How the Fediverse Could Save Democracy

& Why it Probably Won't


Barry S. Stahl

Solution Architect & Developer

@bsstahl@cognitiveinheritance.com

https://CognitiveInheritance.com

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Favorite Physicists & Mathematicians

Favorite Physicists

  1. Harold "Hal" Stahl
  2. Carl Sagan
  3. Richard Feynman
  4. Marie Curie
  5. Nikola Tesla
  6. Albert Einstein
  7. Neil Degrasse Tyson
  8. Niels Bohr
  9. Galileo Galilei
  10. Michael Faraday

Other notables: Stephen Hawking, Edwin Hubble

Favorite Mathematicians

  1. Ada Lovelace
  2. Alan Turing
  3. Johannes Kepler
  4. Rene Descartes
  5. Isaac Newton
  6. Emmy Noether
  7. George Boole
  8. Blaise Pascal
  9. Johann Gauss
  10. Grace Hopper

Other notables: Daphne Koller, Grady Booch, Leonardo Fibonacci, Evelyn Berezin, Benoit Mandelbrot

Some OSS Projects I Run

  1. Liquid Victor : Media tracking and aggregation [used to assemble this presentation]
  2. Prehensile Pony-Tail : A static site generator built in c#
  3. TestHelperExtensions : A set of extension methods helpful when building unit tests
  4. Conference Scheduler : A conference schedule optimizer
  5. IntentBot : A microservices framework for creating conversational bots on top of Bot Framework
  6. LiquidNun : Library of abstractions and implementations for loosely-coupled applications
  7. Toastmasters Agenda : A c# library and website for generating agenda's for Toastmasters meetings
  8. ProtoBuf Data Mapper : A c# library for mapping and transforming ProtoBuf messages

http://GiveCamp.org

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The Fediverse

  • Group of Social apps
    • Communicate using the open ActivityPub protocol
  • No centralized control
    • Many decentralized servers
  • No corporate control
    • Not at the whim of a "tech-bro"
  • "Easy" to change instances
    • Your graph and your content are yours to move
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The Utility of ActivityPub

Data streams like "[Actor] did [Activity] to [Entity]"

  • Communication terms

    • Actors
    • Entities
    • Activities
  • Examples

    • This person bought this car
    • This broker bought this stock in this amount for this customer
    • This project manager updated this project timeline with this milestone
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Fediverse Services

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Fediverse Adoption

  • Most "thought-leaders" have a presence
    • Some cross-post, others have migrated completely
    • A tipping-point is coming
  • Tech-heavy at the moment
    • Other domains are hit-or-miss
  • Sanctuary for underserved communities
    • Moderation policies vary by instance
  • Requires some up-front decisions
    • More barriers to entry than corp solutions
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Could Save Democracy

  • No algorithm
    • No incentive to the extremes
    • No advantage to being evil
  • Less corporate control
    • No universal policies
    • If your instance changes for the worse, you can move
    • Lawsuits: still an attack vector
  • Less governmental control
    • There will always be an instance...
    • Support direct action
    • Governmental blocks: still a risk
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...but probably won't

  • Inertia
    • Change is a last-resort
    • Discovery is hard
  • Open-Source is often a hobby
    • Features may deploy slowly
    • Distribution makes changes harder
    • Moderation is time-consuming
  • Active subversion by corps
    • Migration away is intentionally hard
    • Predatory activities
    • Bait & Switch
    • Divide & Conquer
    • Adversarial interop
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Call to Action

  • Help build-up the platforms
  • Contribute OSS
    • Submit Code
    • Review Code
    • Documentation
    • External Tools
    • Moderation
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