The Fediverse, or the Social Web
This post was inspired by a post on the Fediverse. If you can, I suggest you go ahead and read it first, since it'll be referenced throughout the post.
The post by Amelia (@mordremoth@lgbt.io).
I haven't been able to find much solarpunk literature, so I was pleasantly surprised when this micro-story appeared as a reply to a post in my feed, which asked what the Fediverse might look like in 2030. The story reminds me of what I wrote about in Peace & Violence, which was my inaugural entry into solarpunk fiction. It also gave me something new to write about for this gemlog, which I haven't written for in a bit.
Welcome back to Futurism, which I bet is still the only solarpunk gemlog on the planet. Most of this blog is speculation about what certain aspects of our lives might look like in an optimistic future -- where technology is better, where the climate fight is not much of a fight anymore, where people can live as who they are, where people don't have to submit themselves to be allowed to live. So of course, that Fediverse thread and Amelia's story in response fit right in on this gemlog!
Amelia's story
There are a few things she talks about that really sell this as a solarpunk story (yeah, I refute my previous comments about it not technically being solarpunk; it definitely is): cargo e-bikes, mutual aid as a natural thing, "slow tech," and community gardening. There are also a few aspects that are maybe too optimistic, particularly the Nextdoor equivalent not being filled with racist Karens; you're pretty much always¹ going to live around people like that (Maybe what she did was block/mute all the racist Karens), or the Fediverse agreeing on anything.
One of the things she mentions is that she'll "want to use a full-sized screen and keyboard to play with" a particular type of post. More than likely, Amelia is thinking of a modern smartphone for her current device and a computer for her "full-sized" device. The specifics here are pretty vague, but that's on purpose -- to leave it up to the reader's imagination, and I'm currently imagining her referring to a comm for browsing and a reader as a full-sized device (for context: I imagine it to be somewhere between the size of an iPad and the size of a Kindle; but closest to a Remarkable).
I definitely feel like some of her vision of the Fediverse, particularly the new types of posts, would be difficult to achieve. I fear that it would be easy prey for scope creep, the kind we saw with Web 2.0 and the rise of React and web apps. Current Fediverse software (and XMPP software, and other software built on open protocols that aren't the Web) typically rely on the receiving app already understanding the type of embedded content. It would either be a security nightmare or a massive bloat, or both, to have a protocol with wide, generic potential types. That's why many protocols that use HTML, including XMPP, Matrix, and Mastodon, actually use a really limited subset of HTML: external resources and scripting are pretty dangerous and hard to get right. (I may be under-informed, but this may be where WebAssembly really shines right now, although it is pretty limited. Maybe I'll write more about WebAssembly in the future!)
One minor thing that bugs me about the story is the line about accessiblity. This is just common sense positive development; what about it has anything to do with "accessibility?"
The Fediverse at large
Realistically, the open, federated social web as we know it collapses. The ActivityPub-based Fediverse, previously composed of just white techies, finds itself totally dependent on one or two centralized services which eventually turn off federation. The ATmosphere (the Bluesky team's affectionate name for that ecosystem) also makes federation more difficult, in an attempt to settle debts and finally turn a profit, and literally just becomes a Twitter successor. I expect Bluesky to be the reigning champion of all of this, but they'll be no better than Twitter in the end.
Optimistically, either ActivityPub gets a new major version which solves many of the major unsolvable issues with AP and AS2 as it is today, and adds important features for the future like nomadic identity, AND AP implementers pivot to its intended architecture where the server is generic and most of the work is client-side, or ATProto ends up growing and developing things like private accounts, becoming an official standard registered with an already-well-known standards organization, and the ActivityPub-based Fediverse ends up suffering the fate of Scuttlebutt and all its users flock to ATProto.
Then, from there, a lot of other developments can happen: protocol support in operating systems and browsers, applet sharing, Adaptive Cards, and integrations with a lot of things, like some kind of local DeepL and an RSS extension pointing to an inbox for interactions, to make Amelia's vision come true.
Maybe it's more achieveable with a new protocol built on top of RSS. (We'd probably need an XML compact form to make that feasible.)
Right now, I think ATProto is the most well equipped to pull this off, considering its architecture that decouples the app from the storage, and already allows third parties to host feeds and moderation (labeling) services, all of which are interoperable.
Naming
In 2024, we've come to expect platforms to have names. While Mastodon definitively refers to a specific set of software, it's sometimes used erroneously to refer to the federated network Mastodon is a part of. Outside of Mastodon, that network is usually called "the Fediverse," or Fedi for short, and occasionally "the Fedisphere." (I've heard the name Fedisphere be used to specifically refer to the alternative-software sections.)
One of the inventors of ActivityPub, the current de-facto (and current standard) protocol for the federated social web, Evan Prodromou, is very adamant that the correct form should be "Social Web." The name hasn't stuck, much like "Skoots" over on Bluesky.
(And yeah, let's be honest. Even though the AT Protocol's app ecosystem is "the ATmosphere," it's just Bluesky up there so everyone just calls it Bluesky.)
I can only hope that in 2034 we've either settled on a name, hopefully Fediverse, and/or that the platform name becomes irrelevant, and it's just how "social media" is expected to work, the way blogs are expected to have RSS feeds (or at least were, in the heyday of personal blogs).
Closing thoughts
While I may disagree with Amelia on how exactly this vision is achieved, I think I share her vision of a brighter, more equitable future. One part of it is an improved Social Web, with affordances to nudge people to share things like mutual aid requests and real updates instead of advertisements and bragging, significantly improved moderation, and more integration (with things like translations and TTS!).
Futurism Meta: The Tower short story
I don't think I'll be able to finish that one. I did start on it. I might go back to it, or publish the unfinished draft. Haven't decided yet. So don't count on that coming out any time soon. Sorry.
¹ Another way to ameliorate this is to actually help people move away: instead of just going "if you don't like it here, then go somewhere else!", ACTUALLY HELP THEM GO SOMEWHERE ELSE! Wild idea, right? (This also applies to social media, cough cough Mastodon.)
Email me: me@blakes.dev (or DeltaChat)
Chat with me: me@blakes.dev (XMPP)
or on my backup: blake@federation.quest (XMPP)