The Social Web Foundation and the elephant in the federated room

Part 3 of I for one welcome Bluesky, the ATmosphere, BTS Army, and millions of Brazilians to the fediverses!.

Last updated October 14 – see the update log at the bottom for details.

"In a gesture that’s been a long time coming, Evan Prodromou, co-author of the ActivityPub protocol, has launched The Social Web Foundation."

– Sean Tilley, Evan Prodromou Launches The Social Web Foundation

"The Social Web Foundation’s mission is a growing, healthy, financially viable and multi-polar Fediverse”

– SWF mission

"The Social Web Foundation (SWF) has some backing from Meta as well, alongside other major implementors of the ActivityPub protocol, including the social magazine app Flipboard, newsletter platform Ghost, Mastodon, and others. The Ford Foundation has also offered the organization a large grant to get the project started. In total, SWF is closing in on $1 million in financial support."

– Sarah Perez, As the open social web grows, a new nonprofit looks to expand the ‘fediverse', TechCrunch

Contents

• Intro
• Let's talk about Meta
• Meanwhile, back in reality ...
• SWF could potentially be a useful counterweight to Meta (although I'm not holding my breath)
• There are many different ways to engage
• SWF and the Schism Within the Fediverses
• To be continued!

One way to look at SWF is companies who have placed a bet on ActivityPub trying to respond to the momentum of Bluesky and in the ATmosphere, fediverses that use the newer AT protocol instead of ActivityPub. But as I'll discuss in an upcoming post, there are also a lot of exciting things happening in the ActivityPub Fediverse.

I think SWF is likely to be a net positive as well – at least for the corporate fediverse, and if SWF evolves in the right ways, maybe also for the free fediverses trying to build alternatives to surveillance capitalism. Three big reasons:

• SWF's Executive Director Mallory Knodel has a background in feminist technology and human rights work; see for example Article-19 Activists Mallory Knodel and Ulrike Uhlig Reimagine the Internet and her Linux Foundation Keynote (with Larry Kunz) on Making Tech– and the World– More Diverse, Equitable, and Inclusive. These are certainly perspectives we need more of the fediverses (and everywhere else too).
• Some of the issues SWF is focusing on are indeed big challenges for the ActivityPub fediverse, so there are plenty of opportunities for impact.
• Even if SWF doesn't evolve (or worse, becomes a pawn of its corporate masters) and the opportuinities are missed, it's still likely to catalyze useful changes in the fediverses. In fact, there are already some positive impacts.

So I for one (somewhat cautiously) welcome the Social Web Foundation to the fediverses!

Note: There are many fediverses discusses the terminology I'm using here – but there's no need to wallow in the details unless you're into it. A fediverse is a decentralized social network. Different people mean different things by "the Fediverse" (and Definitions of "the Fediverse" goes into a lot more detail for your wallowing pleasure). Since 2018 or so most people have used "the Fediverse" as a synonym for the ActivityPub-centric Fediverse, although that may be changing – the tech press increasingly considers Bluesky part of "the Fediverse".

As always, opinions differ in the fediverse – and opinions especially differ about SWF's launch patner Meta and their plans to embrace, extend, and exploit the ActivityPub Fediverse. So not everybody is so welcoming to SWF. And Meta's certainly not the only concern; the critics also bring up a lot of other good points ... which is why my welcome to SWF is also tinged with caution.

Still, let's look at the potential upsides if SWF can evolve in the right ways.

• Most obviously, the corporate fediverse could get a lot of value from SWF's"Big Fedi" approach of prioritizing growth and improving onboarding (a huge challenge in the ActivityPub Fediverse) if SWF also prioritize safety.
• A multi-polar counterweight to Meta will certainly be very useful for everybody else in the corporate fediverse, if SWF can act transparently enough and introduce enough oversight to build trust that they're not just operating on Meta's or some other funders'behalf.
• If SWF aligns with positive values of the ActivityPub Fediverse like consent, support for LGBTQIA2S+ people, and accessibility (and makes an effort to counter less-positive values like racism, sexism, and Islamophobia), and if SWF doesn't limit the benefits of its work to only helping its corporate masters, it could also help others in the broader ActivityPub Fediverse – perhaps even the "free fediverses", opposed to surveillance capitalism.
• If SWF broadens their scope to include deepening connections and leveraging synergies between fediverses, Bluesky and the rest of ATmosphere (the AT-based fediverse) could benefit. If SWF also focuses on safety and equity, it could be an even bigger win – for example by combining the perspectives and approach to community Rudy Fraser discusses in Blacksky: Expressing the Black Everyday in a New Digital Space with the scoped-visibility and consent-focused approaches that the ActivityPub Fediverse has explored and continues to break new ground in.
• There are also natural synergies with across fediverse if SWF focuses on trust and safety in ways that don't reinforce Meta's strategy. As I said in The free fediverses should work together with people and instances in Meta’s fediverses and on Bluesky whose goals and values align

"Moderation on decentralized networks is a shared challenge."

Then again, there are quite a few ifs here, and a lot of open questions SWF needs to address ... so it might not work out that way. For example, SWF's initial projects ignore safety; and while Evan's done a lot of work on decentralized social media over the years, as far as I know almost none of it has focused on safety. And looking at equity, SWF's launch post has quotes from partners Eugen, Rob, Matthias, Mike, Jaz-Michael, Jon (not me, a different Jon), Bart, John, and Matt ... and their Launch link round-up has posts from advisors Ben, Johannes, Chris, and another Chris. Hey wait a second, I'm noticing some patterns here!

So it's also possible that SWF won't evolve. That would be good for Meta (their two best outcomes are a puppet non-profit they can use ... or an ineffectual non-profit that does nothing to prevent their dominance of ActivityPub and leaves the corporate fediverse at their mercy) but not so good for everybody else. Oh well. If that happens, it'll be another missed opportunity for the ActivityPub Fediverse ... but even in this case, I still think SWF's likely to be a net positive for the fediverses.

In any case, nothing's set in stone at this point. Most non-profits' initial projects, program, staffing, network of participants, and even mission evolve. My guess is that'll be the case for SWF as well. In her newsletter, SWF Executive Directory Mallory Knodel talked about spending a month doing a listening tour. It'll be interesting to see who she talks to, what she learns, how much power the funders give her to influence the organization's structure and priorities, and what (if anything) changes as a result.

There are some straightforward steps SWF can take in the short term that would make some of these ifs more likely to happen. And no matter how you feel about SWF, their existence opens up a lot of opportunities – and raises a lot of questions, some of which I'll talk about in the next post in the series.

But first, let's talk about the big elephant in the federated room – and I don't mean Mastodon.

Let's talk about Meta

Opinions differ in the Fediverse about whether to welcome Meta and their plans to embrace, extend, and exploit the ActivityPub Fediverse with Threads, a Twitter/Bluesky competitor. Erin Kissane's Untangling Threads is a great overview of positions in both directions.

In terms of SWF launch I think of the controversy about Meta's role as an elephant in the room because it's big but largely ignored. SWF's initial communications didn't really talk about it. Neither did the tech press coverage. The two Fediverses, by SWF advisor Ben Werdmuller of ProPublica, is about the only discussion I've really seen, and while it has some good suggestions (including transparency, a topic I'll return to in the next post) and discusses Meta's harms, it leaves out any power analysis or strategy.

You'd think that the split of opinion in today's Fediverse – where lots of people want nothing to do with Meta and see them as actiely harmful – would be relevant enough to SWF's mission of a "growing, healthy" Fediverse that it's important to discuss ... but no.

One aspect of the situation that's especially relevant to SWF is that many Fediverse influencers are somewhat naive about Meta. The overly-optimistic framing of the SWF launch partner that blogdiva & resident afroboricua liza sabater was subtooting is one example. Or consider SWF co-founder Evan Prodromou's recent comment

"They've been great, super helpful, the Policy team has held consultations with hundreds of people in the Fediverse.... They come to events like Fediforum."

Of course the people Meta has working on the project are great and super helpful, it's their job to get the Fediverse to like them! And of course they come to events like Fediforum, it's a great way to get people to like them – and they get good press when they do. A couple of other examples:

• Mastodon CEO (and SWF launch partner) Eugen Rochko's description last summer of Meta's plans to embrace, extend, and exploit ActivityPub as "a clear victory for our cause"
• FediForum co-founder (and SWF advisor) Johannes Ernst's recent comment in the Washington Post that "Meta is actually at the forefront" of an industry transformation to "open networks." Oh please.

Meanwhile, back in reality ...

"Wait a second. Why should anybody trust Facebook, Instagram, or Meta?"

– me, in Should the Fediverse welcome its new surveillance-capitalism overlords? Opinions differ!

Meta has got a history of lying to their "partners" – remember the "pivot to video"? Meta has a history of lying to civil society organizations – remember when Facebook settled with National Fair Housing Alliance, Communications Workers of America, and the American Civil Liberties Union and promised to stop running discriminatory housing ads, but instead changed their algorithms to make it even worse? And let's not forget Mark Zuckerberg lying to Congress. So no matter what they're saying at Fediforum and in response to the hundreds of (no doubt carefully selected) people in the Fediverse they're talking to ... why should anybody believe them?

Meta has a well-documented track record of sabotaging interoperability initiatives with open networks (as Facebook helped Google to do with XMPP and as WhatsApp is currently doing with Matrix). So why should the Fediverse expect them to follow through on their vague promises about openness and interoperability?

To be clear, lying and malicius compliance are only the tip of the iceberg. There's also Meta's long history of anti-LGBTQIA2S+ policies and ongoing refusal to moderate against anti-trans hate, And don't even get me started on the rest of Meta's well-documented history of doing experiments on their users, breaking the law, discrimination, racism, Islamophoboia, helping authoritarian politicians, using people's data without consent, making money from conspiracy theories and white supremcists, enabling fascist coup attempts, contributing to multiple genocides ...

Mark F***king Zuckerberg Is Not Your Friend.

But even just looking at the malicious compliance and lying, it's not a question of if Meta screws over their "partners" in ActivityPub Fediverse, but when and how. They've had a good run so far milking their tiny incremental gestures of compatibility to get positive press. Once that dries up, they might well conclude that the ActivityPub Fediverse no longer helps them with what they hoped to accomplish, and turn their attention elsewhere – just like Google (and Facebook) did with XMPP. Or, who knows, maybe they'll find it more useful to manipulate and coopt their Fediverse allies into helping Meta try to weasel their way around regulations. Time will tell!

SWF could potentially be a useful counterweight to Meta (although I'm not holding my breath)

Fortunately, quite a few people involved in SWF are more sensible (and less sycophantic) about Meta than Eugen and Johannes. Mallory – whose most recent role was CTO of Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), a corporate-funded privacy and civil liberties non-profit that's been part of coalitions trying to hold Meta accountable – knows who she's dealing with. So does Ben. And Vivialdi CEO Jon Von Tetzchner and Flipboard CEO Mike McCue — both SWF launch partners – weren't born yesterday.

From that perspective, SWF's emphasis on multi-polarity makes a lot of sense for its corporate and non-profit partners. While Meta's much more powerful than any one of them individually, together they've got a better chance at preventing Meta's dominance and limiting the damage when Meta stabs everybody in the back. Earlier in this series, I talked about how Bluesky (while far from perfect) could be a useful counterweight for Meta. The same's potentially true for SWF – if they aren't too trusting, and if they don't get coopted or manipulated.

Again, those are big ifs. Meta's very good at cooptation and manipulation, in fact along with lying and breaking the law those are some of their core competences. So I'm not holding my breath. Still Meta's corporate and foundation funders seem to think it's possible, so I'm also not ruling it out.

There are many different ways to engage

Fastly VP Anil Dash (who's also a board member for Electronic Frontier Foundation) is another person who I'm confident knows who he's dealing with. Anil's known for his work supporting equity and justice, and has been one of the most outspoken people in the corporate tech world warning about “VC qanon” and the radicalization of the tech tycoons. I'd phrase things slightly differently than Anil did (the way I see it, there's a continuum between non-engagement and embracing vendors profiting from fascism) but we get to similar conclusions.

Different people and organizations have different constraints and priorities – and different possibilities for leverage – so make different choices. As Erin said in late 2023 in Untangling Threads,

"Everyone makes trade-offs. For some people, the benefits of Threads federation is worth dealing with—or overlooking—Meta’s stomach-churning awfulness. But I do think there are human costs to conflating considered pragmatism with a lack of careful, step-by-step thought."

Even though I for one do not welcome Mark F***king Zuckerberg and his shitty company to the fediverses ... they're here. For many, there isn't a credible path to complete non-engagement with Meta today. As Erlend Sogge Heggen analogized earlier this year in What Meta-corp can give the fediverse: Money

"Deciding to federate with Threads is analogous to doing trade with the United States of America. The USA has a contentious history to say the least, but it's a continent-sized nation containing multitudes.... For some nations, there is no choice. Our globally connected and unevenly distributed world is such that not all nations can afford to close off their borders and trade routes to the US without ruinous consequences."

Of course, there are many different ways to engage. Closely engaging with Meta – taking funding, giving them a formal role as partners and/or advisors – has costs and complexities as well as advantages. Support from Meta (or any corporation) has strings attached, explicitly or implicitly, as well as reputational costs. Advisors making sycophantic comments about Meta casts doubt on whether SWF can be trusted. What if there's a controversial proposal at the SWICG standards group and Evan takes the same position as members from Meta?

Then again, while some Meta-funded non-profits will shamelessly say whatever their corporate masters find useful, others are better. CDT, for example, takes money from Meta and other corporations, so unsurprisingly sometimes winds up toeing the industry line . On the other hand, CDT also does excellent work in a lot of areas (they're one of my go-tos for resources on the intersections of privacy and disability), and is on the front lines on critical issues like FISA reform, opposing KOSA, and the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act. Those are all big positives!

A Mastodon poll (currently in progress) highlights the range of opinions about different kinds of engagement. Of course, polls on the fediverse aren't any more reliable than polls on any other social network, but it's an interesting data point.

SWF and the Schism Within the Fediverses

"The most likely outcome is a schism into anti-Meta "free fediverses", pro-Meta instances in "Meta's fediverses", and a lot of non-aligned instances connecting with Threads to some extent but trying to keep at arms length."

– me, in Should the Fediverse welcome its new surveillance-capitalism overlords? Opinions differ!, June/July 2023

The percentage of respondents who think SWF shouldn't engage at all with Meta is very much in line with earlier polls about Threads from a wide variety of people, and reflects a very real difference of opinions. In general:

• Many people in the Fediverse want to follow people on Threads – and hopefully, maybe, if Meta ever allows it, even have two-way communication. Many of the largest instances are federating with Threads, and many influencers see Threads as big plus for the fediverse
• Many people came to the fediverses want as little as possible to do with Meta. Hundreds of instances have signed on to the Anti-Meta FediPact, many more have defederated (blocked) Threads without signing the pact. and I've seen a fair number of people move away from instances that are federating.

So I still think a schism's the most likely outcome. And that's okay – in fact, if it happens, I see it as a good thing. There are many fediverses.

Still, it poses an interesting conundrum for SWF. On the one hand, this is the kind of situation where a multi-polar organization can have a big impact. For example, today's ActivityPub Fediverse doesn't give people tools to protect themselves against harassment, increasing concerns about the impact Meta's refusal to moderate against racist and anti-LGBTQIA2S+ hate groups will have once they turn on two-way federation. If SWF focuses on safety – for everybody, not just for people in the corporate fediverse – that could make a real difference.

But SWF is unlikely to succeed in their goals if their relationships with Meta are seen as too close, or if they projects they pursue and the policies they advocate for are seen as benefitting Meta significantly more than the people in fediverses ... well, they might claim to be non-aligned, but if that happens, they'll be seen as a pawn of Meta.

So while I can see why SWF has made the tradeoffs they have so far, they may wind up deciding that they have a better chance at success if they instead pursue more of an arms-length approach with Meta. Once again, time will tell!

SWF is already having a positive impact

In any case, no matter how SWF winds up engaging with Meta, and whether or not the evolve, they're already having a positive impact. Three quick examples:

• In the wake of the SWF announcement, I've seen a lot more energy from developers looking at multi-protocol solutions and new alternatives to ActivityPub. That's a very good thing in my books! So SWF is already contributing to innovation across the fediverses.
• SWF is helping the free fediverses by highlighting Meta's plans to embrace, extend, and exploit the Fediverse, and SWF's list of open-source launch partners highlights the urgency for anti-Meta people using those platforms to investigate alternatives to Mastodon and Pixelfed.
• SWF is helping the ATmosphere by experimenting with an approach to create a multi-polar corporate fediverse that isn't dominated by a single company ... there's interesting learning here in how to deal with Bluesky no matter how it works out with Meta.

And what if SWF doesn't address any of their problems, winds up as pawns for Meta, and/or crashes and burns? As I highlighted in the introduction, those are good outcomes from Meta's perspective. Pawns are useful. An ineffective multi-polar organization won't help the ActivityPub Fediverse counter their Meta's deadly embrace. A spectacular failure gives Meta the option of dropping ActivityPub and cutting their losses – which is likely to increase their supporters inn the ActivityPub Fediverse's despration to keep Meta on board.

On the other hand, thouse outcomes would be.a setback for the rest of the corporate fediverse and their partners like Mastodon. The corporate fediverse has deep pockets, and they'll probably find something else to try, but without a counterweight to Meta they're a lot more vulnerable.

More positively, though, even if SWF doesn't deliver what it's funders are hoping for, it's not a bad outcome for the free fediverses, Bluesky, the ATmosphere, or developers working on other protocols.

To be continued!

"[T]his post is eventually going to be a deeper dive into a few of the key questions SWF needs to address, and some thoughts about how they can make progress if the answers are "yes"....

That said, SWF's launch also sparks a lot of questions for others in the fediverses ... so that's where I'll start. Like the title says, there are more questions than answers at this point. But these are questions worth thinking about, not just in terms of reactions to SWF, but also more generally!"

– More questions than answers: another post about the Social Web Foundation and the fediverses

The next post in this series continues the discussion of SWF. But SWF's not the only one with agency, so it also discusses questions for supporters, fediverse developers concerned about the direction of ActivityPub, and the free fediverses might react.

After that, I'm working on another post that covers some of the exciting things happening in the fediverses ... and another one that's a deeper dive into AT's architecture and the possibilities of the ATmosphere.

Stay tuned!

Sneak previews

As always, these previews are often from drafts and may well be different in the final version!

...............

The complete absence of anything to address current Fediverse safety issues in SWF's initial list of projects has raised more than a few eyebrows.... I'm far from the only person who's concerned that if and when SWF does prioritize safety, they'll do it in a way that (a) doesn't work and (b) helps Meta more than it helps people in the Fediverse.

The good news is that there a lot of ways to improve safety on the fediverse, so if SWF decides to prioritize this there are plenty of good potential projects to add. On SocialHub, SWICG Trust & Safety Task Force lead Emelia Smith's suggested that SWF should commit to devote at least X% of its resources to safety, which would be an important signal they intend to prioritize this issue.

............

SWF's launch is a natural inflection point where they can thank some or all of their initial advisors, move on, and bring in a new, more diverse (demographically, geographically, and philosophically) group of advisors that better align with a focus on equity. New advisors can help them get more diverse partners as well.

Another priority is to ensure that projects involve – and pay! – Black and Indigenous people, women of color, trans and queer people, disabled people, focusing on the needs of their communities. As Afsenah Rigot says in Design From the Margins

"The decentered include subpopulations who are the most impacted and least supported; they are often those that face highest marginalization in society... when your most at-risk and disenfranchised are covered by your product, we are all covered."

.............

For people organizing and developing for free fediverses (defined in opposition to surveillance capitalism) that prioritize justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion

• SWF highlights the willingness of many fediverse influencers and the ActivityPub power structure to embrace Meta. How to leverage this to reinforce oppositional efforts, and build parallel power bases?
• What opportunities does a multi-protocol approach open up?
• What (if any) engagement with multi-polar, Meta-friendly organizations like SWF makes sense in various situations – and how to build spaces and organizations that don't engage?
• What (if any) levels of engagement with fascists, racists, terfs, etc makes sense in various situations – and how to build and encourage more spaces that don't allow them?
• How to get from the fediverses' history of anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, sexism (etc) – and the skewed demographics – to create a movement that's intersectionally diverse, inclusive, focused on equity and justice?
• Where and how to organize?

Update Log

Ongoing: typo and wording fixes, additional links, minor cleanups

October 13: originally published (with "Draft" notice still in text) as I for one (cautiously) welcome the Social Web Foundation to the fediverses, but we really need to talk about the big elephant in the federated room. Alas, that title was way too long for good link previews. Oh well.

October 14: new title, various cleanups, removed draft notice, changed URL.