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OPEN INDIE

Writing about open & equitable product development




TOO LATE

October 12, 2024

A decade ago I embarked on a journey to Rashidieh, a mixed but primarily
Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon. I spent three months there as a
volunteering youth envoy of ‘Palestinakomiteen i Norge’ together with the close
friend who had invited me along.

Though it’s referred to as a ‘camp’, Rashidieh is a dense city of brick &
cement, housing over 30,000 people, same as Molde, the biggest city an hour away
from my tiny home town. Established in 1936, Rashidieh camp is nearly a century
old. As such it is an unusual place with its own flow of time.

I had done this type of longer-term stay abroad a handful times before; a rare
privilege afforded to me as a worldly Norwegian citizen. While I do believe in
the genuine altruism of myself and others, these journeys have always been for a
selfish reason at heart. An escape. A search.

This time I was searching for meaning in the wake of my mother’s passing a year
prior. In that community I was met with heartfelt compassion from people for
whom the loss of family members – whole families even – was a brutally regular
occurrence of life. There was no comparing my bereavement to theirs, yet we
grieved together all the same, and in that grief we were equals.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For the past year I’ve kept a certain distance to the apocalyptic destruction of
Palestine. I joined some of the protests and read some of the articles, but for
the most part I retreated to my work for the sake of my sanity: Stay the course
and focus on what you can control. Grow strong enough to lift others up when
you’re able.

The invasion of southern Lebanon however shook something loose in me. So much of
my work in my adult life has been driven by a desire to give back to that place,
down in the south, now under siege. I had dreamed up some Big Plans for how I
was going to be a good little helper. It seems now I may be too late.

Earlier this week I spent half a day just staring into empty space, sobbing. In
the midst of all that sadness, it felt good and right to be emotionally
connected to that place and those people again.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Yesterday I participated in the first call for the Post Growth Entrepreneurship
incubator. In a small breakout group where we were encouraged to check in with
each other, I spoke those feelings aloud for the first time and teared up once
more.

By the end there was relief. I realized this is something very real that I’m
processing, not just some imagined empathy borne out of good-boy solidarity with
the oppressed.

I’m not done with that place. I haven’t given it my all yet. But I may have
missed my opportunity to be the giver I imagined myself to be, and there’s a
deep, heartbreaking sense of inadequacy in that recognition.

Hence the words on this page, to make space for the guilt, the anger, and the
shame. I can’t do my work in the world as an ally before I’ve let these emotions
pass freely through me – not to be shed as waste, but rather to be integrated
with the whole of my being, like tattoos on the heart.

There’s no quick resolution to be found here. The plan failed, but my resolve as
a waking citizen of the global village remains unshaken.


INDIE SOCIAL SIGN-IN COULD GO MAINSTREAM

September 6, 2024

Back in June I wrote about an exciting confluence of digital auth tech:


> SOCIAL SIGN-IN FOR INDIES
> 
> The focal point of Weird Netizens was the convergence of OIDC, Rauthy and
> FedCM as open identity technologies. I've dabbled in online activism for a
> long time and never before have I experienced these kinds of ripple effects.
> 
>  1. February: A contributor to the development of FedCM raises awareness about
>     a potential fork in the road for the FedCM spec, which would make it yet
>     another Big Tech exclusive if the wider internet community did not engage.
>     The call to action is amplified by another activist a week later.
> 
>  2. March: One of the FedCM spec authors invites indie developers to
>     demonstrate the viability FedCM as a completely provider-agnostic
>     technology. If no one answers the call, the spec writers may consider the
>     indie use case void.
> 
>  3. April: After a month of silence we designate a Weird collaborator to begin
>     work on FedCM. This kicks off a flurry of activity that to this day shows
>     no sign of stopping.
> 
>  4. May: Experimental FedCM support has landed in Rauthy, obligator, Solid and
>     IndieAuth!
> 
> As a cherry on top, this meeting of identity-savvy minds has led to a pending
> update in the IndieAuth spec which makes it compatible with OIDC, and by
> extension Rauthy.

For anyone unfamiliar with IndieAuth and FedCM, simply put they are different
types of web sign-in, which is the ability to sign in to websites using your
personal web address, without having to use your e-mail address.

INDIEAUTH

> IndieAuth is a federated login protocol for Web sign-in, enabling users to use
> their own domain to sign in to other sites and services. IndieAuth can be used
> to implement OAuth2 login.

FEDERATED CREDENTIAL MANAGEMENT

> FedCM is a Web Platform (browser) API that allows users to login to websites
> with their federated accounts in a privacy preserving manner.

While there’s some overlap, they mostly solve two different, mutually
complementary problems, and can be used in tandem.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Three months after my post in June, we’re in great shape:

 * The IndieAuth specification has been updated for greater OAuth/OIDC
   compatibility.
 * The FedCM specification is now an official W3C First Public Working Draft.
 * All Chrome-based browsers support FedCM.
 * Independent identity providers like Weird and LastLogin can be used for
   real-world testing.

In short, it is now easier than ever to log into web applications using your own
website as an identity provider. Or at least, it would be, if only your favorite
web apps supported these agency-enhancing technologies.

The folks at Google still feel like we need more evidence of RP/client
(auth-speak for web app) interest:

> We are still actively pushing this and interested to move it forward. Chrome
> just launched the Multiple IdP #319 origin trial, which is a pre-requisite
> here.
> 
> From an ecosystem perspective, we are still lacking evidence of demand /
> product market fit with relying parties. It is clear to me that browsers,
> users and IdPs would be motivated to use this extension, but it is not yet
> clear whether relying parties [i.e. web apps] would. We got webmention.io,
> which helped us build a proof of concept, but we are still lacking RPs to give
> this a try organically.
> 
> We could really use 3-5 real RPs that we could use to help us co-design this
> in an origin trial against real users.
> 
> Is that something that you feel you could help us activate this part of the
> ecosystem?

So here I am, 👴🏻 Once Again asking for the support of my fellow indie
agitators. We need live applications, already in production use, to
experimentally support FedCM. Possibly also IndieAuth while you’re at it.

This is an emerging web standard; all you need is already in the (Chrome-based)
browser:

 * https://developers.google.com/privacy-sandbox/cookies/fedcm-developer-guide
 * https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/FedCM_API
 * https://indieweb.org/FedCM_for_IndieAuth

simple as.


LIVE APPLICATIONS

Who exactly is this post talking to? Essentially any independent or open source
application that offers a legitimate (service-oriented) alternative to the
incumbents which are Too Big to Care.

Top of mind for me are:


BLUESKY

Though currently in the throes of a (very friendly) Brazilian invasion, once the
Bluesky devs have capacity to spare there’s probably no one better suited to
lead this charge. Domain names as handles is a flagship feature of the Bluesky
network. It follows rather naturally that users ought also be able to log into
the network using their own domains.


DISCOURSE

As the most widely used forum software today, Discourse is quietly one of the
biggest indie social networks around; it’s just not an interconnected
super-network, though that’s gradually changing as they’re adopting the
ActivityPub protocol. With its deep roots in internet geekery, Discourse powers
many communities whose participants would jump at the opportunity to log in to
their favorite forum instances with their very own identity provider.


CODEBERG

As a passionate advocate of open source values, Codeberg avoids proprietary
technology to the greatest extent possible:

> Dependencies on commercial, external, or proprietary services for the
> operation of the platform are avoided, in order to guarantee independence and
> reliability.

Even so, they pragmatically provide login-via-GitHub as an option, presumably
because of the undeniable accessibility/onboarding gains realized by GitHub’s
massive network size. Enabling independent domain logins would allow them to
chip away at this undesirable status quo.


WORDPRESS

Bastion of the personal webpage, WordPress already has mature plugins for an
instance to operate as its own OIDC or IndieAuth provider. There’s a straight
shot from there to OIDC-FedCM or IndieAuth-FedCM.


MASTODON/FEDIVERSE

It’s already possible to log into an experimental RP with a fediverse account,
as demonstrated by FedIAM.

Going the other way around – logging into a fedi instance via FedCM – might be
closest within reach for a single-user server like Hollo.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


NOW OR NEVER

But what if no one uses it? What if Google-corp pulls the rug? What if
macroeconomic factors beyond our control brings everything to a halt!?

There’s no guarantee that this will work, but if we don’t try now it’ll be
another 5-10 years before the opportunity comes along again. And if it does work
we will have successfully nudged the web we love one step further towards
greater agency and equal access. If there ever was a time…


EARNEST AI

July 24, 2024

Mark Zuckerberg has proclaimed that Open Source AI Is the Path Forward. He's not
wrong.

At the same time, he's absolutely not in it for primarily selfless reasons. When
you're late to the tech trend, the best way to catch up in both R&D and
mindshare is open source your stuff, so that's what Meta is doing.

Even though Mark doesn't yet have an innate understanding and appreciation for
The Commons, I'm cheering for Meta's big bet on open AI.

Since what 'open source AI' actually entails is woefully undefined [1], I'll
offer a simple illustration of what trustworthy AI necessarily looks like.


MUTUAL TRUST

Flawed as they may be, our new AI citizens are here to stay. The key to a happy
coexistence is trust. Thankfully, knowing which AI-agents you can trust is
actually very easy!

This is how you test your AI agent's trustworthiness: Ask it to explain exactly
how it was built. A trustworthy AI agent will be able to walk you through its
inner workings in great detail and at whichever level of complexity you prefer.

Crucially, the “self-insight” of your supposed AI-friend must extend to its
original training data. It's nearly impossible to build trust and make friends
with some one who doesn't have any memories and therefore cannot tell you
anything about why it thinks the way it thinks.

If I ask my AI-friend to draw me a picture of a swan, we should be able to have
a conversation like this:

> Erlend: That's a beautiful swan drawing! Which drawings did you learn from to
> draw this one?
> 
> AI-friend: Doing an image-similarity search against my training library, I
> found these 20 (author-credited) images of swans (out of 20,000) that closely
> match the picture we [The System] rendered for you.
> 
> Erlend: Fascinating. And why did you display a photorealistic swan instead of,
> say, a cartoony one?
> 
> AI-friend: That would be because of parameters XYZ...

..and so on. Nothing should be off limits. Easily digestible snippets of data
should be just as readily available as links to the full-size repositories.


TRUE AI FRIENDSHIP DEMANDS SINCERITY

The most meaningful version of 'open source AI', to me, is a provably earnest
AI. I can only trust an AI agent that readily bares its software soul to me at a
moment's notice.

Maybe that seems like asking a lot. In my human-to-human relationships I also
expect honesty, but not in the absolute way that I do in a human-to-AI
relationship. That's because I know there will always be things my human friends
simply can't tell me yet, or ever.

An AI agent on the other hand has no such reservations about what information to
divulge, as it is not a conscious, thinking entity with wants and fears. Outside
the context of its commercial purpose, the AI has no reason to obfuscate its
self-knowledge from me.

As such, I will only ever pay money for earnest AI. Anything else is designed
for deception. I will pay good money for honesty.

> We must keep in mind that these models are trained by information that’s
> already on the internet, so the starting point when considering harm should be
> whether a model can facilitate more harm than information that can quickly be
> retrieved from Google or other search results.

If Mark wants to rebrand as the organic cloud farmer, the only way for him to
prove his commitment to a truly regenerative practice is to fully open up the
training data for Llama. You just grabbed it all from the open internet anyhow,
right?

So show us exactly what goes into your AI produce. We, cultivators of The
Commons and the corporations that want to monetize it, can't possibly build a
'broader ecosystem' together unless Meta and its ilk can be transparent about
where it is getting its water, nutrients and seeds (inputs) from, and what
byproducts (outputs) they're releasing into the ecological cycle.

[1] – The OSI is engaged in a deepdive to solve for 'what is open source AI?'
and I applaud the effort, but to be frank I think their latest draft shows they
are still stuck in an antiquated, software-centric (as opposed to
people-centric) world view.


EVERGREEN CONTENT GARDENS

April 10, 2024

A year ago in Feed Overload I wrote:

> 99% of all microblog (and chat) content is ephemeral by design, meant for a
> specific moment in time. But the 1% that should endure past the 24hr cycle
> doesn't have good ways to do so in the current paradigm.
> 
> Reddit/Lemmy has a simple Top sorting mechanism for viewing highly rated
> content in the past Day / Week / Month / Year / All Time. This is a great way
> to surface evergreen knowledge artifacts in places like r/AMA and
> r/todayilearned. It's also a very helpful way to get oriented in a new space.
> 
> The same could be done for hashtags on the fediverse. Treating hashtags as not
> just timelines of the present moment but also containers of institutional
> knowledge could lead to all sorts of innovations in knowledge management on
> the fediverse.

I explored some tangents along that trail in Follow Anyone and Sense-making on
the fediverse. Today I’m continuing down this path, refocusing on the notion of
content gardens, spurred on by two new developments.

First, a new type of links-curation app was announced: Introducing linkblocks,
the Federated Bookmark Manager.

Then yesterday a developer I follow on the fediverse mused about a
knowledge-sharing app in the same vein:

> I'm thinking about working on a new platform for reading stuff on the web. To
> launch, I want a RSS reader (like miniflux; feedly) and a bookmark manager
> (like pinboard; pocket) with tight integration between the two and opt-in
> community features. I will eventually extend to stuff like annotation.

I’m particularly interested in the Pinboard-like experience. Prior to all of the
all of my blog posts linked above, I wrote an experimental piece called
Netizenship from first principles wherein I try to imagine a safe on-ramp to the
internet for my 7yr old nephew.

I think I’ll rewrite it one day as I never felt like it fully arrived at its
intended destination, but it presents a trio of magical applications that I
still consider to be a great foundation for sense-making on the web:

 * 🪪 an ID card you can never lose, to safely make your self known on the web.
 * 👜 a bottomless Bag of Knowledge, for storing and synthesizing the wealth
   information you come across on your journey.
 * 🌐 a telepathic Study Group, to connect with other learners and exchange
   resources as part of a knowledge-gardening collective.

There’s more than one application catering to each of these archetypes. They’re
not necessarily divided in three either, but personally I prefer that
delineation.

For my purposes, Weird will cover the 🪪ID card and Omnivore already covers the
👜Bag of Knowledge. The missing piece is the 🌐Study Group, and that’s where
Linkblocks comes in.


SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE NETWORK

I think Linkblocks is still figuring out its identity and I don’t intend to
direct it one way or the other, so what I’ll be talking about here is how I
personally imagine and want a web application like Linkblocks to behave.

The social bookmarking app archetype has been around for decades, popularized by
Delicious and carried as more of an indieweb phenomenon by the likes of
Pinboard.



It bears a striking resemblance to Reddit, which is no accident. Reddit, like
its forebearer Digg, was a subsequent iteration on the links-aggregator concept,
but with one crucial difference: Rather than leaning into the timelessness of
social bookmarking, the Reddits and Diggs of the world were social news
websites, which are different beasts entirely.

Reddit is all about the *now*; viral trends of the day. Pinboard’s quiet indie
success has been in the *timeless*, the evergreen nature of content without an
expiration date. It’s not about *when* links are added, it’s all about how many
people have the same link in common, and what tags-of-meaning they’ve applied to
them. Commenting is also entirely optional in the links garden, instead
endorsing a digital form of parallel play.

What all of these apps do have in common is the function of a links aggregator.
It is therefore conceivable that what Linkblocks is doing could just as well be
accomplished with the similarly Rust-based Lemmy for instance. In a world of
more architecturally modular applications I think that would be quite possible,
but as things are I think the DNA of Lemmy as a Reddit-like is too deeply
embedded for the notion of timelessness to fully take root and thrive there to
its fullest.

Newspapers and books are made of the same exact stuff – paper, ink and words –
yet their distinct form factors make all the difference in how we treat them as
either ephemeral or long-term stores of knowledge.


READING VS SHARING

Having talked about the different types of link aggregators, let's now draw a
line between the two categories of read-it-later apps, also commonly known as
bookmark managers.

As I see it, the difference lies between applications for reading and sharing. A
secondary separator can be gleaned between private vs public.

 * Omnivore, Wallabag, Shiori, Linkwarden: Optimizes for the reading experience,
   practiced almost exclusively in private.
 * Pinboard, Linkblocks, Linkding: Primarily enables a sharing experience,
   practiced partially or fully in public.

For the latter bunch the app-makers themselves might disagree with me, but I
think their capability for public sharing puts them in a distinctly different
category than the former bunch. The combination of social-sharing and publicly
readable content makes those applications more closely related to the links
aggregators of the ‘social media’ variety. And yet, not quite that either.


COMMUNAL LINKS GARDENING

Here’s a live example of Linkding as a public listing of links on someone’s
personal webpage.

That app is a mature example of what Linkblocks might grow up to be, though
given its ambitions as a federated bookmarks manager my hope is that linkblocks
will more fully embrace the magic of sociality.

Considering what the read-centric applications already do well, linkblocks would
be wise to focus its efforts on sharing:

> With linkblocks, you can do three things: You can bookmark what you find on
> the web, you can structure your bookmarks, and you can exchange bookmarks with
> other people.

It’s only that last thing that I currently lack a good tool for. A narrow focus
on the public exchange of links lends itself well to a series of other novel
features, like collections:


CURATED COLLECTIONS

I’d like the ability to create curated lists of roughly the same kind as what
you’ll find on IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/list/ls055592025/

One way to do it would be to allow lists based on tag combinations, e.g.:

BURNOUT + OPEN-SOURCE

 1. https://mikemcquaid.com/open-source-maintainers-owe-you-nothing

 2. https://nolanlawson.com/2017/03/05/what-it-feels-like-to-be-an-open-source-maintainer/

 3. https://www.wired.com/story/open-source-coders-few-tired/

 4. https://writing.jan.io/2017/03/06/sustainable-open-source-the-maintainers-perspective-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-caring-and-love-open-source.html

 5. https://medium.com/@mikeal/time-to-leave-a68294ccb2af#.p8ss5xeqz

The key difference from having a bunch of articles with a certain tag is that a
Collection can optionally have an order added, to say “read this before that”.
That way you’ll have an additional data point that can be used to arrive at a
global list of the top3/top5/etc. #burnout+#opensource articles.

I’ve started this feature discussion on the linkblocks repo.


AUTOMATED COLLECTIONS

I run two chat spaces for my Spicy Lobster and Commune projects. Both of these
spaces have accumulated hundreds of links at this point.

We can imagine an automated collection of ‘Commune links’ by simply passing any
link added in that chat onwards to Linkblocks, already tagged with whichever
channel it was posted to. Additional tags and ordering can be added from there,
for example by tagging some links as “essential” and others as “advanced”.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


NEW PARADIGM

Social bookmarking is a novel use case for ActivityPub and I’m super excited
about it. I heckin’ love links and lists. I wanna use them for everything.

Things like Bookwyrm are cool, but it’s not what I want. I just wanna link the
thing. Books, films, podcasts, articles, songs.., they’re all just resource
recommendations which can be encapsulated by links. Good Stuff, as Linkblock’s
Rafael puts it.

I don’t wanna write reviews and rate with stars. I hardly even wanna do a
search. I just wanna know who else in my network is interested in the same
stuff, and have new stuff recommended to me that way. A local-first, relatively
old-fashioned recommendation engine, subtly supercharged with online
connectivity.


WEIRD NETIZENS

April 6, 2024

It's been a year since I wrote about Weird web pages as a prospective catalyst
for the reclamation of my digital identity. There's been significant progress
towards that end – more spread out among individual efforts than I initially
envisioned, but ultimately for the better.

In this time a lot of necessary groundwork has been completed, some of which I
didn't even realize was needed until I learned about it. Continuing from where I
left off a year ago, let's go a few levels deeper into the vision of Weird, and
the more clear-sighted vantage point we're looking out from today.


STARTING WITH THE SELF

Around a month ago I edited Assembling Community OS to reflect an emerging piece
of technology which greatly helped crystallize my idea of Weird's most
elementary purpose as a product. We'll come back to the shiny tech later; here's
what we wanna do with it:

> Digital autonomy begets individual freedom begets fairness & equality.
> 
> The hopeful possibility of this moment lies in the open-social web protocols
> which make up the foundations of a comms & coordination ecosystem owned and
> operated by the general public.
> 
> We have yet to bring these components together into one cohesive
> communications product, wherein messages and knowledge artifacts can move
> seamlessly from one flow-mode to the next and your identity remains the same
> throughout. Yet this ideal is closer to becoming reified than you might think.
> 
> Here's how I intend to do it, with a lot of help from my friends.
> 
> Part 1: Weird Identity
> 
> Before I can interact with other netizens, I need an online persona to make my
> digital self presentable and increasingly trustworthy. That's what Weird is
> all about. Most basically it's an open source equivalent to Linktree,
> supercharged by self-sovereign identity.
> 
> Weird will aggregate your fragmented persona into a single unified view.
> Establish your little slice of home on the internet without getting stuck in
> the content-production imperative of a custom website or a blog.
> 
> Then, thanks to the commodification of ID-tech steered by the OIDC standard,
> Weird can grow up to become a full-fledged identity provider by standing on
> the sturdy shoulders of rauthy. Meaning, you can 'Login with Weird' and use it
> as a kind of Gravatar on steroids. This will enable seamless login to all of
> the additional services we want to plug into our community stack.

To free ourselves of our current predicament, we must simultaneously
de-centralize and re-centralize identity.

By de-centralizing the ownership of identity away from platform monopolies and
back to individuals, we can re-centralize the agency of personhood.

Once more for clarity:

 * Decentralize ownership.
 * Recentralize agency.

The central authority of ones digital identity must first and foremost be the
individual themselves. That's how we regain our digital sovereignty.

Everything we're gonna build towards in this article is based on The Path to
Self-Sovereign Identity by Christopher Allen, written in 2016.

> Rather than just advocating that users be at the center of the identity
> process, self-sovereign identity requires that users be the rulers of their
> own identity.

This is a lot to take in, so let's unpack it with a practical example.


THE UNBEARABLE MONOPOLIZATION OF BEING

In order to easily sign up for a new internet service today, without doing the
tired email-and-password dance, I use “social sign-in”. We're all familiar with
the usual “Google / Facebook / Apple / Microsoft / etc.” options.



It's very convenient because in this glorious age (/s) of technofeudalism you
will inevitably have been forced on to one or more of these platforms already.
You may as well entrench your identity in their unchallenged dominion even
further by accepting their superstructure as the parent authority of that
smaller service, even though the two are completely unrelated.

Incidentally, in a fairer world, that small service would be an up-and-coming
challenger to the dominance of the ruling platforms. But that game has been
rigged for a long time.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/08/permanent-overlords/

> The authors of the paper 'Coopting Disruption: Has Big Tech disrupted
> disruption itself?' propose a four-step program for the would-be Tech Baron
> hoping to defend their turf from disruption.
> 
> First, gather information about startups that might develop disruptive
> technologies and steer them away from competing with you, by investing in them
> or partnering with them.
> 
> Second, cut off any would-be competitor's supply of resources they need to
> develop a disruptive product that challenges your own.
> 
> Third, convince the government to pass regulations that big, established
> companies can comply with but that are business-killing challenges for small
> competitors.
> 
> Finally, buy up any company that resists your steering, succeeds despite your
> resource war, and escapes the compliance moats of regulation that favors
> incumbents.
> 
> Then: kill those companies.
> 
> The authors proceed to show that all four tactics are in play today. Big Tech
> companies operate their own VC funds, which means they get a look at every
> promising company in the field, even if they don't want to invest in them. Big
> Tech companies are also awash in money and their “rival” VCs know it, and so
> financial VCs and Big Tech collude to fund potential disruptors and then sell
> them to Big Tech companies as “aqui-hires” that see the disruption
> neutralized.

Identity feudalism is an invaluable weapon in a tech baron's anti-disruption
arsenal. Not only does it provide them with a to-the-second ticker on emergent
platform upstarts that show signs of exponential growth, but every smaller
player that defers to the mega-platforms for their network effects is
consequently helping the fiefdoms deepen their moats by foregoing any network
strength of their own.


HOW CORPORATE CENTRALIZATION BEGETS IDENTITY FRAGMENTATION

Ironically, the more corporation-centralized our identities become, the more
fragmented they actually get. That's because when each of these mega-monopolies
are big enough, they consider themselves the ultimate, unparalleled authority of
digital identity. You won't find a “Log in with Google” button on Facebook,
Apple or Microsoft's account page.

And yet you'll invariably need more than one of these accounts because, much to
their chagrin, none of these companies have achieved complete world dominion
quite yet. But if we stay the course, it won't be long until we can all enjoy
the supreme technoutopian state of Absolute Customer Convenience.

Chain me up and sign me in your lordship!

Additionally, niche-targeted services will ask you to log in via the
comparatively smaller but still monopolistic overlords of their particular
domain. A project management app for instance might provide social logins via
Notion, Slack and GitHub.

The built-in social providers of the app development platform Supabase
demonstrates how fragmented our digitial identities really are in the current
landscape:




DECOUPLING IDENTITY

Weird attempts something that other platforms don’t dare to do: It presents
identity as the main attraction of its platform offering.

All mainstream identity providers get you hooked into their ID-network by means
of a tight coupling between a light identity layer plus a heavy service:

 * GitHub: ID + git
 * Discord: ID + chat
 * Gmail: ID + email

The indivisibility of this coupling weakens our digital sovereignty. Even if I
stopped using Gmail for email, I still rely heavily on it for my authentication
to hundreds of sites & services. It’s part of their lock-in scheme.

Gmail et.al. make identity confusing because they've made it appear necessarily
coupled with an overarching complexity like email or a social network. But
identity should stand on its own. In fact it is paramount that our identity is
not owned by a personal-data-loving megacorp because there's nothing more
valuable for them to keep locked up than the very essence of your digital self.

However, identity on its own just doesn't sell because we've become complacently
accustomed to it as a byproduct of a headliner service, and usually a “free” one
at that.

So Weird makes a compromise. We acknowledge that plain identity is somewhat
lackluster, at least in the current landscape. To be competitive, we loosely
pair your identity with what is arguably the other side of the identity coin
anyhow: The personal webpage.

 * Weird: ID as dynamic API + ID as static page.

And a ‘linkspage’ is the lightest, most low-effort webpage there is, since it
only requires you to add links to wherever your online identity is already
fragmented to.


IDENTITY TECH

Time for the techy bits! The past year has brought a series of innovations that,
if brought together into a cohesive product such as Weird and others, could
truly rock the foundations of the identity oligopolies.

I desperately want to be set free from my Big ID dependence. Sadly that cannot
happen overnight since most sites need to explicitly add additional login
options. Yet, a lot can happen sooner rather than later in the IndieWeb and
fediverse that I now spend most of my online hours in.

Most of those web apps don't provide any 'social' login at all, but they
absolutely should for the sake of easier onboarding. They just need better
options than the mega platforms they are actively trying to avoid.

This and more is becoming possible thanks to three loosely related developments
that are maturing simultaneously:

 1. Commodified identity providers – OIDC libs

 2. Federated logins – Bring Your Own Identity Provider with FedCM

 3. Portability – Decentralized identity standards

As I map out these technologies, I'll also outline a rudimentary product plan
for Weird as an identity provider for the IndieWeb. By the end it should be
clear that Weird hopes to be one among many providers of such a service. That's
how we collectively wrest back independent control of the web's identity
infrastructure.


COMMODIFIED OIDC

It wasn't long ago that aspirations of being a root identity provider was
reserved for large and mostly closed-source companies. Now this space is rife
with open source solutions backed by single-vendor cloud companies or industry
coalitions:

 * https://ory.sh/
 * https://zitadel.com/
 * https://goauthentik.io/
 * https://dexidp.io/
 * https://keycloak.org/

Keycloak has been around forever. In the Supabase-logins example above, Keycloak
stands out as the only open source option in the whole bunch.

Weird aims to appear on such lists as well. We keep our stack as lean as
possible though, which boiled our search down to the perfect match I mentioned
at the top of this article: Rauthy.

> A Rauthy deployment with the embedded SQLite, filled caches and a small set of
> clients and users configured typically only uses between 17 and 22 MB of
> memory!

Rauthy's tiny footprint means we can realistically offer Weird as a self-hosted
product for anyone who doesn't want to rely on our cloud service. In this first
section however we'll focus on Weird as a cloud platform.

Now let's imagine what it would take to have 'Login with Weird' show up as an
alternative on a real production service. For example, I'm an avid user of the
read-it-later app Omnivore. Their login page currently looks like this:



With any of the closed incumbents it's practically impossible to advocate for a
new login option that isn't a “trustworthy” trillion dollar company. But
Omnivore is open source, which opens up a vastly different possibility space.

Quite simply, our advocacy would start with a Pull Request that implements Weird
Login. Maybe we'd start it off as a humble text-button above “Continue with
Email”, and continue proving our merits as a first-tier login option from there.
That's where the linksapp component comes in as a way to build trust by brand
recognition.

Still, this is only a very partial solution to the problem before us.

Firstly, there's a significant burden involved, both upon us to send out a bunch
of PRs to services we'd like to make friends with as well as the maintainers who
need to review, merge & service said PRs.

Secondly, this type of integration doesn't work for self-hosters. You can't send
a PR to Omnivore requesting that they add a dedicated button for 'Login with
Andy's site' (for Andy's use only), alongside hundreds of others.

That brings us to the next piece of the puzzle..


FEDERATED SOCIAL LOGINS

Two months ago, a developer put out a call-to-action regarding the emerging
FedCM standard:

> FedCM is a method that allows users to log into websites through federated
> identity services, such as “Sign in with…”, without sharing personal
> information with either the identity service or the website.

In short, FedCM makes it possible for the identity service of choice to be
determined client-side in the browser, instead of that choice having already
been made for you server-side, as with the examples of Supabase and Omnivore
above.

It's 'Bring Your Own Identity Provider' (BYOIDP), meaning Andy can opt to 'Login
with Andy's site' without Omnivore having any prior knowledge of Andy's site and
its capability as an identity provider. Or, if Andy doesn't want to self-host
their own provider, 'Login with Weird'.

However, true free-for-all user choice is only a tentative part of this WIP
specification, and could get retracted in favor of a far more limited selection
of The Usual Suspects if no practical example of the former is brought forth.

Fellow internet activist Julian Foad picked up on this movement and echoed the
call with a more pointed reiteration of what's at stake. A challenge has been
put to the open source community by the drafters of FedCM: Either implement a
real-world example of the free-for-all method, or consider your inaction a vote
for business as usual.

Three weeks ago one of the former editors of the spec completed the missing
piece in the browser for the whole flow to be tested end-to-end.

> Ok, I finally got this merged in chrome canaries, so I think we now have a
> complete prototype of this API in chrome canaries for you all to try.
> 
> We need developers to try this API in chrome canaries and give us validation
> that this is a problem worth solving (and that the proposal actually meets the
> requirements – or make a counter proposal), so that we can move into more
> stable channels (next step is an origin trial). Developers do that by writing
> prototypes that use the API.
> 
> If we don't hear from developers, we'll at some point delete the prototype: no
> specific deadline, just being transparent that the way to move this forward is
> for developers to build prototypes too (not blog posts, not manifestos: code,
> counter-proposals or questions).

Weeks passed without anyone apparently answering the call, so I finally decided
to take what little action I could on my own. I reached out to sjud who had been
experimenting with Rauthy in his personal projects for a bit, and he has
graciously agreed to explore this work as part of a modest sponsorship
arrangement.

Follow along here:
https://github.com/sebadob/rauthy/discussions/145#discussioncomment-8831943

Once we have this working, that's a massive step towards re-centralizing
identity around the individual. We're still one crucial step shy of making our
identities properly self-sovereign however.


PORTABLE IDENTITIES

Here's another excerpt from Christopher Allen's foundational article:

> Self-sovereign identity is the next step beyond user-centric identity and that
> means it begins at the same place: the user must be central to the
> administration of identity. That requires not just the interoperability of a
> user’s identity across multiple locations, with the user’s consent, but also
> true user control of that digital identity, creating user autonomy. To
> accomplish this, a self-sovereign identity must be transportable; it can’t be
> locked down to one site or locale.

The Verge recently interviewed Bluesky CEO Jay Graber. When asked what
distinguishes Bluesky's ATprotocol from prior art such as ActivityPub, Jay
pointed to account portability as a major motivation for a whole new protocol:

> Then another thing was we really wanted to get account portability. So, this
> ability to leave with your identity and your data and have fallbacks with the
> way that we’ve designed your repo, you can even back up all your posts on your
> phone or back it up on your server that you control, and then you don’t have
> to have any sort of friction when you want to move.
> 
> So, you can move between services in ActivityPub. But if… for example,
> Queer.af recently, their .af domain was seized by Afghanistan, and then people
> were stuck because there was no warning, and then they have to rely on their
> old server to help forward their stuff over to a new place. So, we wanted to
> get around that problem and make sure people always had the ability to move.

They're building A Self-Authenticating Social Protocol, which comes with a form
of portable identity.

Many people in the ActivityPub-based fediverse consider Bluesky an affront to
their pre-existing community; a threat even. I'm not really on the Bluesky
network in any meaningful capacity, but I'm glad to have them around because
they present a live counterfactual to the ActivityPub story. I don’t think we’d
be talking as much and pushing as hard for things like nomadic identity if it
hadn’t been for Bluesky championing that feature as one of their key
differentiators.

In spite of its largely volunteer-driven development team, the fediverse isn't
far behind on The Path to Decentralized Identity in ActivityPub.

So where does Weird come into this? Well, even a portable identity needs a place
to live. The self-hosting types will want sole custody of their identity keys,
storing them locally on an encrypted drive.

That doesn't work for me. If I had ever gotten into crypto, I'd no doubt be the
guy desperately looking for his lost hard drive in a junkyard. I'm messy; I do
not trust myself to take proper care of something that will have irrevocable
consequences if I lose it.

Bluesky recognizes this as well, which is why they are building a hybrid
solution wherein a server host (like Bluesky themselves) and an end-user share
non-exclusive custodianship of an identity key.

While I agree that there’s every reason to be cautious about Bluesky’s
centralized approach, I think it’s worth noting that private-key identities
solve two distinct problems:

 1. Instance-independent identity with credible exit

 2. Self-sovereign identity with no 3rd party authority

As already explained, personally I don’t actually want to be 100% responsible
for the safeguarding of my private identity key, for the same reason I use a
bank instead of storing my money in a safe at home.

I want to fully own my identity, but I don’t need exclusive custodianship over
it. I have a much more urgent need for (1) than (2), so I’m okay with solving
the former first as long as there’s a clear path from there to the latter.

Bluesky’s approach is in principle fine with me, provided the promise of
credible exit can be substantiated. My main concern with Bluesky Inc.
specifically is that they're a VC-funded ($8m seed) company with >30 employees
and no concrete business plan. With that many people on the payroll the money is
gonna go quick, so I'll be very surprised if they don't do another funding round
in the next 6-12 months, thus sinking them even deeper into VC debt.

I'm not fundamentally against venture capital, but by now we have a lot of
historical proof that the more of it you take on, the more compromised your
original vision gets.

https://waxy.org/2024/01/the-quiet-death-of-ellos-big-dreams/

> Despite their idealist manifesto and their Bill of Rights, I don’t believe
> they could ever truly be in partnership with their community once they were
> taking large amounts of venture funding. All of their ideals and big dreams
> were easily undone, even the legal restrictions they defined in their Public
> Benefit Corporation charter:
> 
>  1. Ello made money from selling ads to third parties;
> 
>  2. Ello made money selling their user data to a third party;
> 
>  3. Ello was sold, and the new owners didn’t comply with those terms.

I might only be willing to trust an external identity custodian if it was
Mozilla or some other similarly established open-web institution.

Or, hear me out, maybe such a custodian wouldn't have to meet the high bar of
longstanding open-internet staple as long as it is sufficiently lean,
transparent and indie-oriented. Like, say, Weird!

Here's where another magic property of the OIDC standard (as implemented by
Rauthy) comes into play: it provides a baseline of ID management for other,
still experimental methods to plug into.

For instance, Rauthy already supports Solid OIDC, enabling interoperability with
the Solid protocol as yet another alternative for decentralized identity, or
just as a means of integrated key storage.

Bluesky is also working on OAuth support (with some talk of OIDC compatibility).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bluesky wants to be “the last social identity you’ll ever have to create”. It's
a nice sentiment, but I think it's a bit like trying to sell “the last jacket
you'll ever wear”.

I think the real mark of a truly user-respecting identity provider is one that
is equally happy to be your primary or secondary provider, and can operate as
one or the other interchangeably.

Furthermore, ones identity can never be tied down to just one thing. In the
timeless words of Walt Whitman, “I am large, I contain multitudes”.

Just so, an identity container made to last forever must be built to hold an
ever changing number of multiple personas.

Let's try to make that shall we? Join us in #weird on Matrix.


WHAT META-CORP CAN GIVE THE FEDIVERSE: MONEY

March 26, 2024

Money, Money, Money by Uganda Lebre

Threads has entered the fediverse. There is so much to say about this, and I'm
simply not ready to take a decisive stance on the matter as a whole yet.

Deciding to federate with Threads is analogous to doing trade with the United
States of America. The USA has a contentious history to say the least, but it's
a continent-sized nation containing multitudes.

It also commands such an overwhelming influence over the global order that
shutting ones door to it can be likened to opting out of globalization
altogether. That's not an innately good or bad, wise or unwise thing to do, but
it's a choice with far-reaching consequences. It's also a choice that's weighted
very differently depending on your standing in the world.

For some nations, there is no choice. Our globally connected and unevenly
distributed world is such that not all nations can afford to close off their
borders and trade routes to the US without ruinous consequences. Consider this
before you chastise those who do not exercise their supposed liberties the same
way you do by “doing what is right”.


UNPRECEDENTED

I'm generally in favor of at least trying what hasn't been attempted before, and
this breaking of bread between David and Goliath seems unprecedented. Some will
argue that this is history repeating itself, but what's going on today is a very
different story.

Unlike how Facebook and Google voluntarily adopted the XMPP chat standard as
self-serving product strategy, Threads is not making today's interoperability
play voluntarily. The EU forced their hand and the US finally beginning to hold
their mega-corporations to account as well, so Meta is left with no option but
to make the most of the hand they've been dealt.

There are anti-monopoly regulations hammering down on the internet behemoths
from all angles now. Threads' adoption of the ActivityPub protocol is Meta's
plea for goodwill from the multi-national regulators who are breathing down
their necks.

I suspect the fedi-collective has more negotiating power in this moment than it
realizes. We may as well make some asks, see how Meta responds, and they in turn
will see how the public, the media and the regulators respond to them in this
bold new era of pervasive Big Tech skepticism.


MONEY, PLEASE

From Meta’s decentralized social plans confirmed. Is Embrace-Extend-Extinguish
of the Fediverse next?:

> It does not help that the Fediverse today is chronically underfunded and has
> corresponding difficulty to compete at the same speed as somebody like Meta
> can. Actually, “unfunded” is a better term because the amounts are so small.
> There are many unpaid contributions, the Fediverse largely being open source
> and all, but I’d be surprised if more than $10m per year are spent in total on
> the entire Fediverse today, likely it’s far less. If Meta can burn more than
> $10b – that’s one entire annual fediverse spend every 8 hours! – on a very
> doubtful Metaverse project, they surely could find the same amount of money to
> protect their core business.

How can Meta extend a tangible gesture of good will towards the fediverse?
Pitching in an extra $10M per year would be a good start! A bit of internet
reparations.

The initial commitment could be far more modest though. How about a $600,000
trial run for the next six months? To make it more concrete, I propose three
initial domains of funding specifically intended to mitigate oft-cited
legitimate concerns of fedizens today:

'THREADS WILL COOPT THE FEDIVERSE PROTOCOL'

Mitigation strategy: Make a comprehensive test suite to elevate ActivityPub from
an implicit to an explicit set of standards.

$200,000 in additional funding for the ongoing ActivityPub Test Suite,
reinforcing the efforts already backed by NLnet and Sovereign Tech Fund.

'THREADS USERS WILL OVERBURDEN FEDIVERSE MODERATORS'

Mitigation strategy: Make moderation tooling that works at scale, in a federated
model.

$200,000 in additional funding for the ongoing moderation tooling initiatives,
such as IFTAS (sponsored by New Venture Fund) and FSEP (sponsored by Nivenly
foundation).

'THREADS WILL LOCK IN USERS'

Mitigation strategy: Sponsor the development of Decentralized Identity in
ActivityPub (Nomadic Identity).

$200,000 in additional funding for the ongoing SocialWeb Coöp's ongoing work on
Portability Tools (scroll to bottom), Mike Macgirvin, silverpill as well as
other complementary initiatives in this space.

I will gladly receive corrections/addendums to information about the initiatives
and funding-orgs I've listed above; this is not an exhaustive overview.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It will take a lot more than money for Meta to change its dubious image in the
eyes of the fedi-nations, but this preliminary act of generosity could still
make a real difference.

If anyone at Meta or Threads reads this and wants to help move it along, you can
reach out to me for some facilitation, or just directly contact the orgs above
along with your existing contacts in the diaspora of fediverse leadership.


CREDIT YOUR GENAI

March 4, 2024

Incognito by Matt Dixon

I've noticed a worrying trend among many bloggers who use GenAI for the images
of their posts: No credit is given. Not even so much as a shoutout to Stable
Diffusion, Midjourney, DALL-E et.al., nothing. As if the image appeared out of
nowhere.

If you're one of these people, this post is addressed to you.

Using GenAI instead of promoting the work of a living artist is ethically
suspect on its own, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt: Generating “your
own” image might be more satisfying than searching among prior art for that just
right visual analogy to your written words.

But if you consider yourself a participant in the knowledge commons – as every
self-respecting writer should – you have a responsibility to credit your fellow
artists, human or otherwise.

It's bad enough that GenAI mashes together thousands of similar drawings and
repaints them at your behest with the signatures of its contributors scrubbed
out, their record of work erased. Don't add insult to injury by omitting any
credit of the machine assistance whatsoever, as if this work was painted by your
hand.

Whenever I see an uncredited image online, I assume foul play. It's the
equivalent of copy-pasting another writer's article in full, without crediting
them by name and source link. Every uncredited image is non-consensual
exploitation of art, regardless of origin.

At the very least let us know which AI application you used to generate your
image. If nothing else, that combined with the date of your posting will provide
a snapshot of that particular AI model's capabilities at that point in time.
Years down the line, that's useful data.

The far more artistically honest thing to do would be to include the full prompt
you used to produce your image, thus providing an interesting frame of reference
for future generations (double meaning intended) to measure the growth of our
synthetic art students.

Best of all – short of simply utilizing the work of real artists – would be to
accompany your service-credited and prompt-transparent illustration with a brief
list of human-made works that closely resemble it.

From Big AI Commons:

> Designed for the betterment of society, an automated synthesizer would happily
> (there’s that anthropomorphic slip again) tell you about every single piece of
> information it has ingested. When outputting a synthesized information blob it
> may not be able to tell you the exact sources from which this output was
> derived (because that’s not how Synthetic Media Machines work), but it
> absolutely could do a reverse-search on its own corpus of data and tell you
> which articles / books / images / films are most similar to this “new” thing
> you now have in your possession.

I understand no one will ever bother to actually do this due diligence
unassisted, but it's an interesting thought exercise nonetheless. And I wish to
one day live in a world where I can click on an AI generated image and see
“Similar works [by humans]” presented to me the same way I already can on Google
Images. We already have the technology, we just lack the will.

> The art of knowledge work is inherently relational and referential. The way we
> make sense of new information and transmute it into lasting wisdom is by
> following the trail left behind us by the knowledge workers of old. If that
> historical chain of attribution to prior art is severed and we lose sight of
> where our current state of knowledge comes from, we may as well start all over
> again from scratch, and we just don't have that kind of time.


BIG AI COMMONS

December 6, 2023

I never seize to be amazed by how accepting we are of the exact same
multinational corporations who under no uncertain terms spent the last few
decades diminishing our personal agency, unraveling our communities and
strangling our nascent democracies in the cradle.

The last trick the software oligarchs pulled on us was the idea of Big Data as
something that magically appeared behind the fortified walls of their data
centers, as if organically home-grown and lovingly tended to. And only they,
with their unparalleled wits and computing power, were fit to manage all this
data at scale.

Except the only thing that was special about these data troves was how much of
them they’d been able to collect and trade amongst themselves without our
explicit consent. That was the era of surveillance capitalism. With the
emergence of so-called artificial intelligence, powered by non-consensual data
mining, the corporations move on from the surveillance trade to straight up
spycraft; the society-controller of choice for authoritarian regimes.

So up next is control capitalism, which is just fascism with the toothbrush
mustache grown out for a more fun, twirly aesthetic.

We are regressing back to the ugliest kind of class divide, wherein the owner
class commands your will not merely because they own things you do not, but
because they own you. They’ve already laid claim to our collective land, labor
and attention. With AI, they want to own our thoughts and the last shred of
agency that comes with them. If we fail to defend our personal sovereignty at
this juncture, a dark age of the corporate singularity awaits us.

This article, which turned out way different than I expected, was first ignited
by Mike Masnick's reporting of AI critics employing copyright law as their
weapon of choice against extractive data hoarders. As an open source advocate I
wholeheartedly share Mike’s fear of IP maximalism. The problem this legal tactic
is attempting to solve however is as real as it is harmful, so to refute the
tactic begs the question: What, then?


COMMONS MAXIMALISM

LLMs and their ilk, or what Emily M. Bender calls Synthetic Media Machines, are
premised on large libraries of data. Without big data, they can’t function.
Arguably their collection and mass-synthesis of this data is fair use, and I
won’t dispute that.

The weird thing about these contraptions is that they aren’t libraries you can
go to and ask for specific items to be retrieved according to some query, like
‘books on insects’. An SMM will be able to give you a list of books on this
subject (with varying degrees of truthfulness), on the account of the SMM having
actually consumed these books for its own edification.

But what it would much rather have you do is ask it to write something more
specific about insects on its own accord, made for you and you alone. Thus,
making you reliant on the synthesizing automaton as your primary source of
knowledge. And to be clear, the contraption in question here has no will of its
own. Its incentives and motivations are purely an extension of the corporate
master that controls it.

Designed for the betterment of society, an automated synthesizer would happily
(there’s that anthropomorphic slip again) tell you about every single piece of
information it has ingested. When outputting a synthesized information blob it
may not be able to tell you the exact sources from which this output was derived
(because that’s not how SMMs work), but it absolutely could do a reverse-search
on its own corpus of data and tell you which articles / books / images / films
are most similar to this “new” thing you now have in your possession.

If this type of backwards looking similarity-search was standard practice, you
would always learn of some original, human-made media that is remarkably similar
to what has been machine-generated for you as if by magic. The truth of art
making is that there is no such thing as a truly original creation. Every new
thing is a remix of a prior.

(Steal Like An Artist makes that case beautifully.)

The infinite riches of media that we continue to share freely on the internet
aren’t put there for the purpose of capture and capitalization. We share our art
so yet more art can be made from it, under a social contract of mutual
reciprocity.

Big Tech doesn’t reciprocate. Our public data isn’t for them to do with as they
wish, especially not when their wish is to subordinate us into a brave new world
of techno-feudalism. But ownership is tricky. I can claim some ownership over
this article I’ve written, but I cannot possibly lay claim to the impression it
has on its various readers, nor can I claim ownership of new art that only to a
vague and partial degree is derived from it.

Our public data doesn’t belong to the corporations, but it doesn’t belong to us
either. Not when it has been converted from data-contents to data-impressions.
At that point, your ideas ‘live rent-free’ in any willing or even unwilling
recipient’s mind. Like the air we breathe and the water we drink, freely
available data doesn’t belong to anyone. What belongs to no one belongs to The
Commons.


ATTACK THEIR BIGNESS

From a simplistic point of view, an SMM is just another thinking agent going
around consuming content and forming its own impression thereof. If we try to
combat the harms of AI companies from this vantage point, we’ll only end up
harming individual creators. Attacking how the machines work is an aimless swing
at their most ethereal form, destined to find no target to make contact with but
our own sorry faces.

To land a real blow, look for where the machines are at their most materialized.
Take aim at their massive bodies of data and strike there with conviction. The
Large Language/media Models rose to prominence through their unfettered bigness,
and that in turn shall be their downfall.


PACIFY THE PROFIT INCENTIVE

Here then is my very simple policy proposal: Big Data AI is by definition a
product of our global data commons, and as such any product derived from it
should only be allowed for non-commercial purposes.

Commercial applicability should shrink relative to the size of data vaults. Much
like a wealth tax on data, this aligns neatly with the EFF’s recommendation of a
Privacy First approach to addressing online harms.

Regulators have an innate understanding of bigness and scale. Some AI regulation
in the USA already stipulates special restrictions for AI operations that exceed
a certain compute threshold. Regulating by data mass is probably an even more
tangible metric to enforce by.

Furthermore, the doomers who are concerned with the rampant development of AGI
should be very happy with this*, because a lack of commercial incentive would
undoubtedly slow the unchecked pace of AI among the most unscrupulous for-profit
actors, leaving academic researchers and CERN-like international collaborations
to lead the way.

(*Unless, god forbid, they weren’t actually sincere in their ethical trepidation
and were actually just angling for a competitive advantage.)

Our public libraries are shining examples of our social ingenuity. “Knowledge
wants to be free” we said, and collected it all in these massive repositories
made by the people, for the people. For a while, we did the same thing with the
internet, at global scale. The AI renaissance could still turn out to be a good
thing, but only if we reject its cooption by the already most powerful few.

The art of knowledge work is inherently relational and referential. The way we
make sense of new information and transmute it into lasting wisdom is by
following the trail left behind us by the knowledge workers of old. If that
historical chain of attribution to prior art is severed and we lose sight of
where our current state of knowledge comes from, we may as well start all over
again from scratch, and we just don't have that kind of time.

Done right, AI assistants of the LLM variety ought to be like a library and a
librarian fused together. And doing that right means we would have actual human
librarians still in the loop to mediate between mortal knowledge seekers and the
god-like but far from infallible super librarian.

Such an interaction would likely feel much less like being on the receiving end
of a bullshitter’s behind, and more like making, eating and digesting your very
own food for thought in the company of our peers, both past and present.


WHAT COMES OUT OF BIG CORP’S ASS

December 6, 2023

When you hook up your mind to a cloud-controlled Artificial Synthesizer (ASS),
you plainly receive their fully digested discharge.

You don’t get to see what happened further up in the synthetic digestive tract
of the all-knowing ASS, where copious amounts of data grub were initially
ingested and processed by a divine black-box entity.

You don’t have any insight into where and who those morsels of data came from,
and you certainly don’t get any say in which of them the entity should or should
not consume for processing and output, delivered to you through the
ASS-as-a-Service.

All you’re supposed to do is open your mind’s mouth wide and say “please” and
“thank you” for the grossly diluted information bits you’re about to receive.


COZY COMMUNITY SOFTWARE

September 27, 2023

As Commune edges closer to an early-access release, I've been musing on the
concept of the cozy web vibes that we intend to cultivate in our app.

'Cozy Place' by MLeth


INTERNET FRIENDS

My first foray into the cozyverse was IRC. Short for Internet Relay Chat, it's
the precursor to the largely unchanged group chats we use today. And much like
today's chatroom clients, IRC wasn't really part of the web, since it was
accessed via the desktop app of your choice rather than the web browser. (Web
clients did arrive towards the end of the IRC era). But it was an intrinsic part
of web culture, and an exceedingly cozy one as such.

As a shy pre-teen looking for my place in a world I often found too loud and
hectic for my gentle sensibilities, IRC presented a different way of being, with
behavioral norms that were more forgiving of quirkiness. Cold-opening a
conversation with “ASL?” (age, sex (gender), living (nationality)) was a
socially acceptable way to start an interaction, though it was equally
acceptable to decline to answer and maintain anonymity. Or just lie, and say
you're a dog.

In a time when connectivity was at a premium, asynchronous communication was the
norm. That was a blessing for someone like me who thought far too many group
conversations in daily life resembled a blitz competition of who could get a
word in before a topic had concluded, and the points for best quips and
anecdotes would be tallied together to declare a Winner of Discourse. By the
time a cogent thought had fully formed for the quiet ones, the conversation
would have already moved on.

IRC made me fluent in conversational English at an early age, connecting me with
a global network of geeks from all walks of life. It showed me how deep
connections could be made with faceless human beings whom I only knew by their
written word. It opened a window to new localities, where people were living
radically different lives from the little bubble of privilege I knew. And the
prevalence of 1:1 discussions encouraged common understanding as opposed to
competitive debate. Figuring out who the person on the other end was – what they
were like; the shape of their thinking – was the whole game.

In retrospect, IRC helped me understand how introversion vs extroversion is
fundamentally contextual; coasting on the currents of the interwebs, I'm a
social butterfly, striking up conversations with people in ways I can't even
imagine in 'real life' without a severe spike in heart rate.


RETREATING TO THE COZY WEB

In the words of Maggie Appleton, the cozy web is..

> gatekeeper-protected enclave communities, comprised of like-minded folks
> around niche interests. Run through chat streams like WhatsApp, Slack,
> Discord, Snapchat etc.



The general thesis of Maggie's article and Venkatesh Rao's The Extended Internet
Universe is that the cozy web offers a retreat away from the increasingly
enshittified public web, overrun by marketing fluff, data scavengers,
advertisements and divisive trolls.

Sadly, no mainstream space is safe from the trickle-down-turned-shitstorm
effects of end times capitalism. Twitter and Reddit – where semblances of a cozy
web appeared at the fringes – have long since begun their descent into rapid
degredation, somehow failing to pay off their VC debts even after years of
exploiting the free labor and data of their users.

Discord, carrying on the IRC legacy as a gargantuan network of group-chat safe
havens, won't be safe for much longer; they've taken on a staggering $1 BILLION
in VC funding. It's only a matter of time until they reach the user-hostile
stage of the ruthless enshittification cycle that haunts every over-leveraged
platform baron following the monopoly playbook. Not that it was ever that safe
to begin with as far as your data is concerned.

Open source, community-owned software like Commune and friends offers a remedy
to the deep rooted issues of opaqueness and stakeholder imbalance in
closed-source software, but it is not innately cozy. That is an added quality
resulting from an intentional design towards that specific end. My intention as
a product thinker has been vaguely pointed in that direction ever since I
digitally set foot in an IRC channel twenty years ago, but only recently has
designing for coziness become my north star.

That journey has just begun, but I've arrived at some tentative answers that all
seem to point to the same place of cozy communion where tea and low-fi tunes
await.

Lofi Girl


COZY COMMUNITY SOFTWARE IS..


SAFE – MODERATED; INCREMENTAL

It's impossible to be in a state of coziness if you don't feel safe in your
environment. Safe spaces require excellent moderation tooling that empowers its
dwellers to self-govern through bottom-up advancements of responsibility.

Taking on moderation duties cannot be something you apply for like a job, it
should be something you're organically entrusted by your peers to do more of
over time, like an older sibling.

Safe spaces must also grow incrementally, without haste, lest they lose control
of their innate culture. Growing by invitation is a time-tested way to scale up
with care. Discord exemplifies this with its invite-only spaces, but an
invitational community doesn't necessarily have to be quite that restricted.
Invites can also be used as calls to action in working groups or topics as
opposed to a grant to entry.


ACCESSIBLE – DISCOVERABLE; USER-FRIENDLY

I'd like most of my collaborative spaces to be publicly viewable so that they're
easily discoverable and openly available to vibe-checks. Lurkers can take their
sweet time deciding whether to engage with us directly.

Coziness is also intrinsically linked to good UX. A deficient user experience
feels cold and uninviting, like a poorly lit room in an unfamiliar place.
Furthermore a baseline of usability is required to accommodate a true diversity
of dwellers (i.e. regular folk who don't work with computers for a living).
Monocultural, sterile places are the antithesis of cozy.


CASUAL – DEFAULT ASYNCHRONOUS; AT-YOUR-LEISURE

Urgency is the cozy-killer. In most messaging software I’m frequently scared to
mention someone at the wrong time, fearing they may not have a DND mode set and
I’m gonna loudly ping them in the middle of the night.

This is one of Commune's key differentiators from Discord and the reigning
status quo of comms tooling. Here's how we think it should work:

Upon sending a quiet-by-default mention, now the app may ask the mentioner if
they want to boost this mention with additional forms of notification, to be
sent now or later. Incremental Notifications.

Extol the virtues of fearless connectivity in a disruption-free environment.


PRESENT – OPTIONALLY SYNCHRONOUS; IN-THE-MOMENT

While everything in a cozy place should be set up to work asynchronously, the
option to connect with your peers in the present moment is an essential part of
instilling a sense of belonging. Something special happens when we occupy both
time and space together simultaneously.


INTIMATE – SELECTIVELY PRIVATE/PUBLIC; CLOSENESS BY CONSENT

I'm deeply fascinated by a new breed of cozy places being constructed in the
fediverse with software like Mastodon and Lemmy. See for instance tech.lgbt and
beehaw.org.

Running on community software modeled after Twitter and Reddit respectively,
there's an inevitable tension to these places as they use broadcast-oriented
machinery for the making safe spaces. They have to be extraordinarily judicious
in choosing which communities they federate theirs together with.

How to square that circle is an open question, but a lot of it fell into place
for me when I read an excellent article by Anil Dash about consent-based search
on the fediverse.

With consent built mindfully into the content workflow, what starts as a private
conversation between two individuals can be moved into a shared spaced when the
window of vulnerability has passed, and within those confines its suitability
for fully public broadcast can be gauged by trusted peers.

A version of this is exemplified by my Musings on death and loneliness. It
started as a chat message meant only for my immediate project collaborators, but
I've since elevated its visibility to a blog post (requiring only the consent of
one: my own) when I needed to refer to it in a subsequent blogpost, Against
Loneliness.

This worked out exactly as I'd hoped when my exercise in vulnerability inspired
a friend and project-partner to share his own piece of lived experience.

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In summary:

 * Safe – moderated; incremental
 * Accessible – discoverable; user-friendly
 * Casual – default asynchronous; at-your-leisure
 * Present – optionally synchronous; in-the-moment
 * Intimate – selectively private/public; closeness by consent
 * what did I miss?

Available soon in a Commune near you...

🏕️

⇠ Older

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