Gregory's Server
In 2020, I published *This is Fine: Optimism & emergency in the p2p network*(https://newdesigncongress.org/en/pub/this-is-fine). It laid out a clear argument that the #fediverse is irreparably vulnerable because of its p2p nature and political naivete:
*"Anyone with administrator access to an Instance can read anything that travels through that Instance’s infrastructure – including direct messages. The level of risk correlates with the number of cross-Instance interactions between users. If users from different Instances communicate, an attacker need only compel one Instance to reveal the direct messages between all of the interacting accounts. [...] In a peer-to-peer network without encryption, there’s no structure, no agreed-upon governance, and absolutely no protection. Compromising or compelling an Instance or its staff means that all of network traffic is laid bare to its assailant. [...] The decentralised community seeks to antagonise a powerful status quo whilst making tradeoffs that do not acknowledge how societies directly threaten their communities."*
Today, Kolektiva - a anti-colonial anarchist instance - announced an FBI raid of one of their admins, which included the seizure of an entire copy of the Kolektiva instance.
This is *literally* the kind of situation I warned about nearly three years ago.
At the time, *This is Fine* was shared pretty widely across Mastodon, Secure Scuttlebutt and other related communities. The piece generated a lot of discussion, but ultimately nobody wants to confront this undeniable reality: ActivityPub and all of the platforms that fall under the umbrella of the #fediverse will betray even its staunchest champions of decentralisation or anti-capitalism. The same is true for all other p2p or federated protocols. This digital movement is built on tools whose authors deny the very reality that even they themselves face.
From the forensic immutability of Manyverse/Secure Scuttlebutt, to the backyard-run, un-encrypted, metadata riddled design of every Mastodon/Pleroma/whatever servers, to the utterly insane non-consensual and moderation-free data-storage design of Lemmy, you are all organising on platforms built by people who, quite simply, *have delivered a shockingly dangerous set of tools that will eventually be used against you.*
It beggars belief that any such project could be seen as #queer or #feminist or #anticolonial, because every single server, every single instance is a packaged gift rich with data and ready to inform movements and structures that are out to destroy us.
At the time, *This is Fine* was shared pretty widely across Mastodon, Secure Scuttlebutt and other related communities. The piece generated a lot of discussion, but ultimately nobody wants to confront this undeniable reality: ActivityPub and all of the platforms that fall under the umbrella of the #fediverse will betray even its staunchest champions of decentralisation or anti-capitalism. The same is true for all other p2p or federated protocols. This digital movement is built on tools whose authors...