Convener: Paul Fuxjäger (@cypherhippie@chaos.social)

Participants who chose to record their names here:

• Jim DeLaHunt (@jdlh@mstdn.ca)
• Manfred Zielinski (@manfredzielinski@mastodon.nl)
• Charles Iliya Krempeaux (@reiver@mastodon.social)
• Peter Mechels (@zzepposs@chaos.social, @FediVariety@mastodon.social)

Notes

• Collecting ideas for the “Plus One (+1)” Concept (a public advocacy strategy designed for collective advocacy for the wider open social web)

• Criteria found here: https://offene-netzwerke.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Paper_Alliance-Open-Networks-and-Democratic-Public-Sphere_251130.pdf

  • In addition to posting on proprietary networks, must also post on one additional network which is decentralised and open.

• Question: what networks qualify as “decentralised and open”, and so qualifies as “+1”.

• Dutch government has a Fediverse instance. About 50 organisations have accounts on that instance. Want more.

  • @communitymanager@social.overheid.nl
  • @opensource@social.overheid.nl
  • The recently-elected Dutch government supports it. They called it “1+”, i.e. Fediverse first.

• Jim: I am new to the term “Plus One conept”. It is not immediately clear to me what it means. But a second phrase “not just the proprietary, closed, unaccountable service but also the open, decentralised, safer alternative”.

• A member of the International Court was put on a boycott list by US government. This meant US companies were forbidden to do business with that person. They lost credit cards, banking, etc. This resonated strongly with the Dutch government. This is an example of a foreign action which pushes government to support the +1 concept.

• It would be valuable to have both ATproto and ActivityPub community to lobby for the same “+1” message. But some in the ActivityPub community consider ATproto financing and governance has negatives which means it is not “open” enough.

• The perfect is the enemy of the good. From the point of view of some in Fediverse, the financing and governance of the Atmosphere makes it not perfect. That is interfering with the “good” of having both communities working together to persuade governments.

  • How can you make things less bad, even if it is not yet “good”?

• As FOSDEM, there was talk of a “trusted European service”. The definition is not very clear.

• How do you measure? When is something “independent enough” from Big Tech?

  • For instance, some of the cables over which internet traffic travels are privately owned. Is that OK, or must one build a decentralised, open, set of network cables?

• A principle “we will treat advertising as a last resort”. That is something I can support. That seems to be BlueSky’s philosophy.

• People who do ads often sell space via ad networks. There are two big networks. If you are better at selling your own ad space to advertisers, you don’t need the networks.

• Talk of “ethical ad networks”.

  • What does that mean? Definition unclear.

  • A history of ad sales techniques:

    1. Selling ads to sites with ad space.
    2. Selling ads via e.g. Google which knows what people are searching for.
    3. Ad networks track user’s details. At each step, the advertising works more effectively.

  • A limit on tracking and surveillence has been resources to do the tracking. But LLMs provides enough resources to track each person personally.

  • To make an ad network “ethical”, you need a way to make the ads effective.

• If you get too much feedback from your readers, you turn into a shitty guy.

• Both ATproto and ActivityPub give users relatively fine-grained control of how much information about one’s self one shares with surveillance. That allows a kind of ethical surveillance (“research”). Even though it does not prevent bad actors.

  • ATproto did a better job of collecting user preferences than ActivityPub. They record the distinction between “refused” and “did not choose”..

  • The World Wide Web has been “opt out” for decades. This sets a culture of “opt out”.

• Proposal: User Intents for Data Reuse #3617: https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/3617

• https://docs.joinmastodon.org/entities/Account/#indexable

• https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/3617 this is the discussion within bsky

• Jim: One objection to “1+ principle” is that posting to multiple platforms takes more work. Cross-posting tools like Fedica answer that objection by reducing the effort for sending the same post to multiple places