Is federation the future of social media?

There's no doubt, in the eye of the general public, that standard centralized social media platforms, the like of which Meta and its subsidiaries (Instagram, WhatsApp, and the age-old Facebook) dominate.

However, what may surprise some is that even private messaging, forum, and less traditional social media hosts (think TikTok and YouTube) are becoming worried.

This is because social media hosting companies are feeling increasingly liable to blame when users post illegal (or even malicious) content. The source of this anxiety is new legislation, specifically the Online Safety Bill, slated by the UK Parliament for early 2023, barely 2 years after the FTC's Children's Online Privacy Protection Act and the EU's GDPR, the last of which everyone is duly reminded of whenever they see a cookie banner.

However, that's not to say that such enterprises are no longer profitable.

To secure their source of revenue, the platform operators are swiftly developing plans to reduce their liability. As you may have estimated, the prevailing strategy is more intense moderation. ^1

However, fear not!

Not only are some of these efforts failing, ^2 to combat this increase in moderation intensity, some opportunistic idealistic software developers have formulated a standard referred to as ActivityPub after many years of development. As the name suggests, this software standard describes how social media platforms supporting it shall notify other listening (federated) platforms that an activity has occurred, and (Pub)lish that activity to the network of interconnected platforms.

It's somewhat difficult to understand even as a concept, so let's break it down.

Development

When the developers publish the social media platform software as open-source code, the handwritten instruction for the computer is provided publicly. This is in stark contrast to most proprietary software, which is provided in binary form.

Where this concerns web technologies, the waters become murkier. This is because all browser-facing code is interpreted as text rather than converted to binary first, but the distinction been proprietary and public software is fundamentally about how the code is distributed rather than its form, be it textual or not. Doing the bare minimum to make something run isn't considered to be consistent with the positive ethical implications of open-source code. However, all of this is primarily irrelevant since these platforms are ultimately hosted on servers, and thus the server-side code is the important part. However, the code that they provide to the user's browser is also readily available, and most times, dynamically generated by the server-side code anyway.

Distribution and implementation

After the new code has been published, the platform operators take the code and update their servers to use it. It's usually as simple as running a few well-known or afore specified commands. This ensures that the platforms are interoperable.

However, to achieve true interoperability, the platforms must be able to access each others' publicly published information. How this occurs has already been explained, but the implications of it are important: like with most information in the internet—those of you who have used archive.org know well—it should be considered to be permanent.

Due to the nature of federation, content is duplicated. Although commands can be sent to the other servers to edit content (this is important functionality to ensure that the federated content remains up-to-date) no guarantee exists that the command shall be adhered to by the remote server. A good example of this is collapse.cat/post/231 and lemmy.ml/post/95553. Lemmy, the software that the specified platforms use, is an alternative to the popular link aggregate site Reddit. Compare them, and you shall notice discrepancies: collapse.cat's version of the discussion is notably more lean than lemmy.ml's.

Is this due to undue accidental censorship implemented by the administrators of the platform, or technical incompetence? My assumption is the latter, due to the ease of being incompetent rather than the effort necessary to be vaguely dictatorial. However, such disparity can be problematic, potentially more so than merely having to visit the original site of the conversation, as any centralized platform's architecture mandates.

Although I try not to disregard problems such as these with subconscious bias toward the federated platforms, I do not believe that they are cause for concern, because nothing truly prevents a malicious actor acquiring such information from more centralized platforms. I believe that more expansive solutions are necessary – perhaps crowdsourced safeguarding warnings built into browsers' antivirus solutions, but added instead to combat misinformation. Centralization merely hides this problem at best, lulling users into a false sense of security, when they should probably be more thoughtful about what they post on the internet.

Usage

Usage is ultimately the most important aspect. That is because even if a technology is technologically revolutionary, what competition is it to established companies if it is not used by even a marginally significant amount of users?

Golly. It has the users. Do you wonder why?

For Mastodon, an alternative to Twitter, and the premier ActivityPub-compliant platform, it was primarily because of Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter.

For me and most of the users of the niche Bookwyrm, it was because we wanted to be able to share our literature in a way that would invite others to partake in this much-neglected pastime, and Goodreads didn't provide that ability. ActivityPub was the perfect solution. I still find it incredible that I can comment on my read books from what is basically my Twitter account, and then look at some pictures from an Instagram alternative, all from the same feed.

It at least centralizes how I interact with my content, which as a user, is all that I care about.

Couple that with the Tumblr developers announcing support for ActivityPub soon,

Come to @tumblr. We'll add ActivityPub for interconnect. Don't stress.

— Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) November 21, 2022

and the maturation of the myriad existing federated platforms imminent, we may see a resurgence in e-mail-like interoperability between more abstract methods of communication. Hopefully, at least in the theatre of technology, the old adage that “Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it” shall need not prevail.

I believe that these changes to the digital landscape are here to stay, but where's my federated TikTok, y'all?

Reposts

gitlab.com/-/snippets/3709342