Werd I/O

Like many of you, I received a survey today with the title: “What is your dream for Mozilla?” I filled it in, but the potential for Mozilla is so expansive and critical to the future of the internet that I wanted to address my thoughts in greater depth here.

Mozilla describes its mission as follows:

Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent.

I believe Mozilla is best placed to achieve this goal by explicitly fostering an ecosystem of open, accessible software that promotes user independence, privacy, and safety. It should be a facilitator, supporter, and convener through which projects that promote these values thrive.

What should its next chapter look like in an internet increasingly dominated by corporate interests? Mozilla has the tools, the history, and the mission to reclaim its role as a pioneer of the open web. But doing so requires bold steps and a renewed focus on impact and innovation.

A mission focus on impact

Its success should be determined through impact. It should publish an impact report that shows how it has spread usable, private, open software worldwide, and solicit donations based on that activity. How has Mozilla prevented a monopoly of ad-driven surveillance technology in different markets? How has Mozilla helped people keep themselves safe online while seeking reproductive healthcare? How has Mozilla tech been used in authoritarian regions to support community well-being? It should clarify its roadmap for turning its mission into measurable outcomes, and then be unashamed about fundraising based on this directed mission. These focused impact reports would guide internal strategy, demonstrate accountability, and inspire public and donor trust.

Conversely, I believe Mozilla is not a media company. That means it should not attempt to be Consumer Reports; we don’t need it to navigate the world of AI for us or tell us what to buy for Christmas. Those are valuable pursuits, but Mozilla should leave them to existing technology media companies.

Impact-focused products that bring something new to the table

I believe this impact focus means that it should not seek to charge consumers for its products. If the mission is to make the internet open, accessible, private, and safe for individuals, as much friction towards achieving that goal should be removed as possible.

Many of Mozilla’s efforts already fall in line with this mission. The Firefox browser itself is an open, anti-surveillance alternative to corporate-driven browsers like Chrome, although it has fallen behind. This is in part because of anti-competitive activity from companies like Google, and in part because some of the most interesting innovations in the browser space have happened elsewhere: for example, Arc’s radical changes to browser user experience are really compelling, and should probably have been a Mozilla experiment.

Firefox Relay — which makes it easy to hide your email address when dealing with a third party — and Mozilla VPN are similarly in line at first glance. But because the VPN is little more than a wrapped Mullvad VPN, with revenue splitting between the two organizations, it isn’t really adding anything new. In a similar vein, Relay is very similar to DuckDuckGo’s email protection, among others. And why is one branded as Firefox and one as Mozilla? I’m sure the organization itself has an answer to this, but I couldn’t begin to tell you. (For what it’s worth, Mozilla seems to agree about the distraction and has scaled back support for these services.)

AI is a new, hot technology, but there’s nothing really new for Mozilla to do here, either. Many vendors are working on AI privacy, because that’s where a lot of the real revenue is: organizations with privacy needs that relate to sensitive information. There is no reason why Mozilla will be the best at creating these solutions, or differentiated in doing so.

Instead, to paraphrase Bill Clinton: it’s the web, stupid.

If Firefox is the biggest, most impactful software product in Mozilla’s arsenal today, how can it bring it back to prominence? One interesting route might be to use it as a way for third parties to explore the future of the browser. Mozilla can ship its own Firefox user experience, but what if it was incredibly simple for other people to also build wildly remixed browsers? Could Mozilla build unique features, like privacy layers tailored for vulnerable users, that competitors don’t offer?

Projects like Zen Browser already use core Firefox to build new experiences, but there’s a lot of coding involved, and they’re not discoverable from within Firefox itself. What if they were? One can imagine Firefox browsers optimized for everything from artists and activists to salespeople and investors, all available from a browser marketplace. The authors of those experiences would, by sharing their unique browser remixes, help spread the Firefox browser overall. While browsers like Chrome serve corporate goals around ads and analytics, the Mozilla mission gives Firefox a mandate to be a playground for innovation. It should be that. (And, yes, AI can play a supporting role here too.)

Note that while I think products should be made available to consumers free of charge, that doesn’t mean that Mozilla shouldn’t make money. For example, if there’s revenue in specific experiences for certain enterprise or partner use cases, why not explore that? Enterprise offerings could directly fund Mozilla’s open-source projects, reinforcing its mission.

Truly supporting a vibrant open web

While Mozilla’s products are key to advancing its mission, its influence can extend far beyond the browser. Mozilla has the potential to be a home base for similar projects that have the potential to create a more open, private, safe and self-directed web.

While that might mean support technically — developer resources, libraries, and guides — the most burning needs for user-centric open source projects are often unrelated to code. These include:

• Experience design. Most open source projects lean towards coding as a core competency and aren’t able to provide the same polished user experiences as commercial software. Mozilla could bridge the gap by providing training and direct resources to elevate the design of user-centric open source projects, and to prepare these projects to work well with designers.
• Legal help. Some projects need help with boilerplate documents like privacy policies, terms of service agreements, and contributor license agreements; others need assistance figuring out licensing; some will have more individual legal needs. It’s highly unlikely that most projects have the ability to produce this in-house, meaning they either leave themselves open to liabilities by not getting legal advice, or have to retain legal help at a high cost to themselves. Mozilla can help.
• Policy assistance. Mozilla could help projects navigate complex regulatory environments, such as GDPR or CCPA compliance or lobbying for user-first policies globally.
• Funding. Offering grants or investments for vetted open source projects could amplify Mozilla’s impact. It’s done this in the past a little bit through its defunct WebFWD accelerator and specific grants, and it’s doing a version of this today with its accelerator for advancing open source AI. There’s room for a wider scope here, and a little bit of a carrot-and-stick approach: for example, funding could be contingent on a project demonstrating its human-centered approach and being willing to work with designers.
• Go-to-market strategy. Mozilla could provide guidance on launching and scaling projects, including identifying its first users, building community, and targeting messaging to them. Mozilla could host workshops on community engagement and messaging, enabling projects to scale effectively.
• Regional impact. Different geographic communities have different needs. Regional accelerators could deliver it as a curriculum to local cohorts of open source teams. Regional accelerators could support open-source teams with tailored workshops and local mentorship, building capacity while addressing regional challenges.

A centralized Mozilla hub could provide templates, guides, and access to expert mentorship for projects to tackle legal, design, and policy hurdles. One-to-one help could be provided for the projects with the most potential to meaningfully fulfill Mozilla’s impact goals. And through it all, Mozilla can act as a connector: between the projects themselves, and to people and organizations in the tech industry who want to help mission-driven projects.

By creating a thriving ecosystem of user-centric open-source projects, Mozilla can ensure its mission outlasts individual products.

The dream of the nineties is alive in Mozilla

Mozilla has the tools, the history, and the mission to make the internet better for everyone. By fostering innovation and empowering communities, it can reclaim its role as a leader in the fight for an open web. Now is the time for bold action — and a strong focus on its mission.

That’s my dream for Mozilla. Now, what’s yours?

I care a lot about the future of social media. It’s how many of us learn about the world and connect to each other; putting something so important in the hands of a handful of centralized corporations has repeatedly proven itself to be harmful. That’s why I’m so excited about the growth of federated and decentralized social media in the wake of Elon Musk’s disastrous acquisition of X. These platforms give more control to communities and individuals, reducing the risks of a central corporation manipulating the global conversation through algorithms or other means.

Although a lot of my focus has been on Fediverse platforms like Mastodon, from time to time I’ve mentioned that I’m really impressed with what the Bluesky team has achieved. The Bluesky platform is growing very quickly and seems to be the go-to choice for less-technical users like journalists, politicians, and so on who want to leave X. Bluesky offers valuable insights for anyone interested in the future of social media and how to build a vibrant alternative platform.

• Easy to understand onboarding: You register at the Bluesky site. To get you started, you can access “starter packs” of users to follow around various topics, so your feed is never empty. Here’s a starter pack of ProPublica journalists, for example, or people in tech from underrepresented communities.
• It feels alive: The posts are both timely and engaging. This is in contrast to Mastodon, where they’re purely chronologically-ordered, or Threads, where I was still seeing hopeful posts from before the election a week later (because they piggybacked on the Instagram algorithm, which is optimized for a different kind of content). News can actually break here — and so can memes. Find an old-timer and ask them about ALF: an inside joke that I absolutely refuse to log an explanation for here.
• Search works universally: It simply doesn’t on Mastodon, and I can only describe the search engine on Threads as weird.
• It’s moderated and facilitated: The site has easy-to-understand moderation. More than that, the team seems to have invested in the culture of the community they’re creating. Particularly in the beginning, they did a lot of community facilitation work that set the tone of the place. The result — so far — is a palpable sense of fun in contrast to a seriousness that pervades both Threads and Mastodon.

At the same time, Bluesky benefits from an open mindset, an open-source codebase, and a permissionless protocol that allows anyone to build tools on top of it. Critics will note that it isn’t really decentralized yet: there’s one dominant personal data store that basically everyone is attached to. In contrast to Mastodon’s model of co-operative communities anchored by a non-profit, Bluesky is a venture funded startup that grew out of Twitter.

Other critics complain about the involvement of Jack Dorsey, who created Twitter and therefore a lot of the problems that we’re all trying to get away from. I don’t think that’s a valid complaint: he famously both established Bluesky because he felt that Twitter should have been a protocol rather than a company, and both left the board and closed his account after becoming dissatisfied with the way Bluesky was run as a moderated community. He has since described X as “freedom technology” and put a ton of his own money behind Nostr. I’ve personally found Nostr to be a particularly toxic decentralized network dominated by Bitcoin-loving libertarians. This may indicate where his priorities lie.

I’ll be honest: on paper, I like Mastodon’s model better. It’s a community-driven effort paid for transparently by donations, much like any non-profit. (Much like any non-profit, the bulk of the funding comes from larger entities, but these are advertised on the Mastodon website alongside smaller-dollar donors.) I also like the co-operative model where smaller communities can dictate their own norms but interoperate with the larger network, which means that, for example, communities for trans posters or journalists can provide more directed support.

But this model faces a much harder road. It means, firstly, that there is less money to go around (Bluesky has raised $36M so far; Mastodon raised €326K in 2022), and secondly, that it’s harder to understand for a new user who wants to join in. It’s also clear that CEO Jay Graber has established a cohesive team that by all accounts is a lot of fun to work in. That counts for a lot and has helped to establish a healthy community.

Even with its hurdles, Mastodon’s model embodies a rare, user-first ethos, and I believe it’s worth supporting. In the end, the future of social media may depend on which values we choose to uphold.

I suspect both will continue to exist side by side. If I had to guess, Bluesky might become a mainstream platform for people who want something very close to pre-acquisition Twitter (which it is rapidly becoming right now), and the Fediverse might become the default glue between any social platform. For example, I post my book reading activity on Bookwyrm, which I find more useful in its own right than Goodreads. Other people can follow and interact with my book reviews there, or they can follow from other Fediverse-compatible platforms like Mastodon. (Right now, my followers are about half and half). Mastodon itself will allow niche supportive communities to grow, and of course, the fact that Threads is building Fediverse support means that any of its hundreds of millions of users will be able to interact with anyone on any other Fediverse platform.

Bluesky may evolve into a streamlined alternative to Twitter, while the Fediverse could serve as a decentralized, cross-platform connector among diverse networks. This dynamic offers a promising future for users, with both worlds learning from one another in a productive tension that has the potential to strengthen the open social web. That’s good news for everyone who values an open, user-driven future for social media.

I’ve noticed a few mistaken assumptions circulating on social media lately, so I thought it was worth clarifying a few things around privacy and surveillance.

Much of this depends on the idea of a threat model: a term that refers to the potential risks you face based on who you think might try to access your information and why.

Making a social media profile private does not make it safe from surveillance.

While it may make you safe from harassment by preventing drive-by comments from outside attackers, its content is still accessible by the platform owner.

For centralized services like Threads and X, this is hopefully obvious: the platform owner can see your content. However, it’s also true on other platforms. For example, the owner of your Mastodon instance could theoretically view your non-public posts.

If your main concern is harassment, setting your account to private can be a helpful step. If your threat model is a state actor or other large entity accessing your information and using it to incriminate you in some way, it does not prevent that from happening if the social media platform co-operates. For example, if X was compelled (or chose to) provide information about users posting about receiving reproductive healthcare, it could do that regardless of an account’s privacy settings. Threads or a Mastodon instance could similarly be subpoenaed for the same information.

Remember, even with privacy settings in place, your data belongs to the platform owner, not you. This is a critical point to understand in any digital space, regardless of ownership or whether it is centralized or decentralized. Even if a platform is decentralized, privacy still depends on who runs your instance, their stance on co-operating with outside requests for information, and the legal demands of the region they reside in.

If a platform chooses to co-operate, a warrant is not necessarily required for this information, and you may never find out that it has happened.

Decentralized/federated social networks are not free from surveillance.

These platforms are based on permissionless protocols, which allow anyone to join the network and interact without needing special permissions from anyone. This is great for accessibility but can also make it easier for bad actors to watch public posts.

In some ways, that makes them easier to surveil than centralized services. For an actor to surveil X or Threads, they would need to work with the platform owner. For an actor to do the same thing with Mastodon or Bluesky, they simply need to implement the protocol and go looking.

This is where making your account private can help, as long as the platform owner is not directly co-operating. (As described above, if a platform owner does co-operate, all data stored with them is potentially accessible.) If your account is public, your information can be freely indexed with no limitations.

Social media is not suitable for sensitive conversations.

As we’ve seen, privacy settings are helpful but limited. Given the limitations of privacy settings on social media, for truly sensitive conversations, it’s wise to switch to encrypted channels. You should also be mindful of what you share on any social platform, even with privacy settings enabled.

I always recommend Signal for sensitive conversations, and suggest using it to replace DMs entirely. You’re much more likely to use it for a sensitive conversation if you’re already using it for everyconversation. Unlike the alternatives, it’s open source and auditable, not owned by a large corporation, end-to-end encrypted, works on every platform, and is very easy to use.

You should also consider using Block Party, which is the most user-friendly tool I’ve seen for locking down your social media privacy settings.

In the end, privacy settings can only go so far. Using a platform like Signal can make a meaningful difference in safeguarding your most sensitive information. It’s a free, simple choice. But even more than that, it’s worth remembering: the point of social media is that someone is always watching. Act accordingly.

In case you’re searching for things to take your mind off the immediate horrors of the real world for, you know, some reason, here are ten:

‌3D Workers Island is a horror story told in the form of late-nineties screenshots from forums, websites, and a mysterious screensaver.

‌Practical Betterments is a collection of very small one-off actions that improve your life continuously. Examples include putting a spoon in every container that needs a spoon or cutting your toothbrush in half. Gently unhinged.

‌Someone remixed a cover of Raffi’s Bananaphone with Ms. Rachel and it’s kind of a bop?

‌David Gilliver creates amazing light paintings — one of his latest was just shortlisted in the British Photography Awards. This article says he uses a lightsaber while dressed all in black; the pinnacle of Sith expression.

‌Witches on roller skates! Sure, Halloween’s over. But witches on roller skates!

‌That time Sir Terry Pratchett modded Oblivion is “the untold story of how Discworld author Terry Pratchett became an unexpected contributor to the world of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion,” even as his Alzheimer’s progressed. The video is based on this older article.

‌After having a stroke at 25, Eilish Briscoe created a typeface to show the process of learning to write again — and has created a series of typographic exhibitions centered around the idea that “expression is a luxury”.

‌Halfbakery is “a communal database of original, fictitious inventions, edited by its users”. For example, the beardaclava, which is “a carefully woven balaclava that hangs as a thick and luxurious seamless extension to your existing beard, perfectly matching its colour and hair quality”.

‌Godchecker is here for you if you need to check a god. “Our legendary mythology encyclopedia now includes nearly four thousand weird and wonderful Gods, Supreme Beings, Demons, Spirits and Fabulous Beasts from all over the world.” Comprehensive.

‌Wigmaker is a game about making wigs. And it’s open source!

Mathew Ingram has posted some smart reflections inspired by Netscape’s thirtieth birthday:

I don’t think an ancient serf seeing an illustrated manuscript for the first time in the 11th century would have been any more gobsmacked than I was at Netscape. Yes, there were things like America Online and Compuserve before that, and I had tried most of them. But I felt that they were like a children’s playground with 10-foot-high walls — you couldn’t even see the real internet from there, let alone actually interact with it.

That’s how I felt too. I was an active CompuServe user and had connected to a bunch of the local Bulletin Board Systems by the time I touched the internet; they felt both easy to grasp and constrained.

The web and I grew up together. 

Our family was friends with John Rose, the proprietor of a local listings and classifieds broadsheet called Daily Information, who was a tech enthusiast on the side. He’d turned the Daily Info office (a creaky Victorian house in North Oxford that smelled of photocopiers) into a part-time computer café for the local students to use. My parents were both students at the University while I was growing up, and so I’d hung out at Daily Info since I was small. We didn’t have much money, but because of John, I grew up around daisy-wheel typewriters, which became dedicated word-processors, which became Macs and IBM PCs.

John had become excited about the idea of BBSes (possible because he’d seen that I was excited about BBSes), so hired me as a fifteen year old to start one from him. We had a single line: one person at a time could dial in and look at apartments to rent or get today’s movie times. I’d come in after school for £5 an hour and update the listings and make sure the BBS was working.

A BBS is a walled garden. You dial in, you’re presented with a menu (perhaps painstakingly built in ANSI characters by a teenager after school), and you can select a very small number of things to do. You might chat in a forum, upload or download a few files, or read some information. There’s no expansiveness: you’re logging into a limited information system that’s designed for a small number of people to interact with, likely run from a single computer under a desk.

The internet, of course, is something else entirely.

While I was building text-only interfaces on the BBS computer in Daily Information’s storage closet, the consumer internet was emerging. It wasn’t long before it entered my living room. My mother was a telecoms analyst for Kagan World Media, where she wrote a newsletter about the emerging internet, computer and cellphone industries. (Here she is quoted discussing CD-ROM penetration in Time Magazine in 1995, or in Communications International announcing the decline of the pager). She’d get to try out new tech from time to time, so we briefly got a very early version of commercial dial-up internet at home; I wowed myself with the Carnegie Mellon Coke machine and the Trojan Room coffee pot (the first IoT device and first webcam respectively). I found the internet much harder to use than BBSes, but it was clear that the possibilities were enormous. Family friends would come to our house to see it.

In that first year of running the BBS, John installed a 128kbps ISDN line at the Daily Info office. I’d already played with the internet a little bit at home; here I had more time and bandwidth to try web browsers. I’d been using NCSA Mosaic, an early web browser built at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign by student programmers Eric Bina and Marc Andreessen. When they graduated and started Netscape with Jim Clark, I eagerly downloaded every version: the one when it was still called Mosaic, before the University Illinois complained about use of the name; the version of Netscape with the boxy blue N in the top right that had a prominent role in the first Mission Impossible film; the one with the classy night sky logo.

It was a window into something entirely new. It was magic: a way for anyone to tell stories in practically any way they wanted. There was something about the slow speed which emphasized how special it was; a photograph that took a minute to download, coming into progressive focus or cascading down the screen line by line, felt like it was being delivered from half a world away. That’s been lost now that the web is instantaneous; it’s inarguably better now, of course, but it’s also easier to take it for granted.

With each Netscape release, I was also glued to every new feature that the web allowed. The HTML 2.0 release the next year introduced some major new ideas: a head and body tag, forms, inline images, a few basic styles. By the time I graduated high school, CSS had been invented, and people were beginning to add semantic details to the markup — but HTML 2.0 was enough to get started with.

John bought us some web space, and we created a website for Daily Info. The BBS was still functional, but now any number of people with an internet connection could view the listings simultaneously. It was very basic — this was 1995 — but it was possible for someone to see the listings and pay to add their own to the site on the same day, albeit with a real human dealing with it. The PageMaker files for the paper version of the sheet were still the primary source of truth, so ads were added there first, and then extracted back into files that I could convert into HTML and upload to the server.

I realized years later that the Daily Info website was online before either Craigslist or eBay, which are usually credited as being the first web classifieds sites. It was certainly more basic (built, as it was, by a teenager in a closet), although we progressively built more interactivity through Perl scripts. That fact speaks one of the most powerful things about the web: anyone can do it. You don’t need permission to publish. You just need to have something to say.

My excitement about the internet at Daily Info led to us finally getting the internet at home, through Demon, an early dial-up ISP that literally connected you to the internet with a static IP whenever you dialed in. It was the first to give every customer free web space, which felt like freedom: even though I’d been building at my after-school job for a while, having web space of my own meant I could do anything I wanted with it. I began to experiment with my own homepages, and narrate my life through a kind of online diary (we have a different word for that now). All the while, I continued to update the Daily Info website, which is still running today, with a very different codebase.

I thought I was going to be a writer; experimenting with the web meant that I chose to take the computer science route and learn more about building software. It radically changed the course of my life. I’m still a writer at heart — my love of technology stems from my desire to tell stories with it — but I’ve also been a developer, a startup founder, an advisor, and a CTO. So much of what I’ve been able to do, the people I’ve met, the things I’ve experienced, the work I’ve been privileged to take on, has been because of the magic of those first Netscape releases. I’m grateful for all of these influences — Netscape, John Rose, my mother, the permissionless experimentation that the web itself made possible. That spirit of magic and possibility is still what I’m chasing, and, despite the exploitation of big tech and the corrosive nature of unequal funding and the politics and everything else, is still what I think is magical about the web.

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.