Egregoros

Ripple/XRP (a cryptocurrency company) just granted 200k USD to Social Web Foundation, "...to research sustainable revenue and operating models for digital publishers and community-run platforms":

https://interledger.org/news/interledger-foundation-awards-200000-social-web-foundation-support-decentralized-social-media

This means they will be able to influence the development of the ActivityPub specification at W3C.

For those who don't know: Interledger, WebMonetization and OpenPayments are basically the same thing, these projects were created by Ripple ~10 years ago in order to insert their cryptocurrency and related payment services into web standards. These projects are sometimes presented as independent, but this is a lie, they are not (not in 2019, not in 2025).

Needless to say, Ripple itself is a borderline scam: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2019/03/01/is-ripple-a-scam/. It's not even a cryptocurrency really, their infrastructure is completely centralized and no one in cryptocurrency space takes them seriously. But they have a lot of money to bribe people, so I am sure that we will hear more about their adventures soon.

RE: https://socialwebfoundation.org/?p=99982

@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

@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