#Decentralized web

[safesoundelectric]

A Bright Spark of Hope for the Open Web

Safe & Sound Electric is excited about ActivityPub's potential for a more open internet! We're committed to building a brighter digital future. Join us! #ActivityPub #OpenWeb

Hey there, Safe and Sound Electric checking in! We’re keeping our fingers crossed for ActivityPub. Sure, there might be some hiccups along the way, but the whole idea of a decentralized, user-controlled internet? Now that’s something we can really get behind. You know how they say, “Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst”? Well, we’re definitely feeling that. We know building a truly open…

[kommikoira]

2024_04_29 // thoughts on my internet presence

[the following is generally both a paraphrased and expanded upon explanation of ideas shared on twitter]

seeing as i am kind of getting sick with the way things are on the current internet, i am definitely interested in either pursuing a life outside of it or making my own space on it, rather than being a part of the massive commercialized central net.

the latter definitely is easier to a degree, considering where i am at the moment and the current people in my life, but it is no longer as appealing. i have been increasingly interested in understanding decentralized communications networks or simply self-hosting communications services like an RSS feed for myself, seeing as twitter is basically my little microblog where i post little thoughts i have had that day or try to share ideas.

in their blog, em essex said "the walled gardens are growing higher and higher and are just horrible to navigate." and i definitely agree. so many of the centralized massive communication networks people have been used to using or even born into are finally reaching their limits of growth and are shifting to total profit maximization and/or bolstering and fueling certain political views and debates. the twitter and tumblr of 2016 are gone.

i am looking into hopefully understanding mastodon or matrix a bit better but ultimately i am losing more and more interest in social media as a hobby as i find myself less interested in meeting new people, having already met and made friends with so many people i strived to for years. i mainly like it for art. i am more interested in keeping a blog and having a place to soon share my creative works and learning journey. social media does seem like a necessary thing for a while once i start making music for the purposes of sharing it, so that's a bummer.

[mondovr]

Web3 and NFT Communities: Exploring the Future of Decentralized Ownership and Value Exchange

The Emergence of Web3: Enabling New Forms of Collaboration and Economic Models

Web3 technology is rapidly evolving and is poised to revolutionize the way we interact and collaborate online. This new era of the web promises a more decentralized, open, and transparent internet, with increased ownership and control over our personal data and online identities. One of the most exciting aspects of Web3 is its potential to foster new communities and collaborations, particularly…

[nadreck]

More on Mastodon

Over at Ars Technica, Ben Klemens has an article diving into Mastodon and federation. It’s a good explainer if you’re curious about the standards underpinning the services. The idea of an open web where actors use common standards to communicate is as old as, well, the web. “The dreams of the ’90s are alive in the Fediverse,” Lemmer-Webber told me. In the late ’00s, there were more than enough…

[wilsbennews]

How to Learn Web 3? (Learn Web3 Beginner's Guide)

How to Learn Web 3? (Learn Web3 Beginner’s Guide)

Introduction Web3, also known as the decentralized web, is an emerging technology that utilizes blockchain and other decentralized technologies to create a more secure and transparent internet. As the demand for web3 grows, more and more people are looking to learn about this exciting new technology and how to incorporate it into their businesses or personal projects. But where do you start when…

[iamnomad98]

yo, wtf‽

[be-happy-on-the-internet]

Authenticated Transport (AT) Protocol

This is an open-source protocol created by the company Bluesky, PBLLC, a fully independent company founded in late 2021. However, the bluesky project started in 2019 after Twitter’s co-founder and ex-CEO announcement that Twitter would be funding a small team to develop an open protocol for decentralized social media

Details in the next article under 'Promising Web3 projects'

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Social Quitting

In “Social Quitting,” my latest Locus Magazine column, I advance a theory to explain the precipitous vibe shift in how many of us view the once-dominant social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter, and how it is that we have so quickly gone asking what we can do to get these services out of our lives to where we should go now that we’re all ready to leave them:

https://locusmag.com/2023/01/commentary-cory-doctorow-social-quitting/

The core of the argument revolves around surpluses — that is, the value that exists in the service. For a user, surpluses are things like “being able to converse with your friends” and “being able to plan activities with your friends.” For advertisers, surpluses are things like “being able to target ads based on the extraction and processing of private user data” and “being able to force users to look at ads before they can talk to one another.”

For the platforms, surpluses are things like, “Being able to force advertisers and business customers to monetize their offerings through the platform, blocking rivals like Onlyfans, Patreon, Netflix, Amazon, etc” and things like “Being able to charge more for ads” and “being able to clone your business customers’ products and then switch your users to the in-house version.”

Platforms control most of the surplus-allocating options. They can tune your feed so that it mostly consists of media and text from people you explicitly chose to follow, or so that it consists of ads, sponsored posts, or posts they think will “boost engagement” by sinking you into a dismal clickhole. They can made ads skippable or unskippable. They can block posts with links to rival sites to force their business customers to transact within their platform, so they can skim fat commissions every time money changes hands and so that they can glean market intelligence about which of their business customers’ products they should clone and displace.

But platforms can’t just allocate surpluses will-ye or nill-ye. No one would join a brand-new platform whose sales-pitch was, “No matter who you follow, we’ll show you other stuff; there will be lots of ads that you can’t skip; we will spy on you a lot.” Likewise, no one would sign up to advertise or sell services on a platform whose pitch was “Our ads are really expensive. Any business you transact has to go through us, and we’ll take all your profits in junk fees. This also lets us clone you and put you out of business.”

Instead, platforms have to carefully shift their surpluses around: first they have to lure in users, who will attract business customers, who will generate the fat cash surpluses that can be creamed off for the platforms’ investors. All of this has to be orchestrated to lock in each group, so that they won’t go elsewhere when the service is enshittified as it processes through its life-cycle.

This is where network effects and switching costs come into play. A service has “network effects” if it gets more valuable as users join it. You joined Twitter to talk to the people who were already using it, and then other people joined so they could talk to you.

“Switching costs” are what you have to give up when you leave a service: if a service is siloed — if it blocks interoperability with rivals — then quitting that service means giving up access to the people whom you left behind. This is the single most important difference between ActivityPub-based Fediverse services like Mastodon and the silos like Twitter and Facebook — you can quit a Fediverse server and set up somewhere else, and still maintain your follows and followers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/#free-as-in-puppies

In the absence of interoperability, network effects impose their own switching cost: the “collective action problem” of deciding when to leave and where to go. If you depend on the people you follow and who follow you — for emotional support, for your livelihood, for community — then the extreme difficulty of convincing everyone to leave at the same time and go somewhere else means that you can be enticed into staying on a service that you no longer enjoy. The platforms can shift the surpluses away from you, provided that doing so makes you less miserable than abandoning your friends or fans or customers would. This is the Fiddler On the Roof problem: everyone stays put in the shtetl even though the cossacks ride through on the reg and beat the shit out of them, because they can’t all agree on where to go if they leave:

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms-9fc550fe5abf

So the first stage of the platform lifecycle is luring in users by allocating lots of surplus to them — making the service fun and great and satisfying to use. Few or no ads, little or no overt data-collection, feeds that emphasize the people you want to hear from, not the people willing to pay to reach you.

This continues until the service attains a critical mass: once it becomes impossible to, say, enroll your kid in a little-league baseball team without having a Facebook account, then Facebook can start shifting its surpluses to advertisers and other business-users of the platform, who will pay Facebook to interpose themselves in your use of the platform. You’ll hate it, but you won’t leave. Junior loves little-league.

Facebook can enshittify its user experience because the users are now locked in, holding each other hostage. If Facebook can use the courts and technological countermeasures to block interoperable services, it can increase its users’ switching costs, producing more opportunities for lucrative enshittification without the risk of losing the users that make Facebook valuable to advertisers. That’s why Facebook pioneered so many legal tactics for criminalizing interoperability:

https://www.eff.org/cases/facebook-v-power-ventures

This is the second phase of the toxic platform life-cycle: luring in business customers by shifting surpluses from users to advertisers, sellers, etc. This is the moment when the platforms offer cheap and easy monetization, low transaction fees, few barriers to off-platform monetization, etc. This is when, for example, a news organization can tease an article on its website with an off-platform link, luring users to click through and see the ads it controls.

Because Facebook has locked in its users through mutual hostage-taking, it can pollute their feeds with lots of these posts to news organizations’ sites, bumping down the messages from its users’ friends, and that means that Facebook can selectively tune how much traffic it gives to different kinds of business customers. If Facebook wants to lure in sports sites, it can cram those sites’ posts into millions of users’ feeds and send floods of traffic to sports outlets.

Outlets that don’t participate in Facebook lose out, and so they join Facebook, start shoveling their content into it, hiring SEO Kremlinologists to help them figure out how to please The Algorithm, in hopes of gaining a permanent, durable source of readers (and thus revenue) for their site.

But ironically, once a critical mass of sports sites are on Facebook, Facebook no longer needs to prioritize sports sites in its users’ feeds. Now that the sports sites all believe that a Facebook presence is a competitive necessity, they will hold each other hostage there, egging each other on to put more things on Facebook, even as the traffic dwindles.

Once sports sites have taken each other hostage, Facebook can claw back the surplus it allocated to them and use it to rope in another sector — health sites, casual games, employment seekers, financial advisors, etc etc. Each group is ensnared by a similar dynamic to the one that locks in the users.

But there is a difference between users’ surpluses and business’s surpluses. A user’s surplus is attention, and there is no such thing as an “attention economy.” You can’t use attention to pay for data-centers, or executive bonuses, or to lobby Congress. Attention is not a currency in the same way that cryptos are not currency — it is not a store of value, nor a unit of exchange, nor or a unit of account.

Turning attention into money requires the same tactics as turning crypto into money — you have to lure in people who have real, actual money and convince them to swap it for attention. With crypto, this involved paying Larry David, Matt Damon, Spike Lee and LeBron James to lie about crypto’s future in order to rope in suckers who would swap their perfectly cromulent “fiat” money for unspendable crypto tokens.

With platforms, you need to bring in business customers who get paid in actual cash and convince them to give you that cash in exchange for ethereal, fast-evaporating, inconstant, unmeasurable “attention.” This works like any Ponzi scheme (that is, it works like cryptos): you can use your shareholders’ cash to pay short-term returns to business customers, losing a little money as a convincer that brings in more trade.

That’s what Facebook did when it sent enormous amounts of traffic to a select few news-sites that fell for the pivot to video fraud, in order to convince their competitors to borrow billions of dollars to finance Facebook’s bid to compete with Youtube:

https://doctorow.medium.com/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video-adbe09319038

This convincer strategy is found in every con. If you go to the county fair, you’ll see some poor bastard walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that he “won” by throwing three balls into a peach-basket. The carny who operated that midway game let him win the teddy precisely so that he would walk around all day, advertising the game, which is rigged so that no one else wins the giant teddy-bear:

https://boingboing.net/2006/08/27/rigged-carny-game.html

Social media platforms can allocate giant teddy-bears to business-customers, and it can also withdraw them at will. Careful allocations mean that the platform can rope in a critical mass of business customers and then begin the final phase of its life-cycle: allocating surpluses to its shareholders.

We know what this looks like.

Rigged ad-markets:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

Understaffed content moderation departments:

https://www.dw.com/en/twitters-sacking-of-content-moderators-will-backfire-experts-warn/a-63778330

Knock-off products:

https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/08/twitter-is-the-latest-platform-to-test-a-tiktok-copycat-feature/

Nuking “trust and safety”:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-dissolves-trust-safety-council-2022-12-13/

Hiding posts that have links to rival services:

https://www.makeuseof.com/content-types-facebook-hides-why/

Or blocking posts that link to rival services:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/19/better-failure/#let-my-tweeters-go

Or worse, terminating accounts for linking to rival services:

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2022/12/twitter-suspends-mastodon-account-prevents-sharing-links/

That is, once a platform has its users locked in, and has its business customers locked in, it can enshittify its service to the point of near uselessness without losing either, allocating all the useful surplus in the business to its shareholders.

But this strategy has a problem: users and business customers don’t like to be locked in! They will constantly try to find ways to de-enshittify your service and/or leave for greener pastures. And being at war with your users and business customers means that your reputation continuously declines, because every time a user or business customer figures out a way to claw back some surplus, you have to visibly, obviously enshittify your service wrestle it back.

Every time a service makes headlines for blocking an ad-blocker, or increasing its transaction fees, or screwing over its users or business customers in some other way, it makes the case that the price you pay for using the service is not worth the value it delivers.

In other words, the platforms try to establish an equilibrium where they only leave business customers and users with the absolute bare minimum needed to keep them on the service, and extract the rest for their shareholders. But this is a very brittle equilibrium, because the prices that platforms impose on their users and business customers can change very quickly, even if the platforms don’t do anything differently.

Users and business customers can revalue the privacy costs, or the risks of staying on the platform based on exogenous factors. Privacy scandals and other ruptures can make the cost you’ve been paying for years seem higher than you realized and no longer worth it.

This problem isn’t unique to social media platforms, either. It’s endemic to end-stage capitalism, where companies can go on for years paying their workers just barely enough to survive (or even less, expecting them to get public assistance and/or a side-hustle), and those workers can tolerate it, and tolerate it, and tolerate it — until one day, they stop.

The Great Resignation, Quiet Quitting, the mass desertions from the gig economy — they all prove the Stein’s Law: “Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop.”

Same for long, brittle supply-chains, where all the surplus has been squeezed out: concentrating all the microchip production in China and Taiwan, all the medical saline in Puerto Rico, all the shipping into three cartels… This strategy works well, and can be perfectly tuned with mathematical models that cut right to the joint, and they work and they work.

Until they stop. Until covid. Or war. Or wildfires. Or floods. Or interest rate hikes. Or revolution. All this stuff works great until you wake up and discover that the delicate balance between paying for guard labor and paying for a fair society has tilted, and now there’s a mob building a guillotine outside the gates of your luxury compound.

This is the force underpinning collapse: “slow at first, then all at once.” A steady erosion of the failsafes, flensing all the slack out of the system, extracting all the surpluses until there’s nothing left in the reservoir, no reason to stay.

It’s what caused the near-collapse of Barnes and Noble, and while there are plenty of ways to describe James Daunt’s successful turnaround, the most general characterization is, “He has reallocated the company’s surpluses to workers, readers, writers and publishers”:

https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/what-can-we-learn-from-barnes-and

A system can never truly stabilize. This is why utopias are nonsense: even if you design the most perfect society in which everything works brilliantly, it will still have to cope with war and meteors and pandemics and other factors beyond your control. A system can’t just work well, it has to fail well.

This is why I object so strenuously to people who characterize my 2017 novel Walkaway as a “dystopian novel.” Yes, the protagonists are eking out survival amidst a climate emergency and a failing state, but they aren’t giving up, they’re building something new:

https://locusmag.com/2017/06/bruce-sterling-reviews-cory-doctorow/

“Dystopia” isn’t when things go wrong. Assuming nothing will go wrong doesn’t make you an optimist, it makes you an asshole. A dangerous asshole. Assuming nothing will go wrong is why they didn’t put enough lifeboats on the Titanic. Dystopia isn’t where things go wrong. Dystopia is when things go wrong, and nothing can be done about it.

Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. The social media barons who reeled users and business customers into a mutual hostage-taking were confident that their self-licking ice-cream cone — in which we all continued to energetically produce surpluses for them to harvest, because we couldn’t afford to leave — would last forever.

They were wrong. The important thing about the Fediverse isn’t that it’s noncommercial or decentralized — it’s that its design impedes surplus harvesting. The Fediverse is designed to keep switching costs as low as possible, by enshrining the Right Of Exit into the technical architecture of the system. The ability to leave a service without paying a price is the best defense we have against the scourge of enshittification.

(Thanks to Tim Harford for inspiring this column via an offhand remark in his kitchen a couple months ago!)

[Image ID: The Phillip Medhurst Picture Torah 397. The Israelites collect manna. Exodus cap 16 v 14. Luyken and son.]

[essential-randomness]

Enter the FujoVerse™

Starting 2024's content creation journey with a bang, it's time to outline the principles behind the FujoVerse™: an ambitious (but realistic) plan to turn the web back into a place of fun, joy, and connection, where people build and nurture their own communities and software. (You can also read the article on my blog)

The Journey

As those who follow my journey with @bobaboard or read my quarterly newsletter (linked in the article) know, the used-to-be-called BobaVerse™ is a collection of projects I've been working on since 2020 while pondering an important question: how do we "fix" the modern social web?

Obviously the joyless landscape that is the web of today is not something a single person can fix. Still, I loved and owed the internet too much to see it wither.

After countless hours of work, I found 3 pillars to work on: community, software ownership and technical education.

Jump in after the cut to learn more about how it all comes together!

Community

Community is where I started from, with good reason! While social networks might trick us into thinking of them as communities, they lack the characteristics that researchers identify as the necessary base for "true community": group identity, shared norms, and mutual concern.

Today, I'm even more convinced community is a fundamental piece of reclaiming the web as a place of joy. It's alienating, disempowering, and incredibly lonely to be surrounded by countless people without feeling true connection with most of them (or worse, feeling real danger).

Software Ownership and Collaboration

As I worked with niche communities "software ownership" also became increasingly important to me: if we cannot expect mainstream tech companies to cater to communities at the margins, it follows that these communities must be able to build and shape their own software themselves.

Plenty of people have already discussed how this challenge goes beyond the tech. Among many, "collaboration" is another sticking point for me: effective collaboration requires trust and psychological safety, both of which are in short supply these days (community helps here too, but it's still hard).

Education (Technical and Beyond)

As I worked more and more with volunteers and other collaborators, however, another important piece of the puzzle showed itself: the dire state of educational material for non-professional web developers. How can people change the web if they cannot learn how to *build* the web?

(And yes, learning HTML and CSS is absolutely important and REAL web development. But to collaborate on modern software you need so much more. Even further, people *yearn* for more, and struggle to find it. They want that power, and we should give it to them.)

Once again, technical aspects aren't the only ones that matter. Any large-scale effort needs many skills that society doesn't equip us with. If we want to change how the web looks, we must teach, teach, TEACH! If you've seen me put so much effort into streaming, this is why :)

And obviously, while I don't go into them in this article, open source software and decentralized protocols are core to "this whole thing".

The Future

All of this said, while I've been working on this for a few years, I've struggled to find the support I need to continue this work. To this end, this year I'm doing something I'm not used to: producing content, gaining visibility, and putting my work in front of the eyes of people that want to fight for the future of the web.

This has been a hard choice: producing content is hard and takes energy and focus away from all I've been doing. Still, I'm committed to doing what it takes, and (luckily) content and teaching go hand in hand. But the more each single person helps, the less I need to push for wide reach.

If you want to help (and read the behind the scenes of all I've been working on before everyone else), you can subscribe to my Patreon or to my self-hosted attempt at an alternative.

I deeply believe that in the long term all that we're building will result in self-sustaining projects that will carry this mission forward. After all, I'm building them together with people who understand the needs of the web in a way that no mainstream company can replicate.

Until we get there, every little bit of help (be it monetary support, boosting posts, pitching us to your friends, or kind words of encouragement and support) truly matters.

In exchange, I look forward to sharing more of the knowledge and insights I've accrued with you all :)

And once again, to read or share this post from the original blog, you can find it here.

[mountmortar]

if any of you are ever looking for a place to crosspost your ao3 works, there's always squidgeworld, which is based on the open-source code from the OTW (a.k.a. it looks and acts exactly like ao3, it's just differently colored). in addition to having all the same functionality as ao3, they also have a little more in some places—for example, if you've ever been on ao3 for more than 2 seconds you know that the "&" signifies platonic relationships and "/" signifies slash relationships—squidgeworld has these and also has a new relationship tag called "vs" (literally "versus") for antagonistic relationships, which i think is absolutely hilarious. it's a useful alternative if you're unhappy with ao3 for whatever reason or just want another place for people to read your fics in the event that ao3 goes down!

[qortrola]

Exciting News: Blog 6 Coming Soon!

Hey, gamers and tech enthusiasts! 🎮✨

We are thrilled to announce that Blog 6: "Delving into the Core Components of the QorTrola Gaming Ecosystem: Privacy, Security, and Beyond" will be published later today! 🚀 And available to read on my blog site @

In this blog, we’ll explore:

Privacy and Security: How we ensure your data stays safe.

Incentivizing Fair Play: The innovative reward systems we’re implementing.

DePIN Technology: Bridging Web2 and Web3 gaming for a seamless experience.

Implementation Plan: Our step-by-step journey from concept to reality.

Real-World Applications: Practical use cases that showcase our vision.

Market Insights: Understanding the gaming and blockchain landscape.

Stay tuned for in-depth insights and groundbreaking information on how QorTrola Gaming plans to revolutionize the gaming world with cutting-edge technology and innovative approaches. 🔒💡🌐🎮

Don't miss out! Follow us and be part of this exciting journey. Your feedback and support are invaluable as we move from concept to reality. ⏰

See you soon in Blog 6!

[squidy-tee-png]

I made a Neocities Let's gooooooo!!!

It's uhhhhhhhh not good atm (If you have any advice for using html or css PLEASE hand it over I literally started today-), but I hope and plan on making it better!

[fogsrollingin]

Okay I'm going bonkers with happiness right now. I posted the first chapter of 2 completed fics onto AO3 (last week I realized I'd only posted 1 story to AO3 this year even though I've written a lot - I just languished as I got closer to the end of them), and linked back to my neocities where the full fic was posted AND PEOPLE ARE GOING THERE! And reading it! And giving me kudos and comments on my fic on my website. One person just gave me kudos, not extra kudos, and I am like so delirious with happiness they even got to my website, thought it was good enough to stay on my website and finish reading the fic, and give me a lil checkmark for kudos 🥰🥰🥰

Starting 2024 out RIGHT!!!

Anywhere here's the fics and their links if anyone else is interested in overjoying me

[nadreck]

The Soul of the Web

The Soul of the Web

Over at The Atlantic, Kaitlyn Tiffany has an article on The Battle for the Soul of the Web – a headline that may sound a little dramatic, but is touching on some important topics. The article touches on a few different topics, but a central one is about the decentralized web (DWeb), and where that both intersects and contrasts with the Web3 space. It’s an interesting topic that is worth a deeper…

[doehyde]

in light of recent tumblr changes

if you're sick of staff constantly rolling out user-unfriendly changes and you're desperate to find somewhere else to hang out that isn't the other shitty corporate social media platforms we're offered, please learn HTML and CSS. i promise it really isn't that hard; it takes practice and dedication just as anything else does, but it is so rewarding to have your own personal, customizable space on the internet. you can literally do whatever you want with your site once you make it. want to make a shrine dedicated to your favorite fictional characters? a diary for your daily occurrences? a digital grimoire? maybe reviews of your favorite movies, books, or games? you can do ALL of those things and more. the possibilities are literally endless, all you have to do is try.

below are some resources i've been collecting. i'll update this post as frequently as i can.

where to learn HTML and CSS:

HTML for absolute beginners

MDN CSS basics / HTML basics

W3schools

here are some website hosts:

teacake

neocities

github

some text-based editors:

brackets

sublime

notepad++

visualcode

google alternatives:

search.marginalia.nu

wiby.me

other cool platforms:

livejournal / dreamwidth

substack

multiverse.plus

fc2 blog / fc2 site

misc links:

let's decentralize

internet hiker's log

anipike

nightfall.city

sundaysites.cafe

yami-ichi.biz

tilde.town