Egregoros

@evan @silverpill
>1. Fediverse sustainability. What are the economic, psychological and emotional pressures on instance operators and other infrastructure providers? How can we support them?
import https://blog.freespeechextremist.com/blog/fse-vs-fbi.html

>2. Creator economy. What social, organizational, and technical infrastructure do content creators depend on? What are we missing on the Fediverse?
If you can figure out how to do money transfers in a way that isn't a massive doxxfest and also doesn't constantly get shat on by investors, bankers, governments, etc., you'll probably make a few million from people thanking you for freeing them from that bullshit.
(Hint: BMT Micro is about as close as we'll ever get.)

>3. Cooperatives. social.coop, cosocial.ca and data.coop are all great examples of coops on the fediverse. Does this democratic and participative corporate structure provide an advantage for the Fediverse?
The whole point of decentralisation is that everybody is effectively free to moderate themselves: They choose an instance that they like the moderation of, if such doesn't exist, they create it. So, no, it's good for an arena game and that's about it. (I've toyed with the idea of writing a bot that's capable of parsing rules to some extent that can be set as the head of an instance where people try to manipulate each other into voting for rules that will get themselves banned, but for it to be fun I think you have to allow sufficiently arbitrary rules that a bot would never be capable of enforcing them.)

>4. Web Monetization. Many Fediverse projects have implemented this API. We'll be identifying two more multimedia projects and helping them use the protocol.
ur an fgt, and worse, a mastodonger

Replies

Replying to @Zergling_man@sacred.harpy.faith

pistolero

@Zergling_man @evan @silverpill I was gonna say, like, the inciting incident to that post was the thing that distressed me the most, aside from the machine that used to explode on a regular basis.

> a mastodonger

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Replying to @p@fsebugoutzone.org

Phantasm

@p @evan @silverpill @Zergling_man I think the takeaway from this thread is that only silverpill, me, mia, mirq and dav1d federate to his little coop instance. Everyone else in this thread is defederated by them.

An author of ActivityPub living on one of the most walled of instances I've seen.

Replying to @phnt@fluffytail.org

pistolero

@phnt @Zergling_man @evan @silverpill Well, I don't think you're gonna stay federated with him for long if you keep saying terrible things like "Please don't untag".

On the other hand, it may involve a disability: he had to split up a 4-item list into two posts because of his character limit.
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Replying to @p@fsebugoutzone.org

Phantasm

@p @evan @silverpill @Zergling_man At this point I don't care if he nukes my instance. I wanted to discuss why most of the grant is counterproductive to the network and that's impossible now, because he blocked me. He's a member of "trust and safety" on that instance, so it's possible that he will nuke it.

All I wanted was to point out the counterproductive nature of half the points the grant is funding, talk about and maybe convince him to change his mind on some of it. And we ended up here. Honestly expected better from someone who has been here since GS days.

Replying to @phnt@fluffytail.org

pistolero

@phnt @Zergling_man @evan @silverpill

> I wanted to discuss why most of the grant is counterproductive to the network and that's impossible now

I think it was impossible before. Dude has the same reek that the Newsmast Foundation has.

Replying to @phnt@fluffytail.org

Beer Engineer

@phnt @evan @p @silverpill @Zergling_man In a sense I feel like even if this development actually has any teeth it's not going to be a big consequence in the long run: if they're talking about the next evolution of fedi, then what a committee-steered project with a budget of $200K can half ass in a few years, some hacker with a budget of cup noodles and a vision can whip up in a few months and likely actually achieve its goals. The right kind of software (stares at p) I think would basically make their approach obsolete overnight and actually achieve whatever "sustainability" they're talking about; they just have their head so deep in the sand they can't formulate any part of it.

Replying to @sicp@freebeerextremist.com

Phantasm

@sicp @evan @p @silverpill @Zergling_man See my previous post: https://fluffytail.org/objects/030aff68-caf7-4da0-b7d4-f105505226a3

I think it is counterproductive to try to create yet another third protocol instead of trying to fix an already heavily established and more or less proven to work one. The reinvent the wheel mindset of, oops this failed; we have to reinvent it; is a dangerous one.

Replying to @phnt@fluffytail.org

Beer Engineer

@phnt @evan @p @silverpill @Zergling_man Ah yeah thanks. I don't think it'd be out of style for them to come out one day and say "Here's ActivityPub 2, it isn't compatible in any meaningful way with ActivityPub 1 which we're dropping now, so Migrate or Die" and I wouldn't really shed a tear if every Mastodon instance dissapeared from the timeline tomorrow, but in a sense I feel like it goes both ways: trying to "fix" an existing protocol is usually a fools errand, while if someone makes it worse but still compatible you can just ignore the junk. But if a protocol is suboptimal enough that a whole class of engineering problems have to be focused on the protocol itself instead of the engines that send it around, working from a clean slate isn't so bad.

Replying to @sicp@freebeerextremist.com

Beer Engineer

@phnt @Zergling_man @evan @p @silverpill > trying to "fix" an existing protocol is usually a fools errand,
Maybe not 'usually' but sometimes; if someone tried to pull the IPv6 of fedi it might be successful but hardly an overnight change.
> But if a protocol is suboptimal enough that a whole class of engineering problems have to be focused on the protocol itself instead of the engines that send it around, working from a clean slate isn't so bad.
Also I don't want to imply that I think they would have the foresight to consider this.

Replying to @sicp@freebeerextremist.com

Phantasm

@sicp @evan @p @silverpill @Zergling_man There isn't that much to fix in the protocol. Only the specification needs serious fixes, because it doesn't reflect reality now. In other words it is way too vague and unhelpful. So far from what I look at, FEPs are mostly just that. Documenting what already exists in a series of documents that can be referred later and possibly made into an "ActivityPub 2" later.

Replying to @sicp@freebeerextremist.com

Zergling_man - fedicon 2026 @ C109

@sicp @silverpill @p @phnt @evan >IPv6
Man, my ISP gives me a 12-hour lease on my prefix. I am not asking for that, but that's what I get. (If I am asking for a particular duration it's like a week minimum.)
I don't know if my router is supposed to auto-renew it when it expires, but it doesn't, so I have a fucking cron job to restart the interface twice a day and now my ipv6 works flawlessly(?)

We literally just wanted ipv4 with more address space and no NAT faggotry, how did it end up like this

Replying to @Zergling_man@sacred.harpy.faith

Beer Engineer

@Zergling_man @evan @phnt @p @silverpill My ISP doesn't even offer IPv6 so I've never had a chance to play with it. I was just using it as a placeholder term for "incompatible successor protocol with overblown goals compared to the original".

> We literally just wanted ipv4 with more address space and no NAT faggotry, how did it end up like this
There's more money to be made prolonging the problem than delivering the solution. I think a plausible conspiracy theory is that IPv6 was actually designed so nobody would want to adopt it, even down to the cosmetic details: an IPv4 address is perfectly readable, right? It's just four numbers-- you can fit it into your head. An IPv6 address is all kinds of shit: I don't even really get how they work.

Replying to @sicp@freebeerextremist.com

Zergling_man - fedicon 2026 @ C109

@menherahair@eientei.org remote

@sicp @silverpill @p @phnt @evan On average, an ipv6 address isn't much worse than an ipv4 address.
eg. I have 117.53.128.146 vs 2407:5400:1100:9200::202. You basically need to pay attention to all of it either way. If I used dead:beef instead of :202, it'd be pretty close.
In a local situation where you only tend to care about the last byte, again, much the same, you only care about what follows ::.

I believe you entirely in that they deliberately tried to make it unreadable, but I think they failed at it.

Replying to @Zergling_man@sacred.harpy.faith

menherahair

@Zergling_man @evan @phnt @sicp @p @silverpill
>I believe you entirely in that they deliberately tried to make it unreadable, but I think they failed at it.
I got you fam https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8369

Replying to @menherahair@eientei.org

Zergling_man - fedicon 2026 @ C109

@josemanuel@qoto.org remote

@menherahair @silverpill @p @sicp @phnt @evan How is it that the only readable RFCs are all joke documents

Replying to @phnt@fluffytail.org

josemanuel

@phnt Personally, I find the reinvent-the-wheel mindset very healthy. It's literally how we got here, how evolution works, but that was not what I wanted to say.

What I wanted to say was this: we are using a protocol that, sooner or later, will get coopted, and the big players will force everybody else to adopt whatever they come up with; so maybe we should start studying the protocol as it is now, find ways to improve on it (even if that means a complete reinvention) and make it capitalism-proof. And we better do it now that when AP becomes AP+Crypto or AP+Meta.

@evan @sicp @p @silverpill @Zergling_man

Replying to @josemanuel@qoto.org

Phantasm

@josemanuel @evan @sicp @p @silverpill @Zergling_man Reinventing the wheel is not how we got here. ActivityPub is very similar to semantics to Ostatus/StatusNet. It's very similar except XML got switched for JSON(-LD) and some semantics changed.

It is unhealthy to reinvent a protocol that has hundreds of thousands of users and thousands of instances depending on it. The ActivityPub specification is well understood and since it's an open protocol, you can't really force it on anybody. There are tens of individual implementations of the protocol, which would need to be rewritten, sometimes from scratch, to support the new protocol. It simply does not make sense. Nostr tried to reinvent the wheel and failed to get traction so far. (Mostly because nothing interesting happens there and it has a serious spam issue.)

If you fear that Meta or whoever decides to takeover the specification and force it on everybody via Mastodon, Mastodon is loosing ground to Bluesky in terms of users even though Bsky is only something like a year out to the public. Mastodon does not have that much leverage anymore where they can shape the network to their own liking.

Worst I think can happen is that some stupid backwards-incompatible change happens, so existing servers will have to support both representations of something for the foreseeable future.

Replying to @josemanuel@qoto.org

pistolero

@josemanuel@qoto.org remote

@josemanuel @phnt @evan @sicp @silverpill @Zergling_man

> capitalism-proof

Replying to @p@fsebugoutzone.org

josemanuel

Do you prefer these corpo motherfuckers dictating the terms of what is rightfully ours, @p? Ancap is a contradiction in terms.

@evan @phnt @sicp @silverpill @Zergling_man

Replying to @josemanuel@qoto.org

pistolero

@josemanuel @evan @phnt @sicp @silverpill @Zergling_man

> Do you prefer these corpo motherfuckers dictating the terms of what is rightfully ours

The mistake is the dichotomy: the problem isn't the commercial activity, it's the voluntary loss of agency and the injection of politics. Most of the people voting "yes please decide for me" are "anti-capitalists" to begin with.

"It's yours if you use it."

Whose is it if you don't? Conflating corporatist dingii with capitalism introduces a divisive false dichotomy. "Either you think these guys should be the ones to determine the future of the protocol or you oppose capitalism" is kind of absurd, isn't it?

Replying to @p@fsebugoutzone.org

Dr ins0mniak M.D. OB/GYN

@p @evan @phnt @sicp @silverpill @josemanuel @Zergling_man

Replying to @ins0mniak@bigmilkers.beer

pistolero

@ins0mniak @Zergling_man @evan @josemanuel @phnt @sicp @silverpill
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Replying to @p@fsebugoutzone.org

Dr ins0mniak M.D. OB/GYN

@p @evan @phnt @sicp @silverpill @josemanuel @Zergling_man

Replying to @ins0mniak@bigmilkers.beer

pistolero

@mrsaturday@shitposter.world remote

@ins0mniak @Zergling_man @evan @josemanuel @phnt @sicp @silverpill
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Replying to @p@fsebugoutzone.org

The Wizard of Ounce

@p @ins0mniak @evan @phnt @sicp @silverpill @josemanuel @Zergling_man

"The catalytic converters are free. You can take them home. I have 54 dead school busses at the storage yard down the street"

Replying to @mrsaturday@shitposter.world

Beer Engineer

@awl@shitposter.world remote

@mrsaturday @ins0mniak @evan @phnt @p @silverpill @josemanuel @Zergling_man
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Replying to @mrsaturday@shitposter.world

Amawlek

@mrsaturday legit my days in Minneapolis @p @Zergling_man @evan @ins0mniak @josemanuel @phnt @sicp @silverpill

Replying to @mrsaturday@shitposter.world

pistolero

@mrsaturday @Zergling_man @evan @ins0mniak @josemanuel @phnt @sicp @silverpill The elites don't want you to know this!

Replying to @p@fsebugoutzone.org

Dr ins0mniak M.D. OB/GYN

@bonifartius@noauthority.social remote

@p @evan @phnt @sicp @silverpill @josemanuel @Zergling_man

Replying to @ins0mniak@bigmilkers.beer

🌈ᚩ🌈

@ins0mniak @sicp @evan @josemanuel @silverpill @p @phnt @Zergling_man

Replying to @bonifartius@noauthority.social

pistolero

@bonifartius @ins0mniak @sicp @evan @josemanuel @silverpill @phnt @Zergling_man
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Replying to @p@fsebugoutzone.org

Dr ins0mniak M.D. OB/GYN

@p @evan @phnt @sicp @silverpill @bonifartius @josemanuel @Zergling_man ever go to the dmv? Thats literally what the entire federal government is like

Replying to @ins0mniak@bigmilkers.beer

pistolero

@fluffy@fsebugoutzone.org remote

@ins0mniak @Zergling_man @bonifartius @evan @josemanuel @phnt @sicp @silverpill

> ever go to the dmv?

If purgatory existed, I feel like that would be it.

> Thats literally what the entire federal government is like

And the state government in most states.
delegation_music--the_house_party_mixtape,_vol._i--06_black_highlighters_freestyle.mp3

Replying to @p@fsebugoutzone.org

touch fluffy tail (Heroic)

@p @ins0mniak @Zergling_man @bonifartius @evan @josemanuel @phnt @sicp @silverpill

public school is just DMV but you have to be there for 12 years

Replying to @sicp@freebeerextremist.com

pistolero

@sicp @phnt @Zergling_man @evan @silverpill Yeah, I'm not exactly worried about the guy. They aren't really against centralization. I took the survey they gave last year and the questions ranged from "completely irrelevant" to "insulting"; the main problem was that they were looking for a conclusion and the survey assumed the conclusion. That is, the survey existed to validate the thing they wanted to push. It was stuff like "Do you suffer mental health problems because of unmoderated content?" and "Would an automated blocking system help you block better?" and I was all the way in the "fuck these guys with a rake" territory by the time I got to the end. This "but people *love* ~*~cOnTeNt~*~" thing he's doing today is new and I don't think I have ever heard the words "If you don't like creator content" but the phrase "creator content" makes me involuntarily reach for the nearest firearm.

This is ~*~cOnTeNt~*~. It was created by a creator. A creator created this creator content. Don't you like creator content?

I eat psyop and shit psyop.

Everything can be content if you're sociopathic enough.

I only like content from content creators. I like creator content.

Creator content.

:elliotfuriou:

ALLOW ME TO MAKE A FEW POINTS

> (stares at p)

I'm workin' on it.

Replying to @p@fsebugoutzone.org

Phantasm

@p @evan @sicp @silverpill @Zergling_man

>survey

Right, I forgot about that. Also the fact that they begged for $100K USD last year and now are partners in some fedi corpo foundation is interesting.

https://about.iftas.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Fediverse-Trust-Safety-Needs-Assessment-Report-2024.pdf
https://wedistribute.org/2025/02/iftas-funding-crisis/
https://about.iftas.org/2025/03/03/iftas-service-shutdowns/

>CoNtEnT

I'm not really worried about that at all. Mastodon is already full of spam and bots, so that won't change much. But the 4-item list had very "corpospeak" vibes nonetheless.

What I'm more worried about is the centralization of moderation, aka IFTAS, gaining more traction with the help of funding and various new-ish weird projects like Newmast, Flipboard, the now dead Awakari (remember that aggressive scraper?) and similar. A centralized moderation platform, even just a blocklist aggregator like IFTAS so far, are prime targets for a slippery slope of government interference with Fedi. It gives them a very juicy excuse to effectively censor or outright ban Fedi, if you don't implement some kind of automod, like IFTAS is already making. Essentially killing Fedi by making non-automodded social media illegal (mandating automod to be more precise), which all platforms except Fedi/Nostr would effectively pass.

They are basically making a tool that could endanger the network without realizing it. Will it ever happen? Who knows, but it is certainly possible when you look at boomers trying to ban use of Github without an ID in Australia, because they thought it was a social media.

Replying to @phnt@fluffytail.org

Phantasm

@p @Zergling_man @evan @sicp @silverpill Also IFTAS requires you to log in to their site with an admin account to manage the tool that auto-defederates instances, so it is trivial to turn it into an automated messages scanner that deletes messages at will. It already has the necessary access.

Replying to @phnt@fluffytail.org

pistolero

@phnt @Zergling_man @evan @sicp @silverpill

> Right, I forgot about that.

I might have actually gotten that from you. I wish I'd kept the questions around.

> the fact that they begged for $100K USD last year and now are partners in some fedi corpo foundation is interesting

Yeah, same smell as Channels/NewsMast (who bought indieweb.social).

> Mastodon is already full of spam and bots

The point I would have made if the missing "s" hadn't completely ruined the comedic potential was more that the guy speaks a very foreign language with very different underlying assumptions.

> Awakari (remember that aggressive scraper?)

Which aggressive scraper? Please feel free to link-dump.

> Essentially killing Fedi by making non-automodded social media illegal (mandating automod to be more precise),

Yeah, and flip a coin whether they beat the "but child pornography!" drum or the "but right-wing extremism!" drum. (Those two bogeymen do some pretty heavy lifting nowadays.) They seem to be using both.

Luckily, there's no CP or extremism on any of these heavily modded mastodong instances.

> boomers trying to ban use of Github without an ID in Australia, because they thought it was a social media.

Goddammit. And you know, Wisconsin was mulling a statewide VPN ban because of the anti-porn law, right?

Replying to @p@fsebugoutzone.org

Phantasm

@p @evan @sicp @silverpill @Zergling_man
>Which aggressive scraper? Please feel free to link-dump.
I meant Awakari. They operated a large follow bot, so technically not a scraper since they did it the correct AP way. But it was pretty aggressive in terms of that it would follow large swaths of people completely randomly in a very noisy way. There also was according to my federated users list an Awakari account on Flipboard so they may be related?

It was supposed to be something similar to Flipboard where scraped content was put into "interest groups" you could follow or something like that.

https://fluffytail.org/objects/9b00f882-76b8-4e56-897b-4955b61e3795

Replying to @phnt@fluffytail.org

pistolero

@phnt @Zergling_man @evan @sicp @silverpill

> I meant Awakari.

Yeah, just an oblique remark that there are so many.

> They operated a large follow bot
> https://fluffytail.org/objects/9b00f882-76b8-4e56-897b-4955b61e3795

Right, yeah, I remember this one.

> It was supposed to be something similar to Flipboard where scraped content was put into "interest groups" you could follow or something like that.

And Newsmast, though Newsmast claims to curate (though I found out about Newsmast after deploying https://git.freespeechextremist.com/gitweb/?p=fse;a=blob;f=lib/site/mrf/shut_yr_mouth_about_them_politics.ex;h=2d861996b79deb2a1df69f59fa2d18a0472ff966;hb=HEAD , which demonstrated that there is definitely zero curation being done, because a handful of their bots would repost everything coming out of FSE.

Replying to @phnt@fluffytail.org

Zergling_man - fedicon 2026 @ C109

@fluffy@fsebugoutzone.org remote

@phnt @silverpill @p @sicp @evan >boomers trying to ban use of Github without an ID in Australia, because they thought it was a social media.
accidentally based

Replying to @p@fsebugoutzone.org

touch fluffy tail (Heroic)

@p @phnt @Zergling_man @evan @silverpill
>he had to split up a 4-item list into two posts because of his character limit.
out of curiosity, why wouldn't you simply increase your character limit?
if it's like x/twitter, where your character limit is increased if you pay for a premium subscription, shouldn't he have that as a serious guy? is there some angle here where he's a free-tier user intentionally...?
otherwise, isn't mastodon free software? can't he just make the (presumably simple) modification to increase it? it's probably faster to increase the limit than to split up posts if you're going to split them more than a couple times. or maybe, the masto servers truncate posts past the character limit when serving them, so even if he increases on his server, others won't see the longer posts, they are truncated.

just making guesses, the behavior is surprising to me

Replying to @fluffy@fsebugoutzone.org

Phantasm