librarypunk - 101 - Mastodon, Bluesky, and Bullshit Part 1 feat. Jonny Saunders

Episode Date: August 18, 2023

A two parter because we had so much to cover! Jonny joins us to explain Fediverse, ActivityPub, Bluesky, and other mysterious hives of villainy. How do preservation? Also: Microsoft lost the keys to their cloud. Also we started a discord! https://discord.gg/jY4jaNgan  Media mentioned https://jon-e.net/surveillance-graphs/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/17/microsoft-lost-keys-government-hacked/ https://dustycloud.org/blog/on-standards-divisions-collaboration/ https://jon-e.net/infrastructure/#forums--feeds (applicability of AP to publishing) https://mayfirst.coop/en/ https://www.e-flux.com/journal/65/336347/the-vectoralist-class/  https://www.versobooks.com/products/887-capital-is-dead https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/710957/chokepoint-capitalism-by-cory-doctorow-and-rebecca-giblin/ https://piracy.solutions/

We have a Discord. Links in the description. Go click it. I saw that you had linked to, like, the surveillance grass piece, and I'm just like, dear God, like, that massive document, like, I hope that it just like, I was like, I tried to warn you, I just being like, yeah, and it's also, like, sort of tangentially related,

related to, like, like, activity pub and the Fediverse and stuff like that. We're just like, that, like, infrastructure piece was more, is more, like, in that universe. But it's just like, oh, God, I hope I, I hope I, hopefully I didn't just like fuck up their day thinking they had to read like a whole book or something like that. I was reading it on the tea on my way home from work. Hell yeah. I enjoyed hypothesis, the overlay.

I didn't get a chance to look at the annotations, but I'm a big league digital garden person. Yes, okay. So I was like, yeah, I love that shit. And also, I'm sure we'll talk about this at some point, but a lot of the stuff that you were saying about about linked data is very similar to thoughts I had maybe wanted to write about eventually, but I don't have to write journal articles anymore. So like, no. You're out of the business.

Out of the business. But about like I had envisioned linked data and like writing about it as like a critique of it as like a colonial divine language. Like a reverse tower of babel like confusion of tongues where it's like instead of the tower of babel, like splitting everyone being able to understand each other into all these diverse languages. Like people want link data to be like this one divine perfect language that everything speaks. But it's like who gets to decide what that language is and who crafts it. Yep. And what it's structures are and stuff.

Oh my God. Like that's it's like and that's that's almost yeah, exactly what I was like, what I'm the type of thing where I was just sort of like, okay. Like link data but not like this kind. Like that just like. And because it's like the history is actually a lot more. thing. So cool. Yeah. Because like a lot of people were like the initial inclinations of this like from like Tim Bernersley writing and stuff like that is like not we will not have like one uniform vocabulary for everything. It's like there's going to be like there's a gradient of local languages to

global languages and just like being able to like link between these things. It's sort of the whole point. But like that got lost like immediately. Oh yeah. And reading reading some of the like, I don't know if you ever spend any time reading like W3C mailing list archives or anything like that but it's just like like that that kind of shit is just like I can see the type of person that would be attracted to this effort and like why it might have gotten off the rails a little bit that just like people not necessarily into like the fluidity and like sort of vernacularism that you'd need for that it's like no let's be engineers about meaning like that's like I don't know if that's going to work out instead of like book toucher people they'd be like word toucher people ontology toucher people they're like

Make the word. It's got to be the right word. I actually took like an ontology development class in grad school as part of, as part of my library science degree. And that was actually really like, my professor would just go off on tangents on like first orologic. And also about how Unicode doesn't always account for like Semitic languages very well. And like talking about how our like web standards are still very focused on this like one

very kind of like Eurocentric because he would he he was Jewish and so he talked about like Hebrew a lot as like a script and like the web's difficulty with trying to capture it right yeah that was a really cool class yeah this is like I'm I get it's like one of these many different sort of like you know deep like sort of like pathological fascinations is definitely like I love watching the Unicode like proposal sheet as it unfold and stuff like that and just like seeing all the ways that just like it is fucked up for just like non-latin scripts. And I mean like I also mostly go there to look at like the emoji proposals because it's just like those are some of the most fun documents that exist on the internet.

It's just like people fervently making the case for like the cultural universality of butter, just being sort of like people from all over history know butter, butter is like central to our identity as human beings just sort of and like having to prove that with like Google trends. Like the search history for people looking for butter has. always been high. I don't know. I just, I love those things. People need butter.

Yeah, the best one that I've ever seen by far was the uproar that was caused by the, you know, there's like all these different variants with zero width joins just to make all the different sort of like permutations of combination emotions and people wanted to make like the pile of poo be a base emoji.

And sort of just like the absolute scandalization of some of the people on the community is just like, first of all it was a mistake to make the poop we should have stuck with the poop with the stink lines and the flies and bringing the eyes and making it smile was our first mistake but what's next pile of poop with frowning and screaming in terror

like it's just sort of like people just can't imagine this like poop being an expressive component of the language and like that's the best one I found by far yeah they need to make all the horny emojis the ones that people make on their own with like the big eye one looking up. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I am not looking respectfully. I need that one a lot actually. Like in like it was like the last emoji cycle or something.

There were all of these new horny emojis and I'm just like someone at Unicode fell in love. The fistic one. Yes. Yes. Oh, I mean the Italian one. Oh, excuse me. Yeah. This is the fistic one. Anyway. Okay. My name is Justin. I'm a scholarly communications library, and my pronouns are he and they.

I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library, and my pronouns are they them. I'm Jay. I am a music library director, and my pronouns are he, him. And we have a guest. Would you like to introduce yourself? Yes, I am Johnny Saunders. I am a pirate technologist and former neuroscientist at UCLA. Is that enough detail? I don't know if I need to identify myself anymore. All right, as long as the people are happy. Sorry, I didn't eat dinner. So if you could hear me chewing my like cheese stick, I'm sorry. All as well, I'm still viking on the intro music to sort of like, I feel like instead of just being on a podcast, we're also in just sort of like very slick 1950s or o'clock.

But also like something's a little fucked up about it. It's like a little bit of a steampunk vibe inside of the car. There's like a skeleton in the backseat or something. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's got to be a little spooky. It's like the Bentley Roadster. I just watch Good Omen's Season 2.

Out now on Amazon. It was all right. No, fuck Amazon. You can donate money. It's not hard. Yeah, donate money to a strike fund. Pirate it. Pirating is always the moral choice.

Ethical. Do it. Okay, I think I'm on the right show. That's how I'm going to watch Red, White, and Royal Blue, because I love that book, because I'm gay. Wait, I don't know about this. What is it? It's a cheesy gay romance novel that, got adapted into a movie on Amazon about the son of the female president of the United States

falling in love with one of the heirs to the British throne. I love it. It's great. I've checked all my boxes. Right. She's gay romance, check, check, check. Yeah, it's good. Ask the titles of nobility amendment.

In 200 years, we need it. I don't know what that is, but sure. Yeah, we've lost me on this one. Just like, I'm here for the romance, not the politics. Yeah, if you accept the title, you lose your U.S. citizenship. Oh. Oh, gotcha. It's a still pending amendment to the Constitution.

So we could still do it. In red, white, and royal blue, the heir to the British throne actually abdicates and denounces his place in the line of succession. America, baby. It's like one of those things we're just like, it's like the same way that billionaires sort of just like sacrifice their right to be like relatable or just like be in any way sort of like relevant or something like that like you if you're a royal you basically have to abdicate if you want to just like hang out or just engage in the culture at all so yeah it's just the

fashionable thing to do yeah it's pretty good well i'm not like the host but i'm just curious like we were just talking before the show started and just like i'm just curious what like what y'all have been up to and it's like also just like what you've been thinking about just like that leads us to this topic. I heard a little bit of the last week's show. Actually, I don't think it was last it was two weeks ago where you had someone from the Netherlands on talking about Massadon, but just like, I don't really know much about where y'all are like what y'all think about and just like spend your time doing and stuff like that that like keeps you orbiting around this topic. Don't mean to like reverse the interview here. I just like, come on here a little bit about

what's been going on with y'all. Yeah. So we did that episode. because I'm very close friends with that person, and he suggested it. I was like, oh, hey, do you want to do something not Anglo-centric? And we're like, yes, we need to do something that's not about something where people speak English. That would be cool. Plus, like, with the move to blue sky and, like, Twitter dying, like, we've talked a lot about social digital deaths recently, especially with, like, Twitter dying and people, like, freaking out about it. And it's, like, a real mourning process that people are going through.

And we've talked a lot about, like, this is, like, an actual, like, death. And, like, looking at this through the lens of, like, a digital self dying, like, a digital death. And what do we do? How do we prepare all of this? Because, like, especially, like, as librarians and archivists and people who work in libraries, like, this sort of, like, what do you do with stuff when people die is, like, an actual thing. And so, like, the move to Mastodon confused the hell out of people. Because now Mastodon's for nerds who just talk about Mastodon, right? Which, you know, sometimes that's fine. And sometimes that's the vibe. You just want to go on there and be in there.

But people are like, I don't know what a server is. I don't know what to do. I don't know how to sign up. And then blue sky happened. And at first I was like, is blue sky crypto bullshit? Oh, the relationship is thick. Right? Because of like the type of, it's not like a chain, but like I was like, is this blockchain? Like, what is this?

But it wasn't as far as I could tell, but people are moving there. And so, yeah, like, we sort of are interested in this like relationship between like, what would like a decentralized social media or like information network look like it's not been working great so far and also we've talked a lot about the pre blog web and like the history of like again like I'm very into digital gardens and like I we talked a little bit about like Ted Nelson on here a bit who's a complete Chad please don't tell me if he's into crypto it will break my heart because I'm so into him but like Yeah, so like this history of the web and how information and people are connected is something I think we're all very interested.

I mean, like, Sadie works in IT. Gotcha. So, right? And so it's like also something we're both like personally and professionally interested in. And it's just sort of the trajectory of how this podcast has been sort of going, especially since Twitter has been dying. Justin, did I miss anything? I think that's mostly everything we've been talking about. I wanted to do the Mastodon episode because, yeah, platforms are, when a platform becomes centralized, people are experiencing this kind of scale of digital death that they've never really had to experience before unless they were really online forum nerds.

Absolutely. So this is the first time that kind of like normal people are like, where does my stuff go? What happens to it? Like, oh, my God, none of this is under my control. You know, you explain to people the terms of service of Instagram and they're like, oh, they could sell my art. Like, yeah, they have a license to it. It could show up in Hot Topic tomorrow. Like, this happened with DeviantR, right?

So no one understands intellectual property, which is already a problem. But then you put it in layers and layers of, you know, web protocols and terms of service that no one could humanly read. Right? People get mad at like, oh, you didn't read the terms of service. You couldn't in a human lifetime read all the terms of service for all the products you use. No one could do it. No way. And that's like what the old argument is like this new era of digital. death is just like something that like yeah obviously we've been talking about a lot on the rest of the

fed verse and everything like that but it's just like yeah like people it's like since the dawn of like the platform internet like there's been failures of platforms obviously but just like we're talking about just like the death of an entire mode of organizing the internet we're just like it's not just obviously like I've probably pre-tuned to the choir and everything like that but it's like not just Twitter not just like a couple notable ones, but like the mode of having platforms as like the default fact way that the internet is working. Just like it seems like that business model is like closing that for a number of like interconnected and related reasons like recent technological developments, but also just like the VC capital is drying up. Like what the fuck are we going to do? And so just like yeah,

like massive death and like social death at a scale that just like yeah, the people just have forgotten that this is possible that like the internet can be a very fragile thing. Yeah, like people forget that like, yes, this is in the cloud quote, the cloud orthodoxy or whatever. I loved all your little stuff you came up with in that article. I was so into it. All of the words starting with capital letters. I was like, that's how I write too. Yeah.

I mean, I just like sort of gave up on like writing academic papers because I'm just like the whole reason why I started like just like pivoted my entire like life towards this like digital infrastructure. is just like, this is so broken. Like academia is so broken. Every part of it is broken. The publishing system is just like busted and like all of our systems of communication and making sense together are so broken that like it's not even worth it or even in my opinion sometimes ethical to like actually be working on science when the rest of the system. It's just like there's like throwing labor and money down the drain.

And then it's just like, why the fuck would I then like if I'm writing about just like this broken communication and publication system like right for that when it's like. Like, why would you give it to Elsevier? Yeah, and like, and like with that, like, once you let go of that, it's like, why the hell wouldn't I write in my voice or like, you know, the way that actually just like someone would communicate, like the whole problem, well, not the whole problem. Like, one of the major problems with just like academic writing is that just this required to be in this stilted tone and just like this really restrictive format and everything like that. And just like what, like, there's no room for just like, well, we can actually just write what we say and believe. We have to just like put it into this code that no one could decipher, but the people. in our subdiscipline.

And so just like, it's also just a lot more fun to actually write, like, a human being. And so, yeah, like, I have a little bit of fun when I write. But, yeah, like, so, like, you mentioned a lot of, like, about the cloud, TM in, in this piece. And, like, a lot of people, like, don't realize that the cloud is still physical. You know, it's still on a server somewhere. Like, all of this information is still physical somewhere. It's still material that can be.

destroyed or damaged or lost or or whatever like I feel like people like for like why wouldn't the cloud be fragile it's you know like even if you think it's this effemeral thing that in and of itself is fragile so I don't get why people are so fucking shocked and I'm totally with you on that one Jay and it's probably just because I work in IT that I forget like that other people don't notice like don't know the depth of this kind of stuff because like I saw an article come across my Tumblr the other day, that was somebody describing how much water open AI uses for their data centers. And I'm like, yeah, like, how did you think, like, all of those computers were getting cooled? And then I'm like, did you even, like, you didn't even conceptualize

that there are other computers that back all of this up. And like, I work a lot with Microsoft and moving stuff to the cloud there. And it's like, Microsoft just got one of their keys. Oh my fucking Lord. Like stolen by, I think, I think they're pretty certain it was like a Chinese like hacker group. And it was like a major. I can't exactly remember exactly what kind, but it was a major key. Like it was to the whole cloud. Yeah, the key to the whole cloud.

And it like broke open like I think like several dozen including government places. Right. So the government is now like we have to have you have to be responsible. This was gross negligence. And it's like now that it's in your house, you care. But like there were, there had to, so much had to go wrong for that to even happen. And like, been leaked since like 2016 or something like that. Yeah.

It was just like, it's like, it wasn't like just stolen. It's been stolen. And like, yeah. The whole like notion of just like outsourcing responsibility for infrastructure to the cloud is like, okay, we're giving you the legal liability for like, so we don't, no one blames us when shit goes down. and then it's just like, nobody can actually handle that much liability. Like, if there was actually a reckoning for the impact of that, like, I don't even know if there's a legal framework for that, like handling that level of a data leak.

Like, can you do a class action lawsuit on behalf of like, oh, fuck, everybody on the internet? Like, just like that's so, yeah, it was, what a fucked situation that is. And anytime AWS blinks, which happens a lot. It's just sort of like, the internet's off. Like, whoops. cloud flare Cloud flare

Cloudware goes down the whole internet goes down yeah I just like to think of those moments as just sort of like all the like roving autonomous botnets like I have this sort of just like beautiful image of like botnets that just sort of get loose

from their handlers just sort of like it would train to be autonomous and then someone lost the control but it still is going it's doing botnet things whatever just sort of just like this free ranging entity out there on the fields of the internet just sort of like what the suppression field is down Like we can now just like it just goes absolutely hog wild just trying to like bring down the rest of the web once cloud flare shields are over.

I think I read that sci-fi ones. Hell yeah. Yeah. It's just sort of like, Bandnitzer just sort of like these strand beasts like just like these autonomous just like sort of monstrous beings out on that you'll catch for a glimpse and out on the beach and just wondering what they eat all day. Slotching towards Bethlehem. Internet crypted. Yeah. There was something that was, the federal government was doing some kind of, because you're talking about liability.

The federal government is doing some kind of investigation into expanding the existing privacy laws, which is something we've already talked about. But like, we do have like a privacy act in the United States, but it only applies to government, right? So that's why all this shit is outsourced. But it's complete nonsense because like all these government agencies make backups of the proprietary data that they get. So they are effectively also keeping these databases. So there's like being an audit. I don't remember which agency is doing it. I couldn't find it.

So I'm not going to dig for it right now. But yeah, I'm hoping that there's going to be some movement towards updating our privacy laws because we've already got them. We just need to tweak them, really. Some agencies could honestly just go, yeah, you're too entwined with the government now. So you are officially part of the government. Therefore, the Privacy Act applies to you from the 70s. Could happen. I think that's what this agency is looking.

to do. But someone's got to actually want to do it. I've just been seeing, like, usually, I'm living in the United States, just used to the government, just being, like, in a perpetual failed state. And so just, like, like, seeing a government agency do anything is like, like, what the hell is going on? Like, like, did I, am I awake or what is this? Like, just being, and seeing the FCC actually, like, talking some real shit about, like, you know, like, hey, AI people, you can't just, like, launder everything through these models and pretend like it's like not like you can't you can't have it both ways where you make these promises about service and then also like be able to say but it's just an AI so you can't necessarily trust us or blame us for it so just like actually I mean obviously I can never tell

because I don't like I don't often really care about what the government is up to because I'm just sort of like yeah we don't need to trust them necessarily just like sort of build outside of them and like do everything just like in spite of whatever the government is trying to do to fuck shit up and just like that like like I don't know if it actually has teeth or anything like that but just like even seeing them take any stance at all on on privacy or liability for some of these like cloud conglomerates totally shocking to me yeah I do have some some hope because uh because of my work I know a lot of lawyers and oh rich with lawyer daddies lawyers who ideologically agree with me are scary people because they're just going to wait and wait and wait and then

they're just going to jump on something and be like, this is the moment we're going to go for it and get this ruling or get, you know, so they will keep their mouths shut until the exact moment they need to not. And so I do have a hope that, you know, those people are out there being sleeper agents for us. Also kind of makes me want to go to law school every once in a while, but it's like, I'm not doing that. Like, adding to this like vision in my mind of these sort of like digital cryptids, just like I'm imagining a bunch of like, you know, suit guys with briefcases standing next to these like horrific botnet monstrosities just like soon will be our time they're about to miss a robot everything and it just reminds me of the the tree law comic that was that has been going around

tree law tree law tree law tree law what's that i don't know that uh law i guess laws around like cutting trees on private property like that's not yours are incredibly incredibly old and incredibly can fuck someone over yeah so like there was a story. I think it was a series of tweets going around about how a guy in New Jersey cut down 32 mature trees on his neighbor's property to get a better view. How much could a tree cost, Michael? Yeah. It's like, uh, 32 trillion dollars under tree law. And somebody who was a professional arborist and who had done this kind of thing before actually like went through and calculated exactly how much this dude was going to. And it was like in the millions of dollars for cutting down

these trees. Trilaw. Trilaw? So I guess the lawyers really like tree law, but there is a comic about somebody saying something about how their neighbor cut down this unique cherry tree that their grandma brought from the old world or something like that. And like, oh, no, what am I going to do? And lawyers just start popping out of like behind fences and bushes, all saying tree law.

So, yeah. Because this all started because of the fucking, the picket line for the union. for the strike. Oh, yeah. Where they cut the trees so that they didn't have shade. Oh, shit. And they weren't allowed to do that. They ran a foul of tree law.

Holy tree law. Yeah, but then it turned out that the municipal laws in California aren't that strong. So they couldn't be fined all that much. Damn it. California. Tree law. Everyone got excited for nothing. Yeah.

So following up on our Fediverse episode, I wanted to have you on because you about Mastodon and Federation and sort of what is going to happen next. And so a lot of people have been migrating to blue sky. And I mean, I know a lot of people who, a lot of the most interesting library people kind of jumped Twitter months ago and have kind of been leaving ever since. And I'm more or less like done with it because of all the things. Yeah. There's just no one interesting is left over there.

Yeah. And it's, and it's the ads are more sneaky and it just sucks. It doesn't work. It's more or less broken half the time. Yeah. And so everyone's moving to blue sky, but, you know, there's worry that people don't understand the implications of federation. So we wanted to kind of get into like the basics of the Fediverse, its implications. So I wanted you to give an explanation of what is the Fediverse. And if you have to back up, you can explain what prerequisites people might need to know so they can look it up later and be like, okay, look these things up and then come back to this episode,

if you have to do it that way. However you want to explain that. Yeah, I mean, so like, okay, so first of all, this is like a politically fraught topic amongst, like, decentralized web people about, like, what qualifies as the Fediverse and not? But just like, just back in thinking about it's like federation, like as just a general idea where like that's like,

you're like these basic computing paradigms. And so, like, typically the one that we've been familiar with, at least for the last like 20 years of the internet or so, has been just like, yeah, this big platform model. all this platform server client model where there is a web service. I don't know where the fuck it is, but just some computer somewhere that I get to on a website or an app or something like that,

and that is the internet. And then that, you know, obviously evolves and it's just sort of a maturation of the rest of the way that the internet was also designed where it was supposed to be this like all-to-all kind of system where just like every peer was like quasi-equal. But for a number of technical and historical reasons, as well as just like the existence of, you know, informational capitalism, like serving as just sort of a ratchet to constantly privatize and control such like a wild and free thing as the internet, that like you ended up moving less from an all to all sort of like equivalent nodes system to big servers and then everyone else is just clients that can interact only through these big servers. And then so like as a parallel thread through all that time, there's like peer-to-peer internet, which is like mostly exists in the world of pirates or at least has been.

except for a couple of like niche applications of it in other like very specific domains that like, that like again, just like there's a bunch of structural reasons why that like hasn't really taken off and had the same kind of energy and labor time put into it. It's just well, one of the primary ones that's very, very difficult to make money on the peer to peer web. Like I just like the typical example is BitTorrent, which is just like one of the, I mean, it's like one of the best technologies that's ever been made in terms of just like having like, universal culture be like a plausible reality like and so like what i mean by that is not like a universalizing culture but just like making it so that just like information can be shared like

you know quasi globally um in that way but like the creator bram cohen is just like very weird dude there are people people i know that just like love this love him and just like me he's a great guy like great really good ideas and everything like but also just like we lost a good one to the crypto scams but just like through him and with bit torrent and with bit torrent and Inc. They tried to make money off a BitTorrent for like 20 years and just like not able to really. There's not like a good profit model for this kind of thing. So and then there's also just like a bunch of other structural problems with peer to peer to make it sort of like less attractive for the standard kind of like service oriented web that we're used to.

That like, you know, what happens when the peer goes down? Like did we just lose all of the data? And like a lot of that is just like has to do with like there are ways to resolve these issues. but there hasn't been to labor or time or interest to try and work on them. And so Federation is sort of this middle space where like, okay, we want to take the good parts of like what's good about like server oriented web, but also mix them with some of the other parts of just like peer-to-peer style web, where you have these servers that exist and they're sort of like always on

and just like accessible and conserve large numbers of requests. But instead of having everything be exactly the same server and just like owned by the same corporation or whatever, having a bunch of little servers that can all talk to each other in the same language. So there's like if like for someone that's like coming out and at a zero information level, it's like what the fuck is the Fedaverse. It's like that's like one like I mean thinking about specifically what is federation. That's like the first place to start with. It's just like take like a website, break it into 10 pieces and then allow them to talk to each other in in a common language.

And that's federation. It's like so it's a very general idea. It's a very general sort of computing and network paradigm. But like the Fedaverse is, like this sort of cluster fuck of historical communities that, that like I was, I was in a talk or organized by one of the admins of social co-op, one of the like instances that I'm a part of, that had some, someone, Christine Limer Weber that was like one of the authors of Activity Pub. And she was talking about like some of the history of this. And it was like, back in long time ago, like in the 2010s, like there's just like this sort of indeterminate start to the Fediverse where just like a bunch of people that were working on these sort of

federated social protocols from a bunch of different places started like so there's like o status which is like the predecessor to the protocol that we use now like activity pub and there was like hub zilla and a bunch of these other sort of similar like quasi over overlapping protocols that went into and fed into this W3C effort that created activity pub and then that became sort of like the central organizing point where a lot of the energy has been put since then. And so like the Fedaverse as a term is like, it's not like someone came up with that. And like we're just like, it was just like this term that's sort of like, I've asked about this a bunch of times.

Like, where does this term come from? And just sort of like, we just didn't have a name for what the hell to call this whole group of things. And just like it seems sort of close. And nobody really likes it. But it just, it's the one that stuck. I mean, I think it's just like there's a bunch of just like obvious. jokes that come from it is one of them it's just like everybody is a fed on the fediverse and everything

like that just like but it's just like it's sort of an ugly term too um but yeah that's like that's like that's like where it exists now so like that the main thing when you think about just like people who are tracking what exists on the fediverse that's like massadon is like the main app for the main implementation of one of these fedever's things but there's lots of these different little clusters and like as blue sky is sort of its own its own, I don't even know where to start with that. It's its own, um,

uh, its own sort of like off shoot. It's like, people wouldn't consider that to be quote unquote the Fediverse. But I'm not also not like a name snob. I don't really care who, who, uh,

uses what terms or whatever, but it's just like people, I don't think would call it that. But I like, I don't give a fuck. And it's also like, it's also the case that currently it doesn't even federate. Like it,

like the federation is all totally speculative at this point. So, yeah but the point being that it's like there's a lot of interest in this right now for the obvious reasons like what we're talking about now just like the death of the platform web and like one of the major drivers of that when when it comes to blue skies blue sky specifically is just like this legal liability question just like the like okay moderation is extremely expensive to do and if you don't do it like you basically can't have a thing and so like this is jack dorsey and like Like the history of this is just like is very convoluted and spread across just like 10 bazillion different mediums.

But just like Jack Dorsey, if you read between the lines, didn't really like having to ban Donald Trump from Twitter, you know, in 2020. And just was like, we should never have to ban people. And so like I think you can really see that as being like, we should have a free speech zone where just like the Nazis can flourish. And so like that like that's where like largely comes out of is that just like by being able to. to break up the entity into these federated units instead of like one single service, you can sort of claim plausible deniability like hands off. We're not responsible for that content. And so like, yeah, that's like why there's a lot of interest in it in right now,

but just like why you see some of the major players like Facebook and, you know, former Twitter founder getting interested in just like sort of because of that. So it's kind of like operating in a gray space. Yeah. Sorry, I just sort of wandered off the topic of just like trying to just like introduce the notion of the Fediverse because like but yeah we can like talk about each one of these things in in in details specifically so but yeah that legal liability question is a major one yeah i thought that was a good uh history of it especially comparing it to peer to peer that's a good intuition pump yeah

would you say the term intuition pump yeah i love that concept i got that from uh sean from seriously wrong holy shit like i didn't i don't even need a definition or i mean i probably should get, but like, the intuitive feeling from that word, it's like, I need that. I need more of that concept in my life. Yes. When they talk about library socialism, they're like, okay, you know how a library works, right? What if we applied that to a lot of things in society? And he says, no, it doesn't matter if you have a library socialist society. It's that you've gotten an intuition pump into people's minds because they understand roughly how libraries work. And now you can get them to understand a whole society that runs that way. I love it. So, yeah, it sounds kind of like

the reason Jack Dorsey and other people, because these are like libertarian people. They are, you know, they're crooks. And they're trying to use Federation to skirt sort of like moderation liability and these laws that are probably coming down the pipe on a, you know, you've got to spend a lot of money. So if we can find a way to offset that, because there's already lots of liability of like Mastodon, we talked about, I think we talked about it last time. But, you know, if you're running a server, you have to have a DMCA agent, right? Like, you need to be ready to comply with takedowns. Section 230 can cover you

in a lot of good ways, but like it's not going to save you from DMCA. Yeah. This is one of those like so we like I was been on the Fediverse. I'm not like one of the the ye oldie like been on there since the dawn of time or whatever but just like been on there a couple years and just like so and particularly on this instance

social co-op which is like about like not just like having a messadon instance but just like thinking about ways of doing a cooperative web just like that's like the whole sort of like who gets attracted to that instance in particular. And so like there's a lot of like mutually aid oriented people. And so when the great movement from Twitter to the FedEverse started to happen, just like a lot of people there were like trying to help out with like,

can we get disseminate information about how this works? And can we disseminate information about how to run an instance and everything like that? And like that was one of the major black holes of information for a long time during that like couple of months periods. Like, is it actually legal for us to do this? and just like, are we just going to, like, end up exposing a shitload of people to liability because of, because of this? And, like, the answer is like, yeah, but it doesn't really materialized yet. Like, I haven't heard of any sort of major case where someone has been sued.

But it's like, yeah, like, it's one of those things where that weapon is just, like, a shoe hanging over everyone's head and just, like, it will drop at some point. Yeah, that's how copyright infringement always is. Is it one person in particular will get fucked over. And then, like, everyone else is supposed to be on watch. but it's just dissolution of responsibility that's like, yeah, everyone is kind of off the hook. It's just like some teenager is going to get like 10 years in prison or something. Yeah. Whoever the feds decide to go after, right?

And like one of my favorite recent additions to the Fediverse is like, so like all the platforms are breaking and Reddit was one of them. And one of the best subreddit is to jump over to the Fediverse is on, on, so like, mess it on just one interface. That's like Twitter-like interface, but there are lots of these different types of things. and one of them is Lemmy that's like a Reddit clone. And so our piracy, the piracy subreddit jumped on to Lemmy, or at least all the very radical pirate people did a lot of them. It's very funny to see in a piracy sub-reddit, which is like, and piracy is all about just resisting information domination

and just sort of like that, like, who stayed on the giant enclosure platform and who went to the sort of like janky as fuck, like barely working, like free platform, It's just like an interesting sort of like cultural sorting, I guess. But like, yeah, there's like a whole lemmy group now that is all oriented towards piracy and like very sort of like lax moderation as far as like the legality of what content can exist there. And like if federation it's confusing about who's responsible for what and like because like when you federate something, it's stored on everyone else's server as well as the one that like originated it, that gets extra confusing. with these like Reddit-like Fediverse things where instead of just having a server, you also have a server that has a community. And then that community can get split across multiple servers.

And then people with multiple accounts on different servers can follow these. So it's like there's another layer of what the fuck is going on as far as like legal liability goes with those Reddit like clones on Fediverse. But I love them. The piracy lemmy group is one of the best like internet group. It's like that is people talk about it's like the revival revitalization of just like old world forums and shit like that. It's like that one right there is like a really lovely group of people. We could probably skip around a little bit because you just brought up preservation

because that's something I've been interested in with Federation and Preservation because my concern has always been if you have this decentralized group of servers and one server goes down, who's responsible for making copies? Is everyone making copies of each other's stuff? You just mentioned the Reddit clones making copies. Or do you set up like two or three data centers and just start pulling everything in the Fediverse that you can into long-term storage, like Chronopolis does for as a service, you know, just like have a nonprofit fund something like Chronopolis and make redundant data copies. I'm sure that like if any of you have spent any time on the Fediverse, just like you're aware

of this, just for the sake of anyone who might be listening who hasn't spent any time there, like the notion of a gigantic scraper sucking up everything on the Fediverse is just like the fastest way to piss off literally everybody on the on the on the fed aversus sort of like and like but you're right it's a legitimate question like where does this stuff go and like there's like there's a legitimate disagreement about like the value of archives and preservation in the first place and like I mean I basically like come down and just like it's a complicated question there's no simple answer and just like some stuff should be preserved and some stuff should you should be allowed to like delete ephemerally without without like any without leaving any trace

And so like, when I think about this, this problem of data preservation. So like the way that I, in my opinion, just like, my goal is to turn the Fediverse into a new kind of peer-to-peer system. We're just like, we're going to pee the Fed eventually is the great goal. And like the way that that, it becomes sort of necessary when especially thinking about preservation. We're just like the way that it works normally is one server creates a post. and then it goes and tells all of the other servers that follow this particular one. Here this new post exists. They store a copy of it.

But then the thing about the question of validation. So can another server just fake a version of this post or something like that? And so the way that Federation, like in the current form, more or less has to work, is that any third server that sees like the existence of this post or something like that has to go back to the original server to ask if it's a real one, get the original version whatever. And so it's like, wouldn't it be nice if instead we had just like a cryptographically signed version of this post that you could be relatively sure was the same one? And then you could share them between all of the servers.

So they're just like, it's possible that if one server goes down, you have like this distributed version of record or something like that. That can be then be reassembled by the rest of the network. And that's like, so it's like when you think about some of the basic problems with the Fediverse, I mean, there's, we could have a lengthy conversation about just like all the problems that are that exist on the Fedaverse and Federated web generally. But like that's a major one that I think a lot of them point to the eventual need to make peer to peer systems out of the Fediverse. And like so for thinking about archiving and preservation, when you have that sort of more subtle ability to control on an individual level rather than at a server level, what content of mine am I tagging as being publicly archivable? wish I want all of the rest of the network to keep copies of this and sort of make redundant

copies of it in case I'm ever gone or whatever versus something we're just like, okay, this is encrypted and I have like encryption keys for all of my friends to be able to be able to open it for some period of time. But then I rotate my keys. I change the password for everything and now that thing no longer exists on the network. Like a lot of these questions point towards peer-to-peer work and there actually is like a lot of really interesting work that's happening from people on the Fedaverse seeing these problems, trying to respond to these problems, and wouldn't you know that a lot of the more interesting ones are pointing towards a peer-to-peer system like that? So, like, I don't think the Fedaverse is a good

archival medium, and like, especially as it exists now. And there's a, there's, like, a way, there's, you can divide that question thinking about, like, what could it be? Like, what the best version of this archival medium given the protocols we have now? And then, like, also, is it currently, with the implementations that we have now. And it's like the implementations we have now like hard no. But like it's theoretically possible to create sort of like an archival grade medium using activity pub as the protocol backbone of this thing. Like and this is like one of the things I find really interesting about activity pub is like

where it comes from sort of historically is like this merger between decentralized web people, decentralized messaging people and like on the unlikely linked data semantic web crowd. And so like it's made out of JSON LD, JSON link data, which is like a link data format that is a semantic web technology. And so theoretically, it could be possible to apply all the same kinds of technology and all the same techniques of archival, archivalism and just like standardization and to activity pub style objects. It just doesn't exist currently. And like I don't necessarily think that Federation is the right form for that anyway. Yeah, I will mention briefly. You did send me something from dusty cloud.org.

And so I'm putting that in the notes as well. Yeah, if anyone wants to read more about how those standards came about because it was an interesting little story of the link data people, merging with decentralized web people. And then also you have the Indie Web who were not able to merge their standard in because of historical differences and just like some basically hard technical problems. I guess they ran into where there was a major technical and political disagreement of, no, we can't do that because that undermines what we're doing here. Yeah. So then they release two standards and everyone goes, why'd you release two standards? And they're like, well, here's why.

Yeah. And like, just like thinking about this, there's no notion of just like preservation in general. I'm sure that I, y'all are well aware just like living in this world of just like preservation and persistence is like a social phenomenon, not a technical phenomenon. That it's like you can have like, and this is why like the blockchain shit is all a scam, right? But like one of the major ways that it's a scam is like this idea. that it exists in perpetuity just because the technology guarantees that it exists in perpetuity. And like even then, it's like in name and in intended design, it might exist in perpetuity, but then, well, we wouldn't have a bunch of rugpoles that like manipulate holes in these,

in these technologies if it was actually the way that it was that it was advertised to be. But it's like, the times when you lose a Bitcoin or like that one of these cryptocurrencies goes down, And it's like there is no technological guarantee of persistence or preservation. It is all about what kind of social systems and what kind of, you know, human organizations exist to make these archives exist. Like archive.org is a group of people. Like that's, it doesn't like exist because they have a bunch of servers. It's because there's a bunch of people tending to it.

And like, and so then the question becomes like, what kind of technologies can foster and support and be mutualistic with making communities of people, groups of people, people that are interested or not, if it's not applicable to them, these kinds of, like, archival systems if we want them to exist. So, like, I think that that's one of the lessons of Federation. Like, I wrote about this in this, like, decentralized infrastructure piece that, like, preceded the surveillance graphs piece that's, like, when, like, what Federation does is, like, show a model in some way or, like, provide, like, basically, like, a fertile ground for what might be the next step of this kind of technology for being like, okay, Federation is not just useful as,

like a technical solution, but it also is like we can have clusters of people that have like shared values and shared beliefs about something that manage some internet technology together. And like basically reteaching us again how to like manage these things in common, which is like why I'm so interested in social co-op and just like the rest of the sort of like platform cooperatism, people on the web. Because it's like that's really the goal is to like teach people like, you know, and also learn, but like, you know, relearning how to own digital infrastructure, but in a different way where it's Instead of having single admin that runs the whole thing and then everyone else is just like subordinate to them,

but actually legitimately creating good governance structures in these sort of just like social web systems. So that's like, I mean, I don't want to ramble on about this forever, but it's basically like that's one of the major missed lessons when people talk about piracy is like piracy is a social system. And we can take a lot of really important lessons from the way that the social systems of piracy create stable governance systems, despite being hunted by governments around the globe. And so, like, why does that work so well? What is functional about those kinds of systems? Yeah, that's something we actually talked about a little bit on the episode with Leon was, like, this idea of decentralization and getting rid of hierarchy and bureaucracy.

And like, as an anarchist, I'm like, hell yeah, baby, like, get rid of those hierarchies. But, like, on a social network on these platforms, like, decentralization doesn't mean that, like, there aren't rules or any kind of structures. And I think people forget that part. So you have to have these like social contracts and these like plans and structures in place. Like yes, you can get rid of hierarchy. You can have decentralization. But like it can't just be decentralization.

Right. Right. There needs to be an ideology behind it. There needs to be structures behind it. Like, you know, lack of order does not mean fucking chaos. Right. Like almost exactly the opposite. It's like like like, this is one thing that it's like, you know,

the young anarchists out there or something like that just like actually like if you think this is going to be all about like partying and stuff like that it's like anarchism is just like maximal responsibility like it's like it's not like lack of responsibility is you're taking the entire role of the state onto yourself like that just like you can do this shit ourselves and that doesn't I don't trust like that yeah and it's like yeah why would you and just like that it's like that like yeah that when we're talking about these things it's actually not just like destroying

something. It's like making a whole shitload of new things. Like that's like so much labor involved in organizing. And like that's why I just like, I just have like this experience with where there was like this cultural division and this group of co-ups that I was in at some point. We're just like they would always call us like the busy like intellectual elite or whatever. Just like we're the actual real anarchist because we just like fuck shit up all day long and don't listen to anybody. It's like, well like you also don't like show up to like the means where we're trying to keep the organization alive. And so like the least radical thing that you can possibly do is to cease existing. And it's like that's like, anyway, so it's just like,

I've shared this frustration a lot, but just like decentralization is all about not just like running a bunch of servers or just like having this particular program. It's about like changing your orientation to and like your role in these technologies. Yes. clap emoji Yeah I'm with you on that It's in and it's in here I'm pointing to my head

It's in here It's not on the servers It's in here It's in here I'm pointing to my heart now Yeah Like one of the I struggled with whether I should keep this

For a long time When I was like writing that Infrastructure piece And it's like yeah The subtitle of that Is like kill the cloud in your mind And like that's like the main idea Oh hell yeah

This shit It's like just it's about you Like realizing Realizing that like a lot of what we believe about information technology and about digital social technology is like ideological. It's not like natural, fixed, optimal, et cetera. It's like a belief system that's mostly been sort of like subtly and invisibly trained into us by, you know, some of the largest corporations on the globe. And so like that's, that's like imagining new ideologies, imagining new ways

of believing about, about like what's possible on the internet involves, yeah, addressing it as such. It's a belief system. I just wanted to check before we went. long because we've got a lot that we should we could just get through in just one setting instead of doing a second episode separately so yeah I'm good to go there there was like there was something fucked up about like the audio file for the the previous episode and so it we showed up on my podcast player being like seven hours long I fixed that stop emailing me about it okay so like like I was like is this really the kind of show that these folks do just like because the the episode I listened to before was like the internet archive and v hatchet one of yours and i was like this is normal

reasonable podcast length and then i was just like oh fuck like seven hours like okay i don't know why it started doing that but i've always been using variable bitrate to export and that started giving people seven hour runtimes for some reason but not in all the podcasts like distributors just in some of them because that's never happened to me on spotify i'm sorry i use spotify i know i'm a trigger never happened it doesn't happen on the website but sometimes it's insane anyway i I'm using constant bit right now. I know. Episode 100 was the first one in constant bit rate. So it should no longer have that issue.

I'm not going back in re-exporting everything. Yes. Please flip the cassette over to Side B to continue the adventure.