I’m back after a much-needed short break where I travelled across the Atlantic Ocean approximately two and a half times. Did anything happen in the world while I was gone? 🤪
I was, however, dismayed and pretty offended by the recent comments from Emmanuel Macron (France’s President), who recently said that Haiti’s problems were the fault of Haitians. While any country is responsible for a number of its troubles —and believe me, France has its shit to deal with that it seems incapable of addressing adequately— the case of Haiti is an altogether different one. Macron’s comments were offensive because we know the real systemic causes of Haiti’s difficulties since its independence in 1804, only recognised in 1825. France imposed a “Freedom Reparations bill” that crippled the country financially and has only recently been fully paid off, to the tune of around 20 to 30 billion USD. The duplicitous and dishonest assessment of a country badly in need of help, not scorn, is just revolting. France owes Haiti an apology to start with; then, it needs to do something about the money it stole from the people it broke.
Today, I wanted to continue discussing the Social Web, federation and decentralisation. Let me know if you have any comments.
In tech news, there was a mass exodus from Twitter to Bluesky that hasn’t finished, as far as I can tell. For the uninitiated, Bluesky is a supposedly decentralised social media website born out of a project at Twitter a number of years ago to build a new protocol to supplant that of the existing Twitter eventually. That didn’t happen, and the project was spun off as its own entity, where it continued its development of the ATProto protocol and eventually provided its services to the general public. I opened an account a while back as it was still an invite-only project and didn’t think much of it. Now Bluesky has something in the order of 20 million users and is growing. It is on track to overtake Twitter itself. Bluesky is a faithful copy of Twitter, so If you used Twitter of old, you’d be right at home with Bluesky. For the moment, the site is fun, and there are a lot of interesting conversations being had, particularly since the journalists and other social commentators moved over since Twitter’s owner has finally revealed his true colours. I doubt this will last personally, as I’ve lived through this cycle a multitude of times. It first happened when I saw a large growth in the number of people frequenting one of the Usenet groups I was part of in the 90s. The sudden rise in population and the sudden rise in popularity of the group eventually destroyed it. The dynamic was never the same, and the sheer scale of the discussion outweighed any attempts at moderation and gentle cajoling to stay on track. It eventually became hostile and filled with insults and threats of violence and was never the same. I believe this is the fate that awaits Bluesky and any social network that is structured in the way it is. Which leads me to thoughts I have about its structure and why I think the above is the natural conclusion for social media as we know it.
I’ve talked about the “Social Web” and decentralisation at length in these articles and, more importantly, why I think they are the best hope we have yet for a more humane social experience on the Internet. Their very nature of being distributed, decentralised and hence not run by any one person, company or organisation makes them inherently resistant to shock and control by interests other than the users themselves. And it’s not just a lack of monetisation through the tokenisation and sale of your interactions, ultimately dehumanising you and your social groups, or is it the objectively stupid, racist and sexist moderation policies of a madman that would, under normal circumstances, be sectioned and sedated in a padded cell. No, it’s the fact that users who own and run the individual services —called instances— can de-federate other instances that are noxious or otherwise undesirable. There have been several examples of ultra-right-wing nazis starting decentralised systems on Mastodon, only to be choked off (figuratively speaking), making their particular brand of “daddy didn’t give me enough hugs” attention-seeking utterly neutralised. They were not shut down nor “cancelled” from the Internet, not at all. They were just shunned into shouting into the void, the same way the utter cranks shout into a void of onlookers (usually one or two) at Speaker’s Corner in London. Say what you want there; you have the right to do it. What you don’t have the right to is the mass reach of your inane or discriminatory drivel. (That, and a possible kicking from a member of the public offended at your crap). And that’s part of the point: consequences.
Anyway, Bluesky is not this. Bluesky is a sort of halfway house between a singularly controlled walled garden and a truly distributed and federated system like Mastodon. It goes some way toward solving the issue of centralisation without actually being a decentralised system. You can spin up your own hardware and relay connection to the system, but the hardware and bandwidth required are prohibitive for the vast majority of the population of the Internet. Their documentation acknowledges this:
The federation architecture allows anyone to host a Relay, though it’s a fairly resource-demanding service.
Quoting a quote from this very detailed blog about Bluesky:
When you build architecture that in theory anyone can participate in, but the barrier to entry is so high so that only those with the highest number of resources can participate, then you’ve still built a walled garden. – Morgan Lemmer-Webber
I’ve seen discussion of disk space requirements in the terabytes to multiples of terabytes, with that requirement increasing as more users join the site.
So, no, Bluesky is not decentralised nor a truly federated system, but it faithfully reproduces the Twitter-when-Twitter-was-good system, and for most people, that is good enough.
I’d like to see more feedback from the Caribbean about the use of these systems, particularly when it comes to political and socio-economic organisation. Who’s using them? Are they gaining traction? Do they provide a truly collaborative space to exchange ideas without fear of trolls, racists and other undesirables? I’d love to know. Any and all discussions will be strictly confidential unless you decide otherwise. Please reach out.
Upcoming discussions
I wanted to put a couple of bookmarks in here at this point as I don’t have the time to write much more today, but I want to expand on a couple of topics I’ve been looking into lately.
One is about foreign direct investment in the Caribbean and how we need to be vigilant and more demanding of real-world and useful outcomes. The angle of the piece is telling the story of a tragic, and in my mind, criminal outcome. When we’re talking about Blockchain, Defi, and other so-called Web3 investments, there is much to discuss and critique.
I’d also asked about federated instances in the Caribbean and if anyone had examples of such in the region. A guy in Guadeloupe reached out to me, and we chatted about it. I’m hoping to write a couple of words about that soon, too.
Reading
Six years of the GDPR: we won’t pay for our right to data protection
You know my feelings on invasive surveillance adtech, so I’m not going to beat that drum too much. Suffice it to point you to another very accessible article from Access Now. Please become more aware of what these companies are doing with data and the dangers that lie ahead that we have only started seeing.
LLMs don’t do formal reasoning - and that is a HUGE problem
LLMs are still the talk of the town, but mass deployment and inclusion in decision-making roles are still very risky prospects. They don’t reason, and they mathematically place words after each other. That’s it. No magic. This article explains it all.
 The Fediverse has empowered me to take back control from Big Tech. Now I want to help others do the same.
The article title says it all.
Escape from Twitter. The future of social media is decentralized
More on my topic in this newsletter. Heads up: You’ll need to use a translation tool unless you read Polish.
Watchdog finds AI tools can be used unlawfully to filter candidates by race, gender
Shocked, I tell you. I’m really shocked. FFS, why do we keep doing these things?
Written by hand, over several days of thinking, typing, editing, and then panicking to get the last paragraphs written at the last minute. Have a great week.
