Convener: Tommi (@tommi@pan.rent)

Participants who chose to record their names here:

• Mark Corbett Wilson (@mcorbettwilson om Mastodon, X, L)
• Cassandra (cassandravert@indieweb.social)
• Jon (@jdp23@blahaj.zone / @thenexusofprivacy@infosec.exchange)
• johanna (@johannab@wandering.shop, @johannab@cosocial.ca) - largely “listening in” this round, as I’m also at work
• Gilles Dutilh (@depemig@scicomm.xyz)

Notes

Tech is laid over social structures and influences how they develop.

Overall framing: focus on political and social aspects – not technical this session, please!

What kind of social world do we want to shape?

Anarchism: Yes! someone knows the actual definition: No one/corporation/entity is telling us how the Internet or the Fediverse is to operate - we are here to work it out for our communities.

Long-standing fediverse tensions related to how anti-fascist it is (or isn’t) and the rise of the corporate fediverse are social, economic, political - not technical.

Parallelism to rhyzomes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizome_(philosophy)

Collective ownership of different nodes, collective management of a heterogeneous political infrastructure.

Habermas - The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (it’s a book from the late 60’s, translated to English in 1989). He published a paper in 2022 trying to adapt the ideas from the book to the “internet society”. Needless to say, Habermas has received much criticism too.

Critique to ActivityPub because the crowd developing it is not at all diverse. The Fediverse, though, is not defined merely by the protocol! More on different definitions of the Fediverse in https://privacy.thenexus.today/is-bluesky-part-of-todays-fediverse/

Mention to the issue of funding and coping with the Capitalist system, while trying to develop technologies and communities that are able to propose alternative political alternatives.

Jonathan: Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi’s Governance on Fediverse Microblogging Servers discusses the economic sustainabiity, focusing on medium-size services https://fediverse-governance.github.io/

Mark: we have an opportunity to create an alternative to centralized control, that we can call fascism. A positive things I see is the development of a basket of technologies in opposition to the American/Western empire. My hope is that the Fediverse can remain decentralized.

In person representation of centralized/decentralized networks: https://ourinternet.in/ Looking for help or people interested!

Fedi is born to create back door connections to people with otherwise limited access and people who face discrimination in other areas.

Big tech was created for a small number of elites. How can we expand it to meet the needs of more people?

Mast/Fedi needs a central message site.

gilles: I noted that, in order to be succesfully “community-driven” in an inclusive way, contributing (not only using) should be made accessible for everyone. As a personal example, I mentioned that I never saw a button “plese help moderating”, which I would very likely have clicked if it were there. But this is only an example: I myself would love to contribute with one of the things I am skilled at (psychology, statistics, scientific communication), and I think other people with other skills may feel the same.