Gregory's Server
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.
What do we do about this? Honestly, I have no idea. I've spent three years so far trying to get developers and advocates to care about this. I founded my own research firm, New Design Congress, specifically to get platform designers -- *especially in the decentralized community* -- to come to terms with this reality, that all infrastructure are expressions of power, and are at their very core political.
We've been blown off consistently, especially by people who ought to know better and who now either steer massive emerging projects, or act as major ideological activists for these platforms.
New Design Congress spent three years sending proposal after proposal to funders like @mozilla, Reset.tech, @EC_NGI, the @PrototypeFund, and others. We've been knocked back every time. We have **never** received direct support or advocacy from civic society organisations who champion the rebuild of a equitable Internet. We have **only** been able to continue our work and grow thanks to our NDC community and a handful of extremely forward thinking private organisations -- or, shamefully, organisations who have already been subjected to the precarity of decentralization.
I despair for the future of the #fediverse #decentralization movement - #bluesky, #mastodon, #peertube, #ipfs, #dat, #lemmy, all of it.
What do we do about this? Honestly, I have no idea. I've spent three years so far trying to get developers and advocates to care about this. I founded my own research firm, New Design Congress, specifically to get platform designers -- *especially in the decentralized community* -- to come to terms with this reality, that all infrastructure are expressions of power, and are at their very core political.