Over the last year, as Bluesky got more popular, conversations about whether Bluesky and ATProto are really ‘decentralised’ have gotten more “popular” as well. These conversations ranged from high-quality, productive back-and-forth articles to people just saying a lot of dumb stuff on the internet (shocker, I know). As time went on, this discourse has grown more vicious and vicious however. As more governments attempt to control access to the internet, the conversations around discourse have gotten more intense as well.
Last week the Social Web Community Incubator Group (SWICG) had a meeting, and out of that meeting, independent social web developer Emelia Smith wrote and published a statement on ActivityPub and AT Protocol Discourse afterwards. This statement got merged in the repository of the SWICG, with the approval of the SWICG co-director. The statement called for “cooling the temperature of discussions and a reminder to be respectful of each other and the huge amount of work everyone is putting in to build a better open social web”, and got a significant number of signings for from people active within the open social web. ActivityPub co-author Evan Prodromou disagreed with the purpose of the statement, arguing against Bluesky on dubious interpretations of the licensing of ATProto, and got the SWICG to unpublish the statement based on procedural reasons. Prodromou is currently bikeshedding the minutiae of the open letter as it follows formal proceedings to get potentially get merged back in again.
The chain of events regarding an open letter that calls for respect and collaboration across the open social web is fairly indicative of the state of collaboration on the open social web more broadly: There is a large group of people who are actively moving the space forward, and who have signed the open letter that calls for mutual respect and working together for a better open social web. The number of people who voiced objections and concerns is minimal, but by focusing on procedural reasons it creates a greater level of discord within the community of people that moves the open social web forward than there actually is.
I’m signing the open letter wiI have some separate thoughts regarding discourse, decentralisation and why I think this space matters.
I think it’s worth going back to the basics on this again, and talk about why I care about the open social web, the fediverse, and the ATmosphere. Social media has rapidly become load-bearing infrastructure of how our societies operate nowadays. They fulfil a variety of roles, but one aspect that I think is both underrated and highly important is that they function as sense-making tools. News comes through us shaped through the lenses of social media and its algorithms, which makes control over social media and its algorithms extraordinarily powerful. Henry Farrell writes about this in an excellent blog post, with some quotes:
- “the technologies through which we see the public shape how we understand it, […] I believe Twitter/X, Facebook, and other social media services are just such technologies for shaping publics. Many of the problems that we are going to face over the next many years will stem from publics that have been deranged and distorted by social media”
- “The collective perspectives that emerge from social media – our understanding of what the public is and wants – are similarly shaped by algorithms that select on some aspects of the public, while sidelining others.”
- “The resulting problems are not primarily problems of disinformation, though disinformation plays some role. They are the problems you get when large swathes of the public sphere are exclusively owned by wannabe God-Emperors. Elon Musk owns X/Twitter outright. Mark Zuckerberg controls Meta through a system in which he is CEO, chairman and effective majority owner, all at the same time. What purports to be a collective phenomena; the ‘voice of the people;’ is actually in private hands; is, to a very great extent shaped by two extremely powerful individuals.”
This is fundamentally why I care about the open social web. The tools we use in our societies to make sense of the world are in the hands of a few fascist oligarchs, and it turns out that this has pretty bad consequences. The open social web is a way to counter this all. All this is to say, I’m not interested in ‘decentralisation’ in itself as a goal. I’m interesting in building an ethical internet, where the tools we use as a society for sense-making are not captured by oligarchs.
The discourse around decentralisation has elevated a form of network architecture that facilitates and contributes to a healthier social internet into a goal into itself. What fundamentally matters most is that communities can own and control their own places on the internet. Blacksky provides a clear example of this: That Black people can build their own social place on the internet, where the community can set their own rules, have their own moderation, and their own methods for governance is incredibly meaningful in itself, and an example for what self-governing communities can look like on the open social web.
That Blacksky used ATProto to build their own community platform indicates the value of the protocol in contributing towards a more ethical internet. Whether you want to call the process by which this happened ‘decentralisation’ is secondary. I think ‘decentralisation’ is a good description for how Blacksky and Bluesky exist independently on the same protocol while being interoperable, but if someone disagrees with that, so be it. What counts exactly as ‘decentralisation’ is not a particularly interesting question to me, that the Black community now has their own platform they have ownership and control over is what matters.
The protocols and tools we build today aren’t ends in themselves, instead they are simply infrastructure for communities to negotiate their own (connected) place on the open social web. Blacksky proves that communities can build alternatives when given the technical foundations. The question is not whether a protocol meets some standard of decentralisation, but whether it facilitates and enables communities to create their own places.
Over the last decade of so, a group of volunteers, activists and developers have worked together to build an independent social network, the fediverse. Powered by ActivityPub, this network is effectively a network-of-networks. Tens of thousands of people operate servers, which often form their own social network in themselves, which all connect with each other in some manner to form this fediverse super-network. This work has been done without any major funding sources, depending largely on volunteer effort who spend their time working on this because they believed this mattered.
The reason I’m stating this explicitly is because the discourse around ActivityPub and ATProto felt to me to have an undercurrent of resentment. It feels to me that there is a group of people within the fediverse who feel that the rise and popularity of Bluesky dismisses the accomplishments of ActivityPub and the fediverse. That it minimises and overlooks what had already been built. I don’t think these emotions are particularly conductive to constructive conversations, but I can see where the emotions come from.
I think that the fediverse got where it is today is one of the major accomplishments of the internet of the past decade, and an incredible project that speaks to the drive and ingenuity of people who want to build an independent social internet. It’s worth pausing for a second in all this discourse to say that the fediverse is in fact a major accomplishment that is incredibly hard to pull off. People can argue about issues they have with the fediverse and ActivityPub all they want, but at the end of the day there are exceedingly few collaborative digital projects of this scale, who have gotten this far with such a low budget. That makes the fediverse special to me.
Both the physical and the digital world are rapidly changing, in ways that meaningfully impacts the open social networks. In a post where she signs the open letter, ActivityPub co-author Christine Lemmer-Webber summarises the changing world well:
“This is actually a really important time for that message to come across, because our communities do both face major threats which I believe we are ideologically aligned in wanting to face:
- We are facing a large number of laws which appear well-intentioned and aimed to try to take on tech gatekeepers, but unintentionally build regulatory moats that allow only gatekeepers to participate, and which threaten user freedom at large.
- The rise of techno-fascism and omnisurveillance affects all users. Neither ATProto nor ActivityPub, at present, are built in such a way that they can provide the levels of protections necessary to respond to the needs of activists and community members against nation-state level threats.
These are our existential threats, not each other. And we need to figure out how to work together.”
These existential threads and a rapidly changing world also requires updating our understanding of what it means to build a resilient open social networks that can handle these threats. Discourse that focuses on whether a network is ‘decentralised’ or not is too theoretical, and placed too far outside of the current threats.
Age verification laws of social media applies to the open social networks as much as to the Big Tech platforms. They pose serious legal questions for people who operate social media platforms in the affected jurisdictions. The number of jurisdictions and countries who are considering or implementing such systems is rapidly expanding, making it clear that this concern cannot just be ignored. Some countries are taking even more heavy-handed approaches to social media censorship. The recent actions by the Nepali government shows that governments are clear indication that spreading people out over thousands of servers might not provide enough defence against a government determined to shut social media down. All the while Apple and Google maintain near full global control over the apps we can install on our phone. While their CEOs are cozying up to fascism, they have a powerful control mechanism to shut down access to the distribution of social media apps, the main way to access the open social web.
The threats that the new open social networks face here are real, and there are no simple answers that apply to everyone in every situation. Figuring out how to handle these threats requires collaboration, and an approach that goes beyond “is this decentralised” or not.
Finally, I’m proud to say that I can count so many incredible people across the open social web as my friend. There are so many amazing people in this space who are using their talents to build a better internet, and that brings me great joy.
