How the Fediverse Could Save Democracy

& Why Developers Hold the Key

Barry S. Stahl

Solution Architect & Developer

@bsstahl@cognitiveinheritance.com

https://CognitiveInheritance.com

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, Leonard Susskind, Christiaan Huygens

Favorite Mathematicians

1. Ada Lovelace
2. Alan Turing
3. Tim Berners-Lee
4. Isaac Newton
5. Emmy Noether
6. Johannes Kepler
7. René Descartes
8. George Boole
9. Carl Friedrich Gauss
10. Grace Hopper

Other notables: Blaise Pascal, Daphne Koller, Grady Booch, Evelyn Berezin, Pascal Van Hentenryck

• Berners-Lee imagined a read-write commons

  • Free expression, creativity, and connection
  • Share ideas instead of renting attention

• CERN gifted it the world in 1993

  • Open, universal, public infrastructure

• We let it be rebuilt as walled-gardens

  • Ads, surveillance, and extraction

Democratic discourse needs deliberation across disagreement

• Attention markets optimize for speed & virality
  • Verification and context lose to engagement
  • Legitimacy depends on shared facts & time to reason
• Centralized rules become de facto governance
  • Corporate actors decide what we see or challenge
  • A private few determine what we can organize around
  • Freedom of speech for them, but not for us
• People are a product, not participants
  • Institutional trust degrades
  • Fragmentation and outrage gain structural advantage
• Incentives are architectural \(\to\) the fix must be architectural.

• Suite of Connected apps
  • Communicate using open W3C standards
    • ActivityPub protocol
    • ActivityStreams data formats
• No centralized or corporate control
  • Many decentralized servers
  • Not at the whim of a "tech-bro"
  • Can't be sold
• "Easy" to change instances
  • Your graph and your content are yours to move
• One account can connect to many services

• Micro-blogging: Mastodon
  • also WriteFreely, Misskey, Pleroma & GoToSocial
• Photoblogging: PixelFed
• Social Network: Friendica
• Link Aggregation: Lemmy
• Video Sharing: PeerTube
• Video Streaming: Owncast
• Audio Sharing: Funkwhale
• Badges: CommunityCredentials
• Other Projects
  • Hubzilla, Kbin, Mobilizon

[Actor] did [Activity] to [Entity]

• W3C Standards

  • ActivityStreams: Objects and vocabulary
  • ActivityPub: API surface and behaviors

• Communication terms

  • Actors
  • Entities
  • Activities

• Examples

  • Ada sold her Rivian R1T pickup truck to Niels
  • René bought 200 shares of MU stock
  • Nikola updated the timeline of project LUMEN with an integration milestone

• Event-native business model
  • Actor \(\to\) activity \(\to\) entity \(=\) events
  • ie: order approved, invoice posted, ticket resolved
• Interoperability by default
  • Standards reduce custom integrations
  • Supports workflows partners \(\to\) vendors \(\to\) agencies
  • Local policy control with shared protocol semantics
  • Swap platforms without rewriting every consumer
• Auditability and traceability
  • AS creates durable, queryable history
  • Can be used for compliance or other review
  • Great fit for regulated or cross-team accountability
• Developer velocity
  • Fast delivery using shared patterns
  • ie: Subscriptions, automation, and notifications
  • Less glue code, more domain logic

• No algorithm

  • No incentive to the extremes

  • No advantage to being evil

• Not corporate controlled

  • No universal policies

  • If your instance changes for the worse-move

  • Lawsuits: still an attack vector

• Less governmental control

  • There will always be an instance...

  • Support direct action

  • Governmental blocks: still a risk

• Key risks
  • Fragmentation
  • Moderation labor burden
  • Legal pressure
  • Coordinated harassment
  • Instance failure
• Guardrails
  • Transparent governance metadata
    • Publish moderation policies
    • Publish governance change logs
  • Incident response and moderation ergonomics
    • Use runbooks & triage tooling
    • Create escalation paths for human moderators
  • Anti-lock-in interop and continuity safety nets
    • Review proposals for lock-in risk
    • Maintain backup/failover plans
    • Maintain migration paths

• 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

• 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
  • Media & Govt channels
  • Predatory activities
  • Bait & Switch
  • Divide & Conquer
  • Adversarial interop

Policy can encourage these things, devs can make them happen

• Power architecture - Allow Real Competition

  • Protocol interoperability
  • Portability semantics

• Civic safety architecture - Designed for Safety

  • Moderation tooling
  • Reporting workflows
  • Federation controls

• Adoption architecture - Available to All

  • Onboarding UX
  • Accessibility
  • Localization

• Interop reliability \(\to\) fewer federation breakages
  • Ship: conformance tests & compatibility dashboards
  • Benefits: users, maintainers, & cross-site communities
• Migration UX \(\to\) lower switching cost
  • Ship: one-click export/import & graph checks
  • Benefits: people leaving bad governance
• Moderation ops \(\to\) safer participation at scale
  • Ship: triage queues & transparent appeals flows
  • Benefits: moderators, underserved groups & admins.
• Discovery quality \(\to\) healthier public conversation
  • Ship: transparent recommendation & default criteria
  • Benefits: newcomers, experts, & underserved voices
• Civic deployment \(\to\) broader democratic adoption
  • Ship: playbooks for municipalities, media & schools
  • Benefits: institutions & those they serve

Pick one lane this month; compounding contributions beat heroic bursts

• App/Product engineers \(\to\) improve onboarding, migration, discovery, and mobile quality
  • Ship one user-friction fix that reduces drop-off in week one
• Infra/SRE \(\to\) improve hosting automation, federation observability, and abuse-resilient scaling
  • Add one reliability or anti-abuse metric with alerting and runbook
• Security engineers \(\to\) harden identity, anti-spam controls, and account recovery capabilities
  • Publish one threat model and mitigation plan
• DX/Docs \(\to\) improve contributor onboarding, SDK examples, and federation debugging guidance
  • Reduce first-contribution time with a tested quick-start path

• Help build-up the platforms
  • Sign up for Mastodon
  • Use it even if it seems limited now
  • Cross-Post if you must
• Encourage Migrations
  • Govt comms must not be corp-controlled
  • Support media joining the Fediverse
  • Push your favorite communities to migrate
• Contribute
  • Submit Code
  • Review Code
  • Documentation
  • External Tools
  • Content Moderation

• The Fediverse offers a path to a more democratic digital world.
• Challenges exist but we have the power to shape its future.
• Engage & contribute to create a digital landscape that aligns with our values.