The blog has been quiet - partly because my usual beat has lost a bit of space to things that I can not Actually Indicate, and partly because frankly nothing of major interest was going on in the Fediverse. Zuckerberg plans to become an infrastructure company fizzled out due to (or thanks to?) European regulations. Reddit continues its slow descent into an exclusive forum for chatbots talking with each other and finding hooks to plug some advertisement. Bluesky didn’t keep the post-election hockey stick growth, but managed to hold on enough of the userbase and hasn’t completely flamed out.
Even Communick had reached this weird stasis: enough customers to pay the server bills but not enough growth to justify more work on it. After going through one Social Dilemma, two Twitter Diasporas and countless Mastodon and Lemmy instances getting abandoned for insufficient support, maybe it was time to accept that Federated Fetch was not going to happen.
But by the end of last year, something started to change in a way that people could no longer ignore. What was previously seen as Traditional Corporate Greed has become a true concern for a full-on Surveillance State. With Governments in the US and Europe pushing hard for age verification requirements, content moderation mandates, and platform-level accountability laws; centralized platforms are becoming targets themselves. When you concentrate hundreds of millions of users into a single system under a single jurisdiction, you make life easy for the Powers That Be to control you.
And it’s not like there are any innocent actors in this game, either. That’s the deal platforms accepted when they decided that growth was the only metric that mattered. And the companies that gave away control of the communication channel for convenience and optimization are finding out what it means to have no leverage: they’ve watched their reach get algorithmically throttled, their content policies changed without notice, and now they’re watching the platforms themselves become political liabilities.
What then?
Of course, this pressure has caused some movement in the direction of open and federated systems. Communick once again started getting a more constant influx of signups. But no matter how far I extrapolate those growth curves, it’s clear that the vast majority of people are not going to take the initiative to move anywhere. If we want the Fediverse to be universal and a credible threat to the Big Tech platforms, we need to make it interesting for the “cottage industry” that grows on every platform: small businesses looking for a way to reach their customers, content creators who live and die by the size of the audience, other independent developers looking to build a product that serves a niche, etc. These are the people who suffers the most with enshittification and artificial limitations of the platforms, and these will be the first to try any alternative that seems better than the status quo.
These problems will not go away if they leave one corporate-controlled platform and move to another corporate-controlled platform. Leaving Twitter for Bluesky is not a solution. Leaving Facebook for TikTok even less. The only logical response is to stop depending on infrastructure they don’t control. What we need is to bring back the web, a loosely interconnected collection of servers that can withstand individual failures.
Time to ADAPT
One of my many side projects is a website called CareerCupid. It is a website that could be described as “OkCupid for Jobs”. People sign up, answer questions about their values, work styles, needs and wants in a company. The answers of all members are compared against one another and then we give a “matching score” saying how well you would work together.
To bootstrap the network, I wanted it to make it easy to participate even if they never saw the website. So I had the idea of integrating a bot which people could be followed on the Fediverse, and I wanted to give one “actor” for each user that was on the website.
Could I have done that by setting up a Mastodon instance and setting up bot accounts? Yes. Was that what I did? Of course not. CareerCupid is a Django site, so I’ve built my own library that could integrate with it directly. In the process of getting that “cupid bot” interacting with the whole Fediverse, I ended up learning and building enough of ActivityPub and the related set of standards: RDF/Linked Data, Webfinger, Authentication via HTTP message signatures… but above all it helped me understand that all the building blocks that make the “Social Web” are also the building blocks of the Semantic Web. The idea of “different platforms that can talk with one another” is already powerful, but the real insight is that this is mostly a side-effect of RDF - and that integrations can be as trivial as defining a custom vocabulary and letting the world know about it. There’s a deeper implication here around Linked Data and what it means for AI applications - but that deserves its own post.
That’s basically how the Django ActivityPub Toolkit came to existence. It’s not meant to be yet-another service to emulate the proprietary networks (though it can be, as it provides a Lemmy-API adapter), but rather a library and application server that can be used to let you integrate your existing applications and let you build on the social graph (the same one Mastodon, Flipboard, and a growing number of other services already use) without requiring you to bootstrap a whole network every time.
Help me take this to the next level
I’ve been working on this alongside client work, which is the wrong way to build infrastructure when things are changing so fast. I want to make this my full-time job, ideally by finding a company that wants to hire me to keep working on this. If that’s not the right fit yet, I’m seeking 4 to 6 companies to each commit $2,500/month: 10 hours of dedicated development for your specific use case, office hours for your engineering team, and first right of refusal if the project gets acquired. Think of it as sharing the cost of a dedicated infrastructure engineer - at a fraction of what a full hire would run any single one of you.
I’m not looking for donations or one-time grants. This is closer to buying an option: a small bet on infrastructure that might matter a lot in two years, shaped in part by your own requirements, for less than you’d spend on a single engineer’s weekly salary.
The companies I have in mind are ones with an obvious strategic interest in federated infrastructure: telcos who were turned into dumb pipes by Big Tech, news publications who’d like to take back control of their distribution, browser vendors who’d rather not depend on platform APIs. If that’s you, get in touch.