates for everyone owning their own websites and publishing from their own domains. It’s happening! From the resurgence of personal blogs to new independent publications like Platformer and User Mag, many people see the value of owning their presence on the internet and their relationships with their community. Independence from sites like Facebook and Google is surging.

The other is the Fediverse: a way to have conversations on the web that isn’t owned by any single company or entity. The people who are building the Fediverse (through communities, platforms like Mastodon, cultural explorations) are expanding a patchwork of conversations through open protocols and collaborative exploration, just like the web itself was grown decades ago. It’s phenomenally exciting, with a rapidly-developing center of gravity that’s even drawing in some of the companies who previously were committed to siloed, walled-garden models. I haven’t been this enthused about momentum on the web for twenty years.

I was afraid I had become too cynical to find excitement in technology again. It wasn’t true.

While I’ve grown more cynical about much of tech, movements like the Indieweb and the Fediverse remind me that the ideals I once loved, and that spirit of the early web, aren’t lost. They’re evolving, just like everything else.

I was tagged in a fairly critical SocialHub post about the Social Web Foundation launch announcement. I wasn’t in a position to add to the conversation then, but I’ve been thinking about it all week.

Before I dive further, a reminder: I am not an employee or founder of the Social Web Foundation. I am in touch with the founders and have been an unpaid advisor, but I can’t and don’t speak for it. This post is mine alone, and doesn’t necessarily reflect anyone else’s opinions or ideas. I also haven’t vetted or previewed it with anyone.

There are three main criticisms I’ve seen of the Social Web Foundation:

• Meta is a partner
• It’s called The Social Web Foundation but is focused on ActivityPub, ignoring AT Protocol, Nostr, and other decentralized social web protocols that are emerging elsewhere
• It’s focused on substantially growing the Fediverse, which is not something everyone wants

I believe they’re interrelated, and that these differences can be overcome.

Meta enters the chat

Perhaps the biggest red flag to critics is Meta’s presence as one of the SWF’s thirteen launch partners. Many consider it to be an extremely negative force on the web. Its presence is certainly divisive. I’ve been a critic of its Facebook product in particular since its inception: a company that imposes its centralized view of the world on the communications of its billions of users, and in the process has caused real harms.

Those harms include potential mental health and social media addiction effects in teenagers, failing to protect LGBTQ users, and more — up to and including enabling a genocide.

The last claim might seem outlandish, but it’s real. As Harvard Law School’s Systemic Justice Project pointed out:

Scholars, reporters, and United Nations investigators agree that the social media giant played a role in an explosion of ethnic conflict in 2017 that led to the death and displacement of hundreds of thousands Rohingya Muslims in Northern Myanmar.

Given this, the argument goes, why would anyone — particularly an organization trying to build the future of the social web — even consider working with Meta? Doesn’t its presence as a partner taint the work of the Foundation?

As the writer, researcher, and community lead Erin Kissane has pointed out:

I think it’s unwise to assume that an organization that has demonstrably and continuously made antisocial and sometimes deadly choices on behalf of billions of human beings and allowed its products to be weaponized by covert state-level operations behind multiple genocides and hundreds (thousands? tens of thousands?) of smaller persecutions, all while ducking meaningful oversight, lying about what they do and know, and treating their core extraction machines as fait-accompli inevitabilities that mustn’t be governed except in patently ineffective ways will be a good citizen after adopting a new, interoperable technical structure.

These profoundly negative impacts are possible because it is one of the most prominent — potentially the most prominent — platform owner on the internet. Around four billion users use one of Meta’s products every month; that’s half all the humans on earth, or around 75% of all the people in the world aged 15 or older. Arguably no platform should ever be allowed to become this big or influential (can any government claim to have this level of reach or insight into this many people?). Still, at least for now, here it is.

For many people, Meta is the internet. This clearly doesn’t absolve aiding a genocide, throwing an election, or thwarting academic research, but it also makes Meta a platform owner that’s hard to ignore.

Meta sits in a position of influence over the social web. Threads, its fairly recent Twitter-like platform, is rolling out support for the ActivityPub standard that underlies the Fediverse, so it is poised to also be influential there. Once Threads supports the Fediverse bidirectionally, it will easily be the largest social platform on the network. It will consequently have an enormous amount of influence on how the network evolves, regardless of its participation in the Social Web Foundation.

What is a successful Fediverse?

Meta’s involvement and potential dominance inevitably raises the question: What kind of future do we want for the Fediverse? Whether we focus on technical interoperability or grassroots social activism, the answer to this question will shape how we approach growth, inclusivity, and the role of large corporations in the decentralized web.

If you see the Fediverse as a way to interoperate between social networks, such that a user on one platform can communicate with a user on another, you might welcome a large tech company supporting the standard (a bit like one might have welcomed a company to standards-based HTML a generation ago). If, on the other hand, you see the Fediverse as an antidote to technology corporations or a movement that is more about a collaborative grassroots movement than pure technical interoperability — a sort of work of activism — you might be quite alarmed.

These mindsets are analogous to Evan Prodromou’s Big Fedi / Small Fedi dichotomy, but I’d like to apply a slightly different lens.

If your model of the Fediverse is an interoperable standard that underpins all social networks:

• All parties should focus on a single technical standard in order ensure everyone can interoperate and the network can grow.
• The focus should be on onboarding, education, and developer experience.
• Growth is paramount. The goal is to bring the whole world in.
• Having the creator of the biggest social network join is an opportunity.
• The end state is likely a handful of very large social networks, followed by a significant long tail of small ones.

For ease of reference, let’s call this the growth Fediverse.

If your model of the Fediverse is a social movement intentionally set apart from corporate social media:

• A plurality of underlying protocols is allowable and maybe even desirable: the important thing is the support of grassroots communities outside the usual bounds of the tech industry.
• The focus should be on equity, community dynamics, relationships, and movement-building in service of community.
• Preserving the values of the existing community is paramount. The rest of the world can stay away; there’s no need for growth.
• The presence of the largest corporate social media vendor is inherently a threat.
• The end state is likely a collection of small, interoperable communities united by their desire for an alternative to “big tech”.

Let’s call this one the movement Fediverse.

Both models of the Fediverse clearly exist. I’m hardly the first to have discussed them, but the Social Web Foundation announcement has re-ignited the conversation.

Very clearly, the Foundation is closer to the first model than the second. As such, people who don’t care for that model have accused it of being an agent of oligarchy; of doing harm by partnering with Meta; of using the term “social web” while focusing solely on ActivityPub.

A false binary

The thing is, the lines between these two paths are blurry. It’s not necessarily an either-or. The priority for the first is growth of the network and a large, interoperable social web; the priority of the second is small, pro-social communities that exist outside of usual tech industry dynamics. Someone might well feel that the way to get to small, pro-social communities is as a by-product of interoperability, just as not everything on the web itself is corporate even though partners to the W3C body that defines web standards include Google and Amazon.

Some of the things that the movement Fediverse wants are intrinsically important to the growth Fediverse. You can’t grow a giant social network without caring about community safety, for example; over the two years since he acquired Twitter, Elon Musk has ably demonstrated that most users don’t want to stick around on a platform where they don’t feel safe. Community standards are therefore very important to any network that seeks to grow and retain users. Usability and accessibility are similarly vital: what use is a movement that is exclusionary to less-technical people, or, say, the visually-impaired? Any healthy network needs to support diverse voices and ensure that those authors are welcome. The list of shared values goes on.

But there are also undeniable differences. Hanging the needs of an anti-corporate social movement on a technology is a big ask. I’m not critical of the values of the people who do — I largely share them — but I don’t think you can reasonably expect everybody involved in a technology to have the same ideals.

Like any community, the movement Fediverse also has areas where it, too, could benefit from introspection and growth in order to live up to its own values. Some parts of the community have struggled with inclusivity, particularly when onboarding marginalized users who wished to discuss systemic injustice openly. As Marcia X recounted in Logic(s):

What took me aback regarding the fediverse is that my networks were mostly “leftists” and self-proclaimed radical thinkers regarding race, ableism, gender, patriarchy, sexuality, et cetera, and yet what I was being exposed to was a lot of naiveté or hostility for questioning whiteness as a basis for many people’s takes or approaches to these subject matters. And if I were to question or push back on their whiteness, I was often accused of being biased myself.

While many people in the movement are already working hard to address these issues, more can be done to ensure that all users feel safe, heard, and respected. In some cases, the movement Fediverse has fallen short when it comes to fully supporting the lived experiences of new users, especially those from marginalized groups. However, there is clear potential — and growing momentum — to improve this. By continuing to evolve and actively listen to new voices, the movement Fediverse can better embody the values of inclusivity and social justice that it stands for. But there is work to do.

In other words, it’s important to recognize that both groups have challenges to address. Each needs to continue working to ensure decisions are made inclusively, with an eye on the safety of users and the accessibility of communities. By recognizing these shared goals, there’s a real opportunity for mutual learning and growth.

Each has much to gain from each other. One doesn’t need to be a subscriber to the growth Fediverse to enjoy gains from user experience research, technology onboarding, and outreach conducted there. Similarly, one doesn’t need to subscribe to the ideals of the movement Fediverse to feel the benefit of their community dynamics and social goals. In fact, there may be a productive tension between the two that keeps each of their worst impulses in check. One might consider the movement Fediverse to be akin to a labor movement: a way for users to organize and advocate for stronger, safer, and more progressive community design. In turn, the growth Fediverse could be a check against becoming too insular and leaving the rest of the world out in the cold.

While the movement and growth Fediverse may have differing approaches, both share a commitment to user safety, inclusivity, and decentralization. The question is not whether these goals are shared, but how best to achieve them.

Moving forward

Just as unions create productive tensions in businesses that create better working conditions and higher productivity, I think the discussion between the movement Fediverse and the growth Fediverse has the potential to push the open social web further than might otherwise have been possible.

The checks and balances produced by an open debate between the two approaches are particularly useful when considering partners like Meta. The productive tension between these two visions could ensure that while larger platforms like Meta are held accountable, the values of grassroots communities — safety, inclusivity, and equity, for example — are not sacrificed in the pursuit of growth.

It’s not a foregone conclusion that Meta will dominate how the Social Web Foundation is run, but it’s also not a foregone conclusion that it won’t. The Social Web Foundation clearly states in its mission statement (emphasis mine):

A Fediverse that is controlled only by one company isn’t really a Fediverse at all. We think a productive, creative and healthy Fediverse needs multiple providers, none of whom dominate the space.

The goal is a multipolar federated social web. I think a large part of the solution is not to say this, but to show it: conduct meetings and make decisions with as much transparency as possible, so as to prove that Meta (and any other partner) is not dominant. By structurally providing as much sunlight as possible, allowing feedback and comment, and repeatedly demonstrating that this feedback is being considered and acted on where appropriate, both the potential harms and concerns from the movement Fediverse community can be reduced. Just as source code that is open to scrutiny is auditable and verifiable, decision-making process that are open to sunlight can be held accountable. Public meeting notes, decision documents, and so on, all help to support accountability.

In any event, the Social Web Foundation doesn’t need to be the foundation to cover all views of what the Fediverse should be. It’s a foundation that is going to try and do great work to expand the Fediverse. From its mission statement:

We believe that increased use of the Fediverse has the potential to make all of our online social experiences better, as well as to create lots of new opportunities for creation and self-expression. So we’re committed to growing the number of people using the Fediverse.

As Evan Prodromou said in that SocialHub thread abut people who don’t feel the Foundation represents them:

We want a united social web, using a single protocol for internetwork communication. I’d compare email, where proprietary LAN email protocols like Microsoft Exchange are gatewayed into the formal standard protocol SMTP. […] The SWF is not mandatory. People who want to do other things for the Fediverse should definitely do so. But I do want to extend the invitation for people who are interested to reach out.

This doesn’t have to be one size fits all. It’s worth considering what organizing more concretely for the movement Fediverse looks like, and how it might intersect and act as a check on the growth Fediverse.

It’s understandable that some in the movement Fediverse feel uncomfortable with large corporate platforms, particularly those with a history of past harms, joining the network. However, engaging with these platforms — rather than dismissing their involvement outright — may offer a unique opportunity to influence their practices and ensure they align with the values of the community. Constructive engagement with Meta and other large platforms could offer a unique opportunity for the movement Fediverse to influence how these entities engage with the broader social web, ensuring they uphold the values of safety, inclusivity, and equity.

Likewise, ignoring the concerns of the movement Fediverse is not wise: these are valid ideas rooted in real experiences. The tech industry carries real systemic inequalities that go all the way back to its origins in military funding. Addressing those inequities is a prerequisite to the web reaching its potential as a way for everyone in the world to connect and learn from each other. Companies like Meta, as I’ve explained at length above, have committed real harms as a byproduct of their priorities, business models, and funding partners. Grassroots communities that practice intentionality, activism, mutual aid, and radical equity have a lot to offer, and in many ways are models for how the world should be.

The movement Fediverse’s emphasis on mutual aid, radical equity, and intentionality offers invaluable lessons for how the larger Fediverse — and even corporate actors — could operate. Practices like community-driven moderation, transparent governance, and prioritizing marginalized voices could help ensure that the Fediverse grows without losing its soul.

Each group is approaching the problem in good faith. In the end, it’s up to all of us to ensure that the future of the web remains decentralized, inclusive, and safe. We must continue to engage, advocate, and, most importantly, listen to one another as we navigate and build this space together. The Fediverse is made of pluralities: of implementations, communities, vendors, and visions of the future. That’s at the heart of its beauty and its opportunity. The software interoperates; so should we.