Christine Lemmer-Webber - Building a Humane Social Internet

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https://video.fedihost.co/videos/watch/474b5641-db69-4def-96dd-28ed6da89140

Mastodon: @cwebber@social.coop

The co-author of the ActivityPub protocol and co-founder of Spritely Institute, building the next generation of decentralized networked technology, delivers a critique of the Fediverse from one of its co-architects.

The Fediverse’s real strength is participatory structure: any one server can fail and the network keeps running. But it isn’t decentralized enough to survive the threats coming for it, including age-verification laws rooted in anti-queer politics, hardware-level lockdown of what you can run on your own computer, and data-centre concentration that turns information infrastructure into a kill switch. The answer is to push further: content-addressed messaging, peer-to-peer chat with no host to subpoena, and technology built around joy and empowerment rather than defensive compliance.

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Wow, that was a great talk. I liked the bit about the importance of joy to making effective software/platforms.

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FediMTL was amazing! 😁

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He/Them

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OP

Works fine here. Maybe it’s your connection?

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He/Them edited

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Fantastic and inspiring talk.

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He/Him

@squirrel @cwebber

I am actively working on some of these.

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He/Him

@squirrel @cwebber

When phony stark took over Twitter, I foresaw a need for decentralized infrastructure, predicting that the Fediverse was taking on a task that required a huge SRE org to run. This would eventually cause problems.

Resilient decentralized systems is a research interest of mine, and I'd just had some IR&D projects about this kind of thing end, so I started building.

At this point I have the core of an architecture that could grow into the foundation for something.

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He/Him

@squirrel @cwebber

There's still work to be done to prepare this work for use, and to be worked on by people other than me, but it's getting close.

Distributed security through encryption, epidemic - style content addressable storage, and the like aren't there yet, but the foundations for them are.

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As for chat I think simplex ticks a lot of decentralization boxes.

As far as I know, each single person could host their own relying server without much issues.

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