Open Indie

NPR has officially quit Twitter. PBS followed suit. (updated 14. April)

Dear journalists, this is the best opportunity you'll ever get to actively fight back against the attention-hoarding platforms that have been grossly undermining the power of the Fourth Estate for the past two decades.

A true revolution for independent media is available to you as a mere three-step process:

First: Leave Twitter

It should be clear to any journalistic institution of integrity by now that Twitter's leadership is only interested in your patronage insofar as it benefits Twitter-corp, full stop.

The platform is deeply compromised, and you have no control over how and to whom the words you publish there are disseminated. Stop feeding the beast; stop posting.

You don't have to delete your account, nor your tweets. You don't even have to completely stop tweeting. But I urge you to stop using Twitter as your default microblogging/networking application. Try it for a month at least.

Second: Join the fediverse

Facebook, Instagram, Post, Notes... none of these are legitimate alternatives for news syndication in the modern information age. If you take the lazy path of shifting your primary distribution channel from Twitter to yet another black-box platform, it's simply out of the frying pan and into the fiery clutches of yet other monopolist that owns your followship.

If you truly want to call yourselves independent journalists in this day and age, the federated network of instances built on top of the ActivityPub protocol is your only honest outlet as far as social media feeds go. “The medium is the message” is as true as ever, and any medium owned by a technocratic oligarch is in direct opposition to your civic duty as emissaries of truth and understanding. Every additional tweet goes into the record; history will remember your complicity.

The fediverse is collectively owned and operated by thousands of different stakeholders, making it the most independent social network in history.

Most importantly however: the fediverse is a movement, presently engaged in the woefully under-reported fight for an equitable and just internet, and it needs the champions of the fourth power in its corner to stand a chance of winning.

This is no time for editorials and opinion pieces. What we civilians need from you at this time is your attendance at the gathering space. Before you do anything else, show up where the movers are congregating. Then, and only then, should you exercise your voice anew.

Making the move

Migrating to the fediverse is fraught with choices that can lead to paralysis. Here's the one all-important thing you need to know: Once you've made the initial move to any fediverse instance (by default Mastodon), your followship is now and forever truly YOURS. You can take your followers with you elsewhere as you see fit.

It's not a one-click process, but unlike the closed platforms that make every effort to keep your voice and your data locked in, the fediverse and its many nodes is a completely open ecosystem, rapidly evolving in lockstep with its inhabitants.

It takes a while to fully appreciate a social media paradigm that doesn't actively antagonize its tenants; there's less drama and toxicity on the fediverse, but isn't it high time you gave your adrenal glands a rest?

This is the easiest way to get started: Mastodon: A Quick Start Guide for Journalists.

It recommends signing up for newsie.social, which is run by Jeff Brown of https://fourthestate.org/ and https://www.verifiedjournalist.org/ – get verified while you're at it!

There are some other options listed here, but if Newsie is still accepting registrations don't overthink it; Jeff will get you sorted.

Third: Co-create the fediverse

Grow the garden-like town square together with everyone else. You need something? Build it, together with all the other open source developers. You cannot operate as an island. The collective project of the fediverse only succeeds if we work together to grow our common ecosystem.

If you want better infrastructure, connectivity and reach for your craft & trade, it's in your power to realize those betterments. The fediverse is as much yours as anyone else's.

Media agency; see how that feels for a change.

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And that's it. In summary:

1. Resist the urge to tweet
2. Take an hour to put up your fediverse persona
3. Save democracy 🤝

Whether you think of web3 as the advent of peer-to-peer protocols, coin-operated blockchains or autocomplete-AI synthesizers, change is coming.

Yet I find myself unable to race along on the newest ride. Not because of some nostalgic attachment or fear of the unknown; I simply refuse to move on to the next thing until we've finished what we started. Before diving head-first into web3 and AI, I'm gonna take my sweet time settling into web1 and-a-half, i.e. what the nascent web could have been had it not been co-opted by careless tech bros and capital glut.

Digital Wastelands

We talk about inventions like digital social networks as if they're inherently bad designs. Actually the idea of a web-scale address book was and remains great, but the environment it originally grew up in was rotten to the core.

That environment was advertising-driven surveillance states, the subsequent attention economy, and monopolization as standard business practice. You can plant seeds in that ground and watch in amazement as saplings shoot up high in record time, but the resulting produce is an empty husk of a plant, devoid of nutrients.

What has come out of this deeply corrupt, monocultural environment as a foundation for digital flourishing is the enshittified platform; an extractive mono crop that from inception is kept on artificial life support through massive amounts of external energy, incessantly sucked out from its surroundings in parasitical fashion.

Platforms built within these environmental constraints are not designed to produce real value to their users, which to them are expendable units of energy input. Instead they aim to provide so-called free products of novelty and convenience that make users dependent on the platform to the point of chronic addiction, placing them under the platform’s control. And that control knob is slowly but surely turned up to be ever more oppressive as the lock-in dynamics of addiction and network effects compound.

It’s a game of antagonistic domination as opposed to mutualistic service:

Domination game = centrally manipulate users (mind-hack) into co-dependent servitude to the platform.

Mutualism game = collectively manipulate the platform (system-hack) to serve its interdependent tenants.

If you are not paying for the product, you are the product. 1, 2, 3.

Hollow AI

What keeps me up at night when looking at the impending AI revolution is that these tools are growing up in that same corrupt environment, riddled with malicious incentives and inhumane narratives. The supposed alignment problem of AI is in my view directly correlated with the misalignment of growth-obsessed industrialization in a planet that is increasingly inhospitable to dignified human life.

The technical challenges of AI alignment are real, but meaningless in the absence of a societal reckoning to mend the foundations on top of which this profoundly disruptive tech is being built.

Enshittified social networks came awfully close to upending civilized society as we know it. Enshittified AI will be game over.

Rewriting history

Sadly, we can’t travel back in time and stop the trickle-down shit storm of Reagonomics from ever picking up wind. However, we have one last chance to overwrite those dirty specters of the past, undoing the unimaginable damage done in the past half century by extractive robber barons.

This is where the ‘old web’ comes in. Our current moment feels like a unique opportunity to reclaim the foundational web applications of the 2000s that were captured and black-boxed into proprietary packaging before the open web even had a chance to breathe.

Complicit media institutions hailed the monopolists as genius saviors. We should have known better than to trust the hooded man speaking in riddles, however casual-presenting. It took us a while, but we finally see the feudal platform lords for the egotistical man-children they always were.

Feigning humility, the tech-barons would say they were ‘standing on the shoulders of [their fellow] giants’, when in reality their bloodied scaffolding was made entirely on the backs of nameless, uncredited workers. As we delight in calling bullshit on the creators of our rapidly degrading web platforms, it’s high time we call bullshit on their still-erect creations as well.

Every additional minute spent playing their deceitful games is keeping the attention-hoarding monster alive with yet another delicious morsel of your energy. And given just a little more time and sustenance, that ego-of-man meets heartless-machine monstrosity will successfully transform into a demonic creature of such overwhelming power that resistance will be futile.

This is our do-or-die moment; the last of many before it. The preceding big one in modern day memory was the fight to control the narrative of our planet-scale ecological collapse. The ecologists lost that fight to big oil, and millions of human beings have perished in relative silence as a result. The loss of animals and organic life at large is in the many billions.

Reclaim ownership

As the platforms we internet-natives grew up with are becoming boring legacy software and the profiteers avert their attention to the AI boom, now is our once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to recapture the control that was taken away from us.

In the right hands – the hands of the netizens – yesteryear's technologies of social coordination remain as revolutionary as ever. We just never got to experience these tools as magical extensions of humanity. In the current paradigm, the social media platforms strictly use and abuse your attention to amass centralized power and deepen their moats.

Bit by bit the tech was seized from us, and just so the tech shall be reclaimed anew.

Reclaim your mind. Reclaim your identity. Reclaim your contacts. Reclaim your spaces. Reclaim your community. Reclaim your agency.

How? By opening it all up: APIs, clients, protocols and algorithms.

Albert Wenger (author of World after Capital): https://continuations.com/post/172413445510/we-need-mandatory-enduser-apis-for-social-and

For years now I have been writing and speaking about the “Right to be represented by a bot.” We as endusers need to be able to run software on our behalf that interacts with systems such as Facebook. More recently I have phrased this as “Any system with 1 million+ users should by law be required to issue users with personal API keys.”

Why does that make a difference? Because with an API key I can have an intermediary software layer that operates on my behalf. And that layer can connect me with friends and family that are split up across multiple social networks. This would allow for real competition to Facebook to arise. And once there is competition there is a strong check on behavior as a future #DeleteFacebook campaign would be far more impactful.

Cory Doctorow (author of Chokepoint Capitalism): https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

For a really competitive, innovative, dynamic marketplace, you need adversarial interoperability: that’s when you create a new product or service that plugs into the existing ones without the permission of the companies that make them. Think of third-party printer ink, alternative app stores, or independent repair shops that use compatible parts from rival manufacturers to fix your car or your phone or your tractor.

Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure: The Three-Legged Stool: A Manifesto for a Smaller, Denser Internet https://publicinfrastructure.org/2023/03/29/the-three-legged-stool/ https://publicinfrastructure.org/2022/11/09/gobo-2-0-all-your-social-media-in-one-place/

We believe Gobo [a service-agnostic social media client] needs to allow users to:

• Read and post to multiple social networks from one open source client.
• Pick and choose between algorithms for filtering and sorting the posts from all these networks.
• Design (and potentially share) different algorithms for filtering and sorting.
• Use third-party services to assist in filtering and sorting.
• Audit the performance of these different algorithms as well as the third party services.

A lot of this interoperability is becoming enforceable by law in the EU: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/digital-services-act-package

Web platform openness is not some utopian dream: The entirety of the web’s infrastructure is open source. The proprietary apps that have come to control our autonomy are brittle layers of obfuscated code sprinkled on top. There’s no magic trick to those services as we’ve already got commercially viable alternatives for all of them, providing irrefutable proof that the hostile data-prison business practices of the market leaders are utterly unnecessary.

I’ve got my own rudimentary playbook for how I intend to regain control, but there are lots of different ways to play this game. Just don’t play theirs. The new game is a pluriverse of permacultures.

While the hype chasers busy themselves with the next big thing, skating feverishly towards where they think the puck is going, I'm gonna go have a chat with the stadium’s hot dog sellers about the merits of unionization.

The all too common firehose stream has never worked for me. It’s undoubtedly a big reason why I never got properly into Twitter.

I generally don’t go to noisy congregation spots like bars because I find them overwhelming. Too many people talking loudly at each other all at once gives me sensory overload.

(Back when I'd reluctantly go to these places to accommodate my friends' preferences for social arenas, I was well known for my irish exit)

Mastodon – the mainstream ActivityPub implementation – is the same way; algorithmic or chronological sorting makes no difference as long as everyone's speech is mashed together into one mega-aggregate stream of no structure.

I can handle an email inbox, a bulletin-board or an RSS reader, because these feeds usually serve up somewhere between 1-10 updates per day, instead of 100s.

During my few stints of trying to make Twitter work for me, I've encountered multiple people that I wanted to follow, but ultimately didn't because I could tell their feed was too noisy. 'Too noisy' usually meant one of two things: (1) too many posts per day, or (2) posting about a wide assortment of topics – I only wanna keep up with 20%.

That's a shame though, because if Twitter had accommodated better sorting controls, both from the writer's content-push (e.g. require hashtag categorization) and the reader's content-pull (follow a poster's hashtags), I'd follow a lot more people. Ditto for Mastodon et.al.

The existing microblog paradigm seems to work best for two types of people:

• Information hoarders who can justify a large amount of time spent sifting through a massive feed because it translates into niche insights and competitive advantage.
• One-to-many publishers who only use the microblog funnel for outgoing messaging, meaning they don't actually read their inbound feed at all.

For the ActivityPub protocol to become as widespread as email (protocol by specification) and chat (protocol by convention, for now), it needs to provide real utility to the average internet user.

Noisy dinner party

Mastodon is an incremental change, taking the microblog-app archetype from centralized to federated. It’s still the exact same UX paradigm, which is profoundly limited as a tool for sense-making. It’s gonna take a while for the techie community of 10 million to iterate and innovate further until we’ve arrived at the true paradigm shift of a brand new interface for the ActivityPub protocol that appeals to the majority of netizens.

In the blogging paradigm, I could (and did) feasibly follow 500 different blogs. Writing blog posts take time, so if each blogger put out a new post every three weeks that'd be about 20-25 new posts per day. Among those publications there'd still be an abundance of content that didn't always pique my interest, or just a skim-read would suffice to keep up. On average I'd read around 2-5 full articles per day.

The experience was remarkably similar to that of reading a newspaper:

• Finite number of pages
• Long-form by default, with mixed-media dispersed throughout
• Only 5-10% of the paper's content is read in full.

Microblogging on the other hand is like a noisy dinner party that never stops. Its discursive content is non-linear, unstructured and extremely abundant. Following 500 microbloggers who are posting on average several times per day renders my feed completely untenable without the help of a sorting mechanism.

Twitter solves this problem with opaque algorithms. Mastodon opts for chronological sorting, which is earnestly transparent, but punishes curiosity; the more people I follow, the more overwhelming my inbound feed becomes.

Knowledge cultivation vs dissemination

The fediverse of microbloggers' primary objective isn't knowledge cultivation, but rather social bonding and sentiment aggregation.

What's new/trending? What are the most commonly held beliefs? Who shares the same opinions? Which opinions are controversial?

While enduring long-form mediums like blogs and forums excel at creating and refining knowledge, ephemeral short-form mediums like chat and microblogs can more effectively disseminate and reinforce established knowledge.

No strict lines can nor should be drawn between these different modes of communication however. It's not uncommon for a new piece of knowledge to go through the following stages of life, from soft to solid to distributed:

1. New but unstructured knowledge is synthesized over the course of a chat conversation

2. The key knowledge artifact is refined in the form of a blog post

3. The new knowledge is disseminated through microblogs and links aggregators. 🌱🌻💨

With some work, we can make these stages far more seamless, and I believe step 3 in this particular example is currently the least developed.

Slow Feeds

For the likes of me (generally shy & quiet; loud & proud if asked to speak) to functionally participate in the digital conversation of the federated party, three key features are missing in today's microblogging & feed-aggregation clients:

• Follow hashtags
• Bundling content
• Content gardening

Follow hashtags, not people

First and foremost, I'm interested in following topics, not specific people. I'm deeply curious about certain people's feed exactly because they write frequently about a topic that interests me.

If a person who's writing regularly about open source decided to start a farm and consequently began posting mostly about agriculture, I'd be far less interested in their feed as a whole. However, if that same person was still writing occasionally about open source, now with an added ecology-informed perspective, I'd be more excited than ever to keep up with that particular segment of their writings!

It can seem like we have a chicken and egg problem in the widespread adoption of hashtags to properly categorize content on the fediverse, but clients can in fact lead the way quite effectively. As long as there are popular clients that lean heavily into hashtags as a primary means of discovering and displaying content, posters are incentivized to utilize hashtags more (which can even be backfilled by edits), knowing there are clients that prioritize tagged content.

This would be further facilitated by solving the problem of federated search, so that my inbound feed for open source content wouldn't be limited to just the #opensource tag but would also include a variety of related search terms.

I can easily follow 500 people if I'm only following updates pertaining to my specific interests.

Side note: While it might be a controversial opinion, I'm not a fan of inline hashtags as a default way of tagging content. It's just a noisier version of the post-script tagging system we had for blogs. Meta-data should be kept out of the content body unless it's explicitly meant as an outgoing link to a specific feed-aggregate.

Bundles over timelines

Oh how I miss the good old days of digests, when information was expected to be consumed on a daily or even weekly basis, rather than hourly.

While I still want better hashtag-following, I wouldn't need it nearly as much if I could just tell my client to give me a daily/weekly/monthly digest of a person’s posts, based on my frequency preference. Smart clients could even suggest new frequency preferences based on my engagement (or lack thereof) with certain feeds.

I've not seen a lot of examples of this kind of interface in practice. Aside from the mailing list example above, a few others that come to mind are Google Inbox and LindyLearn. Neither perfectly match what I'm describing, but they both play with the concept of information bundling, rather than linear, strictly chronological streams.

Evergreen content gardens

99% of all microblog (and chat) content is ephemeral by design, meant for a specific moment in time. But the 1% that should endure past the 24hr cycle doesn't have good ways to do so in the current paradigm.

Reddit/Lemmy has a simple Top sorting mechanism for viewing highly rated content in the past Day / Week / Month / Year / All Time. This is a great way to surface evergreen knowledge artifacts in places like r/AMA and r/todayilearned. It's also a very helpful way to get oriented in a new space.

The same could be done for hashtags on the fediverse. Treating hashtags as not just timelines of the present moment but also containers of institutional knowledge could lead to all sorts of innovations in knowledge management on the fediverse.

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The vast majority of development effort in the ActivityPub-client space is currently going into various derivatives of the classic microblog paradigm popularized by Twitter. My intention for this post is to gently nudge developers' attention towards a new paradigm that aims to bridge the gap between gossip and sense-making. If you're working on this, let me know!

I'm an uncle of two nieces and one nephew. They will all be citizens on the world-wide-web soon enough.

The boy is starting school this August. He will be getting his hands on a browser and logging on to the internet before long.

His parents (both conscientious teachers) will do their best to keep him restricted to the Kids version of the internet, but this regulation gets harder and harder as both the boy and his local-area social network grow bigger and bigger.

I know the internet well, and frankly I'm somewhat terrified of the thought that this sweet kid is soon gonna occupy this space. It's a wild, dangerous place. Full of wonders, to be sure, but it's becoming increasingly harder to steer away from the bad and only enjoy the good.

The thought of him and his cousins entering this place terrifies me a little bit. On the