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 @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.

@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.

@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.

@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.