end of US tech oligarchy

I'm done with social media. Done is a bit of a deceptive descriptor since I've never really used it. Made about two dozen twitter posts over the years since its inception, mostly because its "generally available from the open web" philosophy. Facebook and its closed off walled garden is hot garbage and I have the dubious honor of never having made an actual facebook post. Discord is even worse than facebook when it comes to generating walled gardens, they just mask it by calling it "private communities". Now that X is slowly but surely closing off general access I decided enough is enough. With the current US administration's treatment of europe I officially pulled the plug on all american tech companies that I could, we're supposed to be allies. Don't worry, this isn't a political post. I've been meaning to do this for neigh on a decade but just haven't gotten around to it. I will only use federated services going forward since lock-in, enshittification and purity tests have become standard for american businesses. I will not be held hostage by companies, nor will I let them hold my data hostage. If they can terminate my account without providing any context and can reply to appeals with "there are no appeals" then I'm out.

fediverse

The concept behind the fediverse is nothing new. Instead of having one single server, or network, that is run by a single entity, usually a company, you have multiple independent instances that communicate. This allows you, as a user, to sign up to any one of the servers. If you get banned from one then you can always pick another. Same if your server goes offline for financial, technical or other reasons. This creates resilience for the network as a whole. If a server is forced offline because it's hosted in a country where the government has turned hostile to free speech then you can just pick a server in another country. If there's a rogue admin who doesn't like you for personal reasons he can still terminate your account, but only on that server. Not on the network as a whole.

new home(s)

Let's go through some of the options we have available to us. I will, of course, keep this post updated as I actually create my accounts and add any services I find along the way. For longer content like facebook we have Mastodon. I have very little to say about it beyond that it fills all of my needs in that area nicely, but keep in mind that I never really used facebook nor twitter. But for blogging and even micro-blogging it works great. You can also cram photo blogging into it even though that isn't the main reason for using it. For microblogging specifically there's Bluesky. Now BS isn't federated yet but they're claiming it will be. Of course if they offer their own incompatible version of federation that lives outside the existing fediverse then it won't do much good. We've also got grandstanding proclamations by the CEO of the company that she won't enshittify the service with ads and such but it's a company. We already know how it will go, which is why they must federate or it will inevitably enshittify. I do think a lot of what they've done so far is great though, their limits on speech is sensible and I haven't seen any massive overreach so far. But then again, they weren't here for covid. I'm not sure they'd allow people to discuss theories on their platform, theories that later turned out to be true. It'd likely just be a repeat of the twitter fiasco and the governmental overreach of that era. But they weren't here, as stated, so I have no right to judge them for something that didn't happen. So far, thumbs up bluesky. Forums like reddit has a direct equivalent in Lemmy. I haven't spent much time there since I didn't spend much time on reddit itself. Unfortunately lemmy really hasn't taken off. Sure, you can get some major ones that get hundreds of posts a day or week, but that's contrasted to thousands or tens of thousands on reddit. Niche communities are a bust, you'd be lucky to find one that gets more than a couple of posts a week. Still, it exists, so that's something. For photoblogging specifically, a la instagram, there's Pixelfed. It looks really nice, the functions I need are there and I'm definitely going to be using it. Google docs was by far the easiest to replace, I already had a NextCloud account with hetzner. It has a built-in office suite that has all the features gdocs offers. Hand in hand with that I had already replaced google drive / dropbox / onecloud / etc with nextcloud file syncing. Add cryptfs on top of that for userland encryption and I can make sure not even hetzner has access to my data. I also use Proton, which is a swiss company, for long term storage of data due to their e2e encryption. They're also handing the e-mail for my domains. However their solution, while open source, is reliant upon them, thus not at all in the spirit of federation, that's why they take a backseat to nextcloud. Google search wasn't exactly a problem considering I've stopped using it years ago. It's absolute hot garbage these days with google intentionally crippling the result so users have to click next more times and thus get shown more ads. Enshittification incarnate. So what do I use instead? A combination of Qwant (French search engine) and SearXNG. My life, both personal and professional, greatly improved when I stopped using the big tech search engines. I'm also keeping an eye on GOOD. While it's run in europe it uses the search results of brave, we'll see, brave is at least independent.

failures

There are services that there simply isn't an alternative to. The primary one for me is YouTube. There's nothing like it. I do not want to replace it. Heck, I want to be a part of it. The majority of content creators providing the videos aren't in america, and the vast, vast majority of american youtubers aren't involved in their administrations nonsense. I see no reason to harm them, myself, even if it is owned by the king of garbage companies. AI wasn't a problem at all. When google's ai started race swapping historical figures and openai was stuck in a loop of its own hallucinations I could just never be bothered. That said I do need an ai for programming, particularly now that I've begun swimming in the lake of garbage that is javascript again (not by choice, by necessity). Still, not a problem since I always favored Le Chat by Mistral. I'm still listing it as a failure since it, also, is as far from federated as you can come. So what exactly will I do about ai? Local models. I've been keeping an eye on them as they pop up, the new mini models with a billion parameters that require as little as 512mb ram and can run on your cpu? Now we're getting somewhere! But so far I'll admit defeat that I tend to just default to mistral through a browser. But in six months or so I'll likely update this post with whichever local model I settled upon. They're already far more advanced than what I need.

islands, not gardens

Of course it isn't perfect. Each server creates their own ToS of a sort. You have to abide by it if you want your account to remain on that server. Now I will fully admit that I do not want unabridged free speech. I do not want to have to suffer the insane ramblings of absolute morons simply because "freedom, fuck yeah!". But on the flipside.. who gets to decide what is true and what isn't? There's an ever growing list of instances where governments cracking down on "misinformation" is analogous to them cracking down on information that is inconvenient for them. Britain has gone the furthest with "non crime hate incidents". How in the hell they could ever make it possible for police to investigate something that isn't a crime is completely bonkers. The word "chilling" doesn't even come close to its effect on speech. When you add companies virtue signalling to boost their financials you get divides that are impossible to traverse. My personal favorite is how during pride every single company will tout the rainbow flag on their social media sites.. except in countries in the middle east, where it might have actually done some good for the community. Oh no, that might actually cause social change, we can't have that when the next quarterly result is.. well, ever incoming. The hypocrisy is absolute. So doesn't the fediverse solve this? Of course not. Instead of having a single point of failure, like a company like twitter and its platform, we now have individual sets of rules for each server. At first you might think that's a good thing, and it is.. kind of. Just pick a server which values align with your own. But federated content can be reached from any server. An example would be that I create an account on server 1. I then post some neat images that server 1 makes public on the fediverse. But someone on server 2 hates my images, so they complain to the admins of server 2. The admins agree with them, the images of my food is just out of line! So the admins of server 2 contacts the admins of server 1 and proclaim that I must be banned. From there I am either banned or I am not. If I'm banned I can create an account on server 3, keep posting photos of my food and the cycle will repeat. Eventually I'll end up on a server where the admins refuse to ban me. That's where it gets interesting. Because admins of a server can also decide which other servers get their content syndicated by our server. So they can sever their connection to server 3, and thus my foodie images, for all of their users. This is by far the worst notion of the fediverse. It creates enormous fragmentation and you can never be sure if you're seeing "everything". It's far, far worse than shadow banning that is so prevalent on the main social media networks. But it's also pretty much a must. Imagine if a server is created that allows outright illegal images, you know the kind we're talking about.. the kind involving children. For obvious reasons such content must not be syndicated so server disconnects must be an option. But that's not what it's used for.

moral litmus tests

It's moral and ethical litmus tests of the worst kind. Purity tests. I have no interest in wasting my time talking about this, it's just a shame that people who proclaim to be allies are some of the worst, most hateful people I have ever had the misfortune of encountering. I truly hope that a middle ground is eventually found on the fediverse. That community notes (the one, single good thing Musk did for twitter) or a functional karma system and an ability to -voluntarily- filter based on karma cut-offs is implemented. But I'm not sure it will be. Because people like control. And for every server there's a dozen little Napoleons. The last thing they want to do is relinquish their power.

my data isn't yours

Let's backtrack a bit. I mentioned how you could create new accounts if you lose your existing one. By far the most valuable feature of the fediverse. But it comes with one gigantic caveat, obviously you must be able to take your data with you. If I lose my account, well, whatever. But if I lose my account and my four years of posts then that'd be catastrophic. It's a complete wipe of my work and my digital existence. It's why people are so terrified of getting their instagram or other accounts terminated. Right now some services have a limited backup feature, but most don't. On top of that you can't actually migrate your history of posts to a new server if they admins don't help you. There's no way to, say, export your mastodon account on server 1 and then import that export on server 2. At best you can manually upload your entire history of posts yourself in one go. Any follows you have on the new server will hate that since their timeline will be flooded by your posts so it's best to do it before you announce your new account. On top of that the dates for all your old posts will be rest to the current date. There's also likely a rate limit on the server to prevent spam which might make the migration take days or even weeks. If you're in the good graces of the admins of the new server the can help you import some backups solving the problems above. But they're not going to do this for just anyone, nepotism at its finest. On top of that most fediverse software don't have functional backup systems -at all-. I will not have my data be held hostage by companies, but neither will I have it held hostage by little Napoleons. So I will take steps to maintain a local backup of all of my posts. This will waste my time, create frustration and additional workloads. But it's a must. Unfortunately.

house of cards

So why don't I just spin up my own server? Even if it's only for myself a handful of friends? I can make sure I don't disconnect servers that don't deserve to be disconnected. My own content is as far from controversial as you get so I know my server won't be disconnected. I can ensure that my accounts aren't banned. It solves everything, right? Wrong. The tech stacks of most of these projects is the most rickety bullshit I've ever encountered. Absolute shitshow spiderwebs of interweaving dependencies. Vulnerabilities popping up everywhere and not getting patched because project maintainers don't realize that their dependency Y of module X has a dependency of Z that depends on dependencies A, B and C. And while B is inlining a binary pre-compiled package that cannot be updated because Z needs that specific version a vulnerability has been discovered in it. I'd never let something like this be public facing towards the internet and run on any of my servers or networks. Ever. So I'll accept the forced server lock-in and hope that proper export/backup is eventually prioritized within the fediverse. All it takes is one high profile developer getting burned by this and we'll get the functionality. My hope is that our accounts are turned into capsules that are completely platform independent, following a specification that is generic to the fediverse. I know, I know. ActivityPub. But I'm thinking more like a Copy-On-Write capsule with incremental backups and revisioning done locally and then published to the servers. Thus the servers can be completely ignorant of the accounting side, they just have to make the account capsules public and provide the interfaces for the protocols. Will we get that? I doubt it. The fediverse is still built on the archaic "server with accounts" concept. But a boy can dream, can't he?