Who will Decentralise the Fediverse?
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:06
Hi! First, I'd like to do a few acknowledgements. Thanks to Gargram, we all kind of maybe moved from places like Twitter and Facebook
00:23
and went onto the Fediverse. A lot of people obviously helping in terms of protocol and all that, but just a big shout out to people like Tipji, who does the glitch social fork, I at least helped a lot with that, and also a mutable creature from the monster fork.
00:42
Before I start, a bit of housekeeping. There will be blank cards probably, or I'll have some blank cards going around, so if you want to write down questions, you can bring back the blank cards, so if you're going to try, or maybe there's many questions, then I can answer them later on, online.
01:04
Also this talk is pretty cool, so it's open source and free software, so be ready for that. Good morning, Nazi, maybe hot takes, you'll decide I guess, and don't I woo, you know, 250 dollars currency, right?
01:24
Obviously this is my experience, and your experience might be different, but as a community host, I have two instances, I've had some many more, one is maybe a single instance, and the other one is about two and a half thousand people.
01:42
The Fedi World, so what is, actually who is on the Fediverse here, show of hands. A lot of people, well done, so if you didn't raise your hands, now is the time to just go create an account, that kind of stuff. So the Fediverse is a bunch of servers sharing content with each other, I guess, there's
02:03
about five different protocols, maybe most people would be now aware of the activity pub stuff, there's stuff that's been here for ten years, like just for our stuff, I think the Fediverse has really grown with, I guess, Mastodon, which probably most of you are aware of by now.
02:23
Lots of dots, shows terrible probably, so this is from Fediverse space, and we see that basically a lot of nodes talking to each other, connected to each other, but the reality is everybody is on ten instances, pretty much, 80 percent, and this is I think a big
02:46
problem as an instance owner and for the Fediverse at large, and many of those are also commercial instances, so the biggest one is, which will not be named, a very, very big instance, full of robots, whatever, but it's still a commercial instance, so
03:03
the Japanese Fediverse are also like hosted by corporate companies, but let's talk about licenses. Do you know this guy, Mark, you heard of the Fediverse, I heard, so he says, he says
03:20
most interesting question technology right now is about centralization versus decentralization, plus his New Year resolution stuff, right? Let's talk a little bit about licenses, I don't know if you know this guy, his name is Jack, he's funding a small independent team of people to do the centralized stuff,
03:41
I guess, really, let's talk about licenses for a bit, I don't know if you remember this, 2015, no, it's not the end of XMPP for Google Talk, right, I'm sure you'll know what's going on now, as an instance owner, I'm kind of ready for that, I'm
04:05
kind of ready for those people to come in, use the software we make for free, use the protocol we made well available, well tested, personally I have no wish to have Twitter come really federating with me, but currently they can all use all the things
04:22
we've provided to them, we make plenty of tools and they can just use them, right, so that's going to be asking about whenever this happens, we're all going to be complaining about Twitter and Google and Apple and whatnot that are going to come in, use the software we made, use the community we made, they're just going to storm it, right, let's talk
04:42
about moderation a little bit, so the Fediverse, when we explain it, it's a bit like emails, right, everybody has emails and then they can send emails to each other and then what we end up with, emails is spam, it's all spam, so on the Fediverse, we have this guy, I don't know if you know about him, but he's just this guy going around
05:04
creating new accounts and saying like, you shouldn't marry an American woman basically, and he's like there all the time and he keeps popping in, and he's not a robot, it's a human, just going in, creating an account and spamming everybody by hand, terrible,
05:21
let's talk about moderation, so on this thing, maybe not very visible, but at the top there's a shadow of a guy, says I feel no man, but that thing, and then there's a button to report, report Fashi, suspend, mark as resolved, that's from the Mastodon interface, and it scares him, right, so this happened all the time, this call was about moderating
05:47
and blocking people, and that's made by Perfinnis, Perfinnis by the way, thank you for that, and it's all the time, people say oh you shouldn't block anybody, you shouldn't use moderation, but I don't want a fascist on my Mastodon, let's talk
06:04
about moderation for a little bit, so here's a story, a tale in two pictures, so Eugene Gagron very famously said, you know, come to Mastodon, there's no Nazis, right, come, leave Kritos, bunch of Nazis there, they don't do nothing about it,
06:21
and it's kind of why I joined, right, but they arrived anyway, they came in, and here basically what this is saying is that there's a problem between openness on one side, and safety on the other, so there's this paradox of terror, where if you tolerate everybody, then you're gonna have people that don't tolerate everybody else, and that's kind of like,
06:47
that's kind of what's happening here, right, like people say oh you should allow everybody, and then they're not happy, let's talk about moderation a little bit more, so here you can see an admin instance separating the oughts from the Nazis, a very manual process,
07:06
you just have to do everything by hand pretty much, currently we only federate content, the moderation part is not part of the Federation, so this is something we could do,
07:22
and probably should do, is have a way to follow the people, so you know, I have my good friend say hey there, and I say oh hey there, I really like your fungal instance, I trust you to do the right thing, and I would like to say whenever it says those instance are bad, I would like to copy this thing, but I cannot do that, I have to rely on like hashtags and message and like telling everybody oh this is happening, please, you know,
07:47
there's this new fascist instance, block them, I don't know, I mean obviously we have some robots, but that's as good as it gets right, like hey there's a new instance popping up, it's those bad people that have terrible view, another problem is privacy, so here's a good
08:10
example of somebody doing it maybe right, but I think what people don't really realize on the fairlyverse, or at least for Mastodon, as Mastodon is concerned like privacy is not necessarily the
08:22
primary focus, right, people don't necessarily know about it, but you have to go and tick boxes and make sure you put yourself out of Google and search engine and stuff like that, so this is a good example, if you have a robot.txt, we'll follow that, we'll not index your content, obviously it would be good if you go to search on social, look up your username and whatnot,
08:43
and you see actually what you configure or what you didn't configure, and that's a good one, but let's talk about privacy for a little bit, does anybody know what this is? Curly flower, yes, right, so there was a people from the University of Milan that did a study,
09:04
pretty bad paper, and they looked at, they scraped all the data and they looked what was on their content warning, and you know their vision of it was like this is bad things right, like content warning is bad things, it's not the spoiler alert or anything like that, when they scraped everything, curly flower was one of the things people were talking about
09:23
about the content warning, right, which is hilarious, so people are scraping the Fediverse and they just think it's okay, I mean here's basically what they said, their idea about why they could do this, basically it doesn't say don't scrap it in
09:43
the terminal service of many method instance, they just thought oh okay, we'll just scrap it then, it's terrible right, content, who knows about that right, so this is happening now, it's been happening many time before, there's been instance trying to archive the Fediverse and every time we have to block people, it's a drama and it's annoying, so let's talk about
10:04
privacy for a bit, please if you make some software that go on the Fediverse, please I beg you, please just try to make sure that by default things are private, I know we all want to expand the network, we want to have like lots of content going everywhere, but
10:20
by default people coming in, they don't know where they're signing up for most of the time, it's quite complex, most of the interface is very straightforward, it's really hard, so if you want more people to be not disappointed that suddenly they say something and then it's indexed by everybody and just if you do software, please think about being not linksable and hiding it from the search engine in this world.
10:44
So as a summary here, there's few things that really on the Fediverse at the moment it's kind of like difficult for me to deal with as an instance admin, so there's big instances and that's where most of the network is, that's a big threat because it means as soon as let's say massive social goes down, then there's like hundreds of thousands of people that
11:04
cannot access the Fediverse anymore and the goal of decentralization is not to have everybody on the same instance, that's a big threat. As I said corporate interest is there, I think they'll be next to come to the Fediverse, they'll be very very very happy to use what we
11:21
built and build on top of that and if we remember what happened with XMPP, the embrace, extend, extinguish, I think this is what's going to happen next, if we're not careful, I'm gonna have to think about that. And the current licenses basically means that everybody can just fork it and make a bad fork and there are licenses like the NPL and the
11:45
hypercredits license that says maybe it should be open source but not to everybody, like you don't necessarily want to have Nazi forking your code and then making Nazi master dogs, you know, that's another threat and we've seen that many times with like the fork of Tusky
12:00
and all that. By the way, Tusky people are looking, thank you for your software, Tusky is great. Modulation is really hard, it takes a lot of time, lots and lots of time and it's very manual at the moment, so it would be great if we had better tools and if you are making tools and
12:22
if you are a community host, I implore you to think about the paradox of tolerance because it's a thing, right, we cannot be nice with everybody because there'll be, including people that are really not nice and there to make a problem, make a fuss, make people feel unsafe, make people feel uncomfortable, I mean I'm not going to name them but there's quite a few community
12:40
now in the fairly vast that really, what they drive for is just creating drama, creating problems, therefore I'm not going to name them. And that's about it, so I get plenty of time for questions. So anyone does have a question? I'll bring the cards back as well. Yeah, just
13:08
pass on the cards forward so we can read them out if there are some questions.
13:27
Yeah, I wonder if you have any strategies in place to try to encourage more different
13:47
servers to try to make them more decentralized and try to push new users to different instances. So what's your question again? So about trying to encourage more decentralization of the
14:02
Fediverse essentially. Personally, I mean I'm going to say it now, I'm not going to make friends here, but I'm usually blocking the big instances as you know I haven't seen them. I would implore people like you know Gagron to just stop getting people in, actually trying
14:21
to actively push them out to make their own. But I mean everybody can, I cannot do much about that personally. I mean I'd like to say you know if you're on maximum.social I'd implore you just move, find a new instance, there's plenty out there. If you don't know where to go just ask a question and people will tell you what instance
14:42
is good based on your interest I guess. So this was a good roundup of issues around federation and centralization. But the question is what can be done about that for example. The question is why do people gather towards the large players? Do they do that
15:03
just for example, wouldn't they do that if we for example had like decentralized identities or nomadic identities like some implementations have and have you for example looked at how the centralization problem differs per software, per implementation? So for example
15:26
whether Harpsilla has the same problem? That's a very good question. So I think like Zot for example is trying to cover that problem I guess. I think in social network there
15:43
are two types of social network. People that use their first name, last name, that's their identity online, they want to be them and people that just have just an account doesn't have to be them, it's a link with their personality. Like on Twitter for example you would have more people that are not necessarily themselves or look like themselves and on Facebook you have people that are like their first name, their last name and a picture of
16:03
their face. So for the Facebook type users I guess, for the people that want to have an identity I think Zot and Ipsilla maybe gather for that group. Personally I'm not necessarily interested in that kind of thing. I'd rather have many outs and many different versions of myself and I can say well here's the board game place and here's like me talking about software and
16:24
here's like me about doing shitballs and I think for me it works better like that. But yeah I think a lot of people are trying to solve the nomadic identity. I think it's quite complex. The answer is like when people come to the Fediverse all the options here are very complex. People are very used to like I want something and
16:41
is there. They don't want to think about it too much and that's the biggest problem. People come to something and they just expect it works. They don't expect to be thinking about it a lot of the time. So a lot of what you, I'm very old, I'm from Usenet and many of the
17:01
things that you describe and that I'm seeing in the new like Fediverse is repeating some of the mistakes that Usenet made. In particular the aversion to being good about moderation and the lack of good tools for managing bad behavior. And I don't know if you know anybody
17:28
who's from Usenet and maybe you want to talk to those people about the mistakes that were made assuming that you could find some of those people who agree that they were mistakes.
17:41
I'm going to say that I don't think the tools we have are bad. I'm thinking that we have tools now which in other places they weren't there before. So we just need now better tools. I think we made a good use of the tool we have now and they're probably better than what maybe there was before. Good. But we need to make the next level of the tools, right? Just a bit more powerful. But yes, if I can find, people want to ask me
18:05
and tell me about the mistake they made. Maybe I can talk to you, maybe you know the mistake. Cool, thank you. I was wondering if you could be a bit more specific about moderation tools and better moderation tools. For example, when I have to do moderation
18:26
on Mastodon, what's the most time consuming is to investigate a report according to the standards and guidelines of our instance, which can be different of another person, another instance. So I was wondering, basically for us, yeah, the most time consuming part is
18:47
investigating a report. So I was wondering if you could go a bit more in depth about what was your idea with moderation tools needing to be better? Yeah, I think at the moment there's no
19:02
level of trust between instances, right? So there's my instance, there's other instances, either follow them or I don't block them basically or I don't silence them. So that's very binary here. I think if there was more level of trust, then we could say it'd be easier to kind of look at the reports and say what happens. So for example, if I could say, I don't know,
19:25
Matthew's instance is very good and it's very well maintained and therefore when there's reports and there's the same reports on her instance, I could say, well, obviously that user is a bad person. They're just a spammer. And then I could just take care of it automatically if I could. So if I could just have more info about other moderators and other administrators,
19:43
I could then potentially get rid of the really spammy problem. After that, once the spam is put away, then we have like maybe the more code of conduct type problem where it's like, is this person a fascist? Are they, I don't know, are they a transphobe? Are they being abusive? And then it reduces a bit the noise. I agree then you just need more people. I mean,
20:04
at the moment, the way the mathematical stuff is very hierarchy based, right? There's admin at the top, moderation, and then end users. Maybe there's something there that can be done to kind of distribute the power as well, to spend less time as a moderator doing lots of that. But yeah, I agree with you. It's just a lot of spam, right? I think moderation
20:27
can be quite easy if you keep your instance small. I really like Darius Kazemi's idea of keeping it 50 people or less, because then you can know everyone who's on your instance. And so if you have a problem, you can actually talk to them and they can talk to each other.
20:42
And I think those small instances are better neighbors as well, because they have less people who are just there to troll because you'd be trolling your friends on your own instance. And I think it also helps with the idea of everyone wanting to join the big instances. The problem is that people don't know small instances. So if all of us who know how to run a
21:01
server created small instances for our friends, it's easier for people to find an instance to join if everyone just, hey, I'm just also going to do a server. And then the workload is small, because you're not trying to grow something enormous. I think exactly what you said, 100%, yes. And if there was software that was easy to run, there'd be more people running it.
21:22
And at the moment, you have to be a system administrator, right? Regardless of which software you look at, from project to kind of tool, all of those, they require some knowledge of running servers. Like you need to know a web server, you know what Redis is, what the database is, and you need to make them work. And it's a lot of work. And obviously,
21:42
if there was an alternative, and I'm sure people have some names in mind now, but an alternative where you don't need to like SSH to the servers and then add some types of configuration files and then restart it to do a block, then that would help. So I feel like having servers that can be run easily, so you can have that one geek that has this 100 people that he knows, and he'd be the geek for those 100 people, and then we can have small instances, they'd be easier to manage
22:03
than, as you said, better neighbors, and then we can start to know each other a bit more, and then you can have plenty of small instances. Yeah, I agree with you, have a point. Any further questions?
22:24
About centralization, do you consider, I mean, I definitely agree there should be, it should be easy to host services and, you know, instances, and I think that's the biggest kind of barrier for a lot of people. Do you think, do you consider that a problem when there are only a few services, there are multiple instances running, but it's one hosting service,
22:46
for some point? Yes and no. I mean, I use services from kick 2000, and I use master host to use different instances, so I don't even do that myself, because I'm also an assist admin, I do that every day, I don't want to go home and do the same thing, so I use third-party services, I think
23:04
they're fine. There's not that many of it, because also it's hard, it's hard to be a host provider, it takes time, it takes knowledge, and not many people want to do it, I mean, like, master host doesn't necessarily want to do a glitch, sorry, because it's not like the mainstream, and it comes with a lot of headaches, I mean, not necessarily, I don't know, they just don't want to do it, basically,
23:23
I don't think there's a lot of headache with it, sorry, if anybody from keystroke is there, it's great, I love your software, thank you very much. But yes, it's not necessarily a problem if many people host, like, if there was at least five or six, that'd be great, but there's going to be one or two or maybe three. Okay, thank you, are there any further questions? We would have time for
23:42
one additional question. If not, then thank you very much for your talk.