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Sunday readings: reflections on the web

Welcome to another episode of Sunday Readings, a bi-weekly newsletter that gives you three articles worth reading. The theme of this episode is reflections on the web. If you’d want to summarize what the fediverse actually is, you could do worse by saying that at its core it is an ‘internet build on top of the internet’.

Reading, writing and reflecting on the fediverse becomes in part about the internet itself. To understand why people are excited about building on the fediverse, it helps to understand and reflect on the development of the internet. And it does feel like people are excited, my feelings are encapsulated by this post:

To understand where that excitement comes from, we’re going back in time:

So get cozy, grab a seat, and lets dive into some analysis of internet history.

The internet transition

Robin Berjon’s The Internet Transition is nothing short of grand, in it’s description of how the internet is at an inflection point. It is a grand, sweeping narrative, where starting at beginning means starting at single-celled organisms. Berjon uses this slow build-up to describe how complexity in society is a good thing, but also that managing societal complexity is, well, hard. The internet has profoundly influenced our societal complexity, and Berjon describes the problem as follows:

  1. the Internet has made greater institutional capacity possible, but

  2. it has also made our world more complex in ways that require an increase in institutional capacity to happen and

  3. it has broken some of our established institutions, actually causing a decrease in institutional capacity, and

  4. we are not yet using the new governance capabilities that the Internet made possible anyway.

This does not mean that creating and using new forms of governance capabilities will take the shape that it is often imagined:

“One of the most common future-Earth sci-fi tropes is that of a single unified worldwide government, often simply depicted as a beefed up UN — something bureaucratic, ineffective, and in charge of pretty much everything. And it’s not just sci-fi authors who tend that way. We tend to imagine governance systems as neatly, even naively, nested: countries, provinces, counties, cities, districts… all forming a nice matryoshka pyramid. From an empirical perspective, this simplistic view is incorrect. It also leads us to conflate global and central.”

Berjon argues in detail against unified and centralized ways of governance, coming to suggest:

“worldwide governance that is neither centralised nor unified, and in which every institution provides governance (in varying degrees) for every other, in much the same way that in an ecosystem everything is infrastructure for everything else. (Yes, like the Fediverse but a lot more so.)”

And finally concluding:

To summarise, we are traversing an epochal change and we lack the institutional capacity to complete this transformation without imploding. We could well fail, and the consequences of failure at this juncture would be catastrophic. However, we can collectively rise to the challenge and an exciting assemblage of subfields is emerging to help. We can fix the failed state that is the Internet if we approach building tech with institutional principles, and an Internet that delivers on its cooperative promise of deeper, denser institutional capacity is what we need as a planetary civilisation.

The issues that Berjon describe point to deep and complex societal issues, that are not solved by all just moving to the fediverse. But as Chris Trottier states, it can be part of a start of a new movement. The cooperative premise is indeed build deeply into the fediverse, and that is something be work hard to maintain and develop.

Robin Berjon – The Internet Transition

Web3, after a complete hypecycle

Matt Baer, the creator of write.as, wrote a blogpost in December 2021, about web3. Web3 was just starting to gain traction, and Matt wrote a reflection on it. He instead proposed a web 3.0, in contrast with the financialized, crypto-centered web3. The web 3.0 values are in opposite with those of web3, namely open, personal ownership, and interoperability.

Now more than a year later, web3 seems to have lived out most of its hype cycle. With the slow destruction of crypto, energy and money seems to be draining out of web3 as well, with people being thoroughly disillusioned by the financializated of the internet.It’s interesting to see how well this piece held up, more than a year later.

Baer summarizes web 3.0 as:

And further on:

If anything feels the most “Web 3.0” to me today, it’s the fediverse. It’s certainly the most human — it allows any kind of organization to form around both platform development (often an open source community) and data stewardship (could be an individual, non-profit, co-op, small business, etc.). There’s no overhead from unnecessary organizations or programmed contracts — people know how to coordinate naturally. It allows but doesn’t require commerce to keep the ecosystem alive. And if there is commerce, it naturally supports healthy competition, i.e. multiple service providers. Finally, it’s both useful and user-friendly enough for anyone in the world to utilize today — something sorely lacking in “web3.”

Baer’s proposals and ideas feel just as fresh and relevant a year later.

Matt Baer – What would a real Web3 look like?

Platforms, not protocols

The third piece is called “Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech” by Mike Masnick. This piece is also older, from 2019, and does not talk directly about the fediverse either. Instead, it sets up the stage, dividing the internet era in an early age of protocols (such as UseNet and IRC), followed by an age of Platforms (the current FAAMG Big Tech), and argues the value of a move towards protocols again. Masnick argues:

Moving to a world where protocols and not proprietary platforms dominate would solve many issues currently facing the internet today. Rather than relying on a few giant platforms to police speech online, there could be widespread competition, in which anyone could design their own interfaces, filters, and additional services, allowing whichever ones work best to succeed, without having to resort to outright censorship for certain voices. It would allow end users to determine their own tolerances for different types of speech but make it much easier for most people to avoid the most problematic speech, without silencing anyone entirely or having the platforms themselves make the decisions about who is allowed to speak.

Without naming the fediverse or Mastodon, the system proposed by Masnick resembles it well:

A protocol-based system, however, moves much of the decision making away from the center and gives it to the ends of the network. Rather than relying on a single centralized platform, with all of the internal biases and incentives that that entails, anyone would be able to create their own set of rules—including which content do they not want to see and which content would they like to see promoted. Since most people would not wish to manually control all of their own preferences and levels, this could easily fall on any number of third parties—whether they be competing platforms, public interest organizations, or local communities. Those third parties could create whatever interfaces, with whatever rules, they wanted.

When describing what might not work, one of the answers Masnick gives is an increased complexity. Written in 2019, it seems remarkably how well this fits with critique that is currently being leveled at the signup process for Mastodon:

It is entirely possible that any protocols-based system will tend to be too complicated and too cumbersome to attract a large enough userbase. Users don’t want to fiddle with tons of settings or different apps to get things to work. They just want to find out what the service is and be able to use it without much difficulty. Platforms have historically been quite good at focusing on the user experience aspect, especially around onboarding new users.

Mike Masnick – Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech

That is all for now, hank you so much for reading. You can follow here at fediversereport.com or follow my Mastodon account.