Statistics on how concentrated user accounts and data are across the Fediverse, the Atmosphere, web hosting, email, and other Internet infrastructure.
Practical Decentralization
The point of decentralization is to guarantee the rights of individuals and communities on the Internet. Pulling that off is a balancing act between practicality and ideology.
BETTER THAN FREE | Edge.org
This super-distribution system has become the foundation of our economy and wealth. The instant reduplication of data, ideas, and media underpins all the major economic sectors in our economy, particularly those involved with exports — that is, those industries where the US has a competitive advantage. Our wealth sits upon a very large device that copies promiscuously and constantly.
🔭🖤🚀 Social media’s next evolution: decentralized, open-source, and scalable
How Blacksky grew to millions of users without spending a dollar
R. S. Doiel, Software Engineer/Analyst — Robert's ramblings
Today the Web and Internet is owned and controlled by large for profit corporations and a few governments1. Corporate ownership combined with government policies has left us as tenant and product. It has given us a surveillance economy and enshittification2.
Findings Report: Governance on Fediverse Microblogging Servers
Research report on Fediverse microblogging server governance: risks and mitigations, moderation, server leadership, federated diplomacy, and governance tooling.
The Internet Transition
The Internet is allowing us to build a richer, more complex society but the way in which we Internet today is failing to support the governance systems that a more complex world requires. I take a look at why these issues are related, try to develop an intuition for a way forward, and point at the emerging field that is coming together to build that future.
Recently I’ve been thinking about a couple of... - Adam Wood
Recently I’ve been thinking about a couple of different tech-related things that sort of overlap. One is the (emerging) shape of the new social web; the other is a pull I’m feeling to try and lessen reliance on American companies. I’ve been interested in / concerned by what became of social media for some time.1 Since the sundering of Twitter in 2022, I’ve kept an eye on the various alternatives, with particular interest in Mastodon and Bluesky. Actually, to be more accurate, my interest has been in the protocols behind those platforms: ActivityPub and AT Protocol respectively. Both have their...
Gathering the Custodians of the Internet: Lessons from the First CivilServant Summit - Citizens and Technology Lab
An agenda for citizen behavioral science to maintain and protect the communities we love online.
The Everything Account
I've been thinking a lot about our accounts lately. We all have an ever-growing pile of digital identities scattered across the web, many forgotten after a brief stint with a random service we found in an app store. It's like second nature at this point: we check out a new
Digital Topology & Economic Power
The autonomous file, once the basic unit of user agency in personal computing, was first hollowed out through proprietary formats and data internalization, then abolished entirely by cloud platforms, relocating control toward incumbents at each stage. Enclosure succeeds not by offering users less, but by bundling genuine capability gains with topological restructuring, so that the user cannot accept the improvement without accepting the new relationship of power.
I think the data center backlash is mostly about data centers
It’s probably not your ideological thing, or mine. It’s about object-level claims about how data centers impact the communities where they’re built, many of which are wrong.
Data Centers - Database
Data Centers in Worldwide - List of Colocation and Cloud data facilities in Worldwide. Get Quotes and find Specs, Photos, Videos etc.
The politics of decentralization and the libertarian allure of Mastodon – Structural Integrity
I am currently reading the fabulous “Hayek’s Bastards” by Quinn Slobodian. It made me think about decentralisation in Mastodon (yes, the federated social network). And it made me think about the lack of a coherent progressive vision for the digital age. I will explain what that book has to do with both. But let’s go back to the political meaning of “decentralisation” in digital discourse first.
Be Wary of Bluesky
Bluesky promises decentralization, but nearly every user's data sits on Bluesky's servers, and every new ATProto app reinforces that centralization. T
Nicholas Vincent | Data Leverage & Public AI
Prof. Nick Vincent is an Assistant Professor in Computing Science at Simon Fraser University. He studies the content ecosystems and data supply chains that fuel
FediMod FIRES on building better and decentralised social media applications
Continuing our monthly interview series "Building a Free Internet of the Future", we talked to Emelia Smith, who is a software engineer. “Building a Free Internet of the Future" highlights the experiences and perspectives of individuals and communities supported by the NGI Zero (NGI0) grants, funded by the European Commission.
