Darius Media

[Desiderato Merriwether]

Firstit became technically difficult to maintain my bot projects. Twitter changed their API around a lot, and were bad about communicating the changes, and which features would stay and which would go. That meant that whenever I noticed a change, I suddenly needed to update all eighty of my Twitter bots to get them working again.

I also got a bad taste in my mouth from Twitter supporting kinds of speech that I don't particularly agree with, and I began to feel like putting my toys and art there was just adding value to the network. For a while I felt that the tradeoff was that the art I published there still enriched my life and the lives of my friends. At some point, though, I started to feel like the balance got out of whack, and I could do more good by putting my work on alternate networks and giving people a reason to get off Twitter.

That project was the culmination of my Mozilla Fellowship. I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do for the fellowship going into it, but I did know that I wanted to work on decentralized social media.

So I wanted to write a guide that talked about why someone who isn't primarily a nerd should be interested in decentralized information flow. What does it bring to your life? And not only that, but what does it bring to your life that Twitter and Facebook don't?

That works for some people, obviously. You know, people care about their health and there is a big industry around health advice, so presumably there are people who care about that sort of thing in a tech space as well. But I wanted to imagine a way of having fun on the decentralized web and bringing value to your life in ways that you can't on the centralized web.

What finally pushed me to create my own Mastodon instance was feeling that it was possible to build a special community by incorporating certain moderation features that weren't available on the regular Mastodon project. The most important feature for me was the local-only posting, which allows users to create posts that can only be seen by members of that instance.

Then there are instances that are built around particular fandoms, and that can sometimes work. But I'm more interested in people who already have preexisting social connections to one another. For a group of preexisting friends, it made sense for me to provide an extra layer of security, where only the other people in the group can see my messages.

I like to go back to email as an example over and over, because email is federated. It has been forever. I can have a Gmail account, and you can have a Hotmail account, and I can send you an email because our services speak the same language, even though our accounts are on different servers and may be using entirely different technology. Federated social media is basically the same idea: two servers that speak the same language, and enable people to talk to each other.

That's how posts on the fediverse work too. Friend Camp is connected to something like 6,000 other servers. I haven't audited these 6,000 servers to know if they're safe, nor could I. If my messages go out to any one of those servers, there could be someone opening up private messages and looking at them.

You've crafted a very particular code of conduct for Friend Camp, and you write in the runyourown.social guide that if someone can't disagree with your code of conduct, then it's probably not strong enough. How do you think about moderation?

That version of content moderation, where you are stewarding the norms of a community, is so different than the Big Tech version, which feels like it is mainly about removing terrible videos of people doing terrible things. Is there any way to scale or automate your approach?

In a way, it's like asking if something as personal as sex work could scale. And, in a sense, live-streamers creating a one-to-many relationship is sex work at scale, but it's a very different thing than one-to-one.

There is a narrative that is invoked with 4chan, 8chan, or Reddit, where if you have a community that creates its own rules and is not subject to some centralized moderating force, you can actually end up radicalizing that community. Do you think that there's something to that?

Is that the right policy for Facebook, where they're trying to serve the entire world? I don't know. It's not an obvious call if you want to serve every single person in the world. But if the fifty of us who are active Friend Campers decided that mentioning peanut butter and jelly sandwiches is completely against our values as a community, and we want to defederate with anyone who mentions them, we could do that. We have that ability.

I was just putting out a worst-case scenario for people so they know what they're getting into. But, yeah, I basically go through every single technical feature, every button that you can press, every preference in your profile. And I am there in the future if they ever have any questions about how any of this stuff works.

You can have complicated features that are not super easy to use, as long as there's someone there who can help you through it. I'm that person for Friend Camp. Because I personally know every single person that joins Friend Camp, I also have some idea of what they're interested in, so I tailor it a little bit to each person. If I know someone's really privacy conscious, I'll spend more time going over privacy features with them in more granularity.

The second half of the orientation is really a social orientation. I like to think about running a federated social media server instance as being like the host of a party. If someone shows up to my party who's just moved to town, it's my job to take them around and introduce them to people and say a few words about them, and maybe take specific time to introduce them to individuals who I think that they should meet. Usually what that means is I go on the local timeline and I scroll down, and for everybody who's been actively posting for the last twenty-four hours, I describe in one sentence who every single person is, and go into more detail if I think there's a potential connection there.

I want to make sure we get to talking about the role of open standards. I'm relatively new to decentralized protocols like ActivityPub, Scuttlebutt, and those sorts of things. How do you see those different protocols supporting potential futures that may exist on the social web?

Mostly, though, open standards are a way for me to easily take advantage of stuff that's already out there. It's a way for me as an individual to amplify my time and effort as a developer. I'm about to release an event management project for the fediverse. And one of the cool things about it is that while I built it to be compatible with Mastodon, because I was doing that through the open standard it already kind of works in a bunch of other ActivityPub-based services. It didn't require that much extra effort for me to tweak it to make it work for systems other than Mastodon, and it actually works better in some of these other services than the ones I designed it for.

And one of the beautiful things about federation is that you can have entirely different services talking to each other. So you could have Friend Camp talking to an instance that does Facebook events-type stuff, and you can also be talking to PeerTube, which is a YouTube-type service. There's nothing preventing someone from making a federated app that, on the front end, looks exactly like a text messaging interface that you could use to talk to your grandparents, because most grandparents can send a text message. Now, is anyone doing that? No. My hope is that more people will.

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If you are struggling to make sense of that, consider this. For much of the period when we were forbidden from travelling or engaging in normal everyday activities, would wake up, flip onto WhatsApp and Instagram, login to Zoom and Teams, perhaps while checking out a YouTube video or TikTok feed on another device. In the evenings we might travel somewhere on Amazon Prime or YouTube, listen to stuff on Spotify, play League of Legends, search for a watch or a dress on Watchfinder or Net-a-Porter, or be entertained on Netflix or Apple. We would also use a podcast app to inform and entertain ourselves, maybe while Alexa or Siri read us the headlines from The New York Times.

All of this has left some of the traditional media in a head spin. Which tail is wagging which dog when a magazine employs a writer who then becomes an advocate for a brand she has written about, and creates a following and business worth more than the magazine that employs her?

Far from being a constraint to traditional media, it is or should be an opportunity. We used to be expert intermediaries, reporting on aspects of the world (news, analysis, business, art) to our audiences. Now, as well as curating, we create: bring to life experiences and ecosystems. We make things happen. We also leverage our existing ecosystems in new directions.

LUX readers were previously defined simply by their demographic. But with wealth comes responsibility, increasingly so in this era, and we are both being inspired by and inspiring our readers, partners and ecosystem to not only help create a better life for our readers, but help them do what they would like to do and adjust the direction of elements of the world for the better. Media has a responsibility to lead.

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