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How Threads will integrate with the Fediverse

This is an exceptionally long post detailing pretty much everything I learned at an event shortly before Christmas at Meta’s offices in San Francisco. I’ve been delayed in writing it up because of traveling back to the UK for Christmas and other commitments – and because I wanted to capture everything. It’s roughly written, and I’ll probably edit it a bit after posting. If you have questions or comments or want me to clarify anything, DM me on Twitter @tomcoates or email me at tom [at] plasticbag [dot] org.

Just before Christmas I was lucky enough to be invited to a Data Dialogue event at Meta’s offices in San Francisco. The event was designed to reach out to people in the ‘Fediverse’ community, tell us their plans for their product “Threads” and get a bit of feedback about the policy and privacy implications. 

Since that meeting, Mark Zuckerberg has announced the first part of the Threads roadmap – making it possible for people to see Threads posts within the wider Fediverse. Given that, I thought maybe it would be a good time to write about the other things I learned and some of the feedback we gave the company.

What is the ‘Fediverse’

For those of you who haven’t been keeping up, the Fediverse is one approach to the question, “How can we have one (or more) social network(s) that no one company owns, for which anyone can make a client or a server, with all of them interoperating as seamlessly as possible so that they’re understandable to people who aren’t terminally online”. 

The main Fediverse approach is through projects like Mastodon – which are effectively small, local social networks that can be hosted by an individual or company, but whose users can still communicate with — and reference posts and people — using other similar networks. Most of these products are built with at least some reference to the ActivityPub protocol co-written by Evan Prodromou.

There are other approaches to this idea of a ‘public’ (that is non-privately owned) social network system or protocol. Some run on crypto tech, where people run ‘relays’ (some of which generate crypto currency for the people who run the servers in the process) but the individual user completely owns and maintains their own identity and isn’t ‘hosted’ as such. 

I co-founded a company a few years ago –  funded by Bloomberg and other VCs – focused on one of those (built on the secure scuttlebutt SSB standard). We made an iOS client called Planetary. Since I left the company it has changed its name and pivoted to another protocol. That’s why I was invited to this event. I’m not going to talk about that much, but feel free to ping me if you have any questions. 

Anyway, there are lots of reasons why people should be switching to the Fediverse – among them:

(a) that one company should not generally be the main arbiter of what is acceptable speech for half the population of the planet;

(b) the general public should have the option to communicate with their friends (or find out information) without having that experience meditated by or optimized’ by algorithms generated by other people;

(c) there are reasonable questions that can be asked about whether or not a space entirely owned by advertising-focused companies can build products that aren’t socially corrosive or promote conflict and polarization.

However, there are also lots of reasons why people tend not to switch to the Fediverse – it can be challenging to understand so the process of using it presents a little more friction to the general public, some of the clients can be a bit clunky, and it’s often unclear how individual products within the space can support themselves financially. That’s why despite several big spikes in people leaving Post-Elon Twitter (I will not be calling it ‘X’) to join (in particular) Mastodon, the number of active users for the Fediverse has generally stayed in the low millions of people. That’s about 1/2000th the volume of the people who use Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp etc. in any given month.

‘Threads’ and the Fediverse

So it was both very interesting and also a little alarming when Meta announced Threads around eight months ago – and at their launch they made it clear that their goal was for it to be part of the Fediverse. 

It was interesting because it seemed to indicate that something was finally changing in this space and that we could look forward to a world in which social networks operated a little bit more like e-mail – ie. used by billions of people, not owned by any one company, where you could choose your provider, but still connect with the entire world of other people.  

And it was a little alarming, because the current Fediverse is mostly enthusiasts and utopian individuals operating in a mostly non-corporate environment, with few (if any) algorithms and little (to no) advertising. It’s currently a space where people don’t generally have to worry about the billion-people-impacting, market-driven and perhaps dehumanizing decisions of massive companies or the fetid whims of asshole billionaires. That has tended to make the spaces much less corrosive, far less aggressive and really quite pleasant to be in.

It’s not unreasonable to wonder if such an environment can withstand the arrival of a social giant.

Anyway, after some initial excitement and dread, after eight months the Fediverse community had started to calm down a bit – mainly because it seemed like this integration was never going to happen. After all, Threads has had a very successful launch – with around a hundred and sixty million people signing up over the last few months. It is a highly active space, and its active user base is now a hundred times the size of the Fediverse with which they had claimed to want to connect. Had something changed? Was it all a bit of corporate flim flam? Was it just an attempt to market it as a more palatable and distinct alternative to Twitter that they really had no intention of following through on? Or had they maybe just changed their minds?

Well, I can report that the answer is no. They have not changed their minds. They seem to be very keen to continue to integrate Threads with the Fediverse. And at least superficially they seem to be attempting to do so carefully and in good faith. 

I have some more behind the scenes stories further down this post which I’ve heard from various players on the edges which might explain some of the motivations at the company, plus a bunch of speculation from other Fediverse attendees. And I have some concerns and questions about what they’re doing and how – both in terms of the impact I think it could have and also in terms of how it will be received by the community more widely. I also have a number of significant concerns with the Threads project itself. 

But I can report that in my opinion the teams building it and the integration seem to be decent people, trying to build something they’re excited by, wanting to be part of something new and truly federated, and wanting to be respectful and careful about how they do it. And whether or not you think their arrival in the space is a good thing, that apparent good faith and care has mitigated at least some of my concerns. 

Okay, so let’s get started with what they announced. One (hopefully final caveat), the whole thing was run under Chatham House rules, which means that I can talk about everything that happened at the event but I can’t ascribe what was said to specific people without their explicit permission. To anyone else reading this who was in attendance, you should feel free to quote me on anything I said. If you’re comfortable being attributed for anything below, then let me know (via Twitter or e-mail tom [at] plasticbag [dot] org and I’ll amend the post accordingly. 

The Product and the Roadmap

The first part of the session was focused on what their goal for Threads was and what the roadmap looked like. They started by stating the product was “a text based app for public conversation and to share your point of view on real time events” (so effectively a Twitter-clone, which we knew), where you could have “productive conversation and tune out the noise” and that it was important to them that it was “open and decentralized”. They seemed quite committed to the latter, explicitly saying things like “Threads will help people find community, no matter what app they use” and “If you don’t like the rules we are enforcing on our server, you will be able to take your followers elsewhere”.

I have some thoughts on that, which I’ll talk about later in this piece, but before that let’s talk about the roadmap they laid out, which is as follows:

December 2023 – A user will be able to opt in via the Threads app to have their posts *visible* to Mastodon clients. People would be able to reply and like those posts using their Mastodon clients, but those replies and likes would not be visible within the Threads application. Threads users would not be able to follow or see posts published across Mastodon servers, or reply to them or like then.

• Early 2024 (Part One) –  the Like counts on the Threads app would combine likes from Mastodon and Threads users

• Early 2024 (Part Two) – replies posted on Mastodon servers would be visible in the Threads application

Late 2024 – A “mixed” Fediverse and Threads experience where you will be able to follow Mastodon users within Threads, and reply to them and like them

• TBD – Full blended interoperability between Threads and Mastodon

Now there are a few bits in here I think are really interesting. Many of them make a lot of sense, but I still think will be controversial.

The first is how long this integration is going to take and where they’re starting work. I imagine there will be a bunch of people out there who think the early stages above feel like Facebook is ‘engaging’ with the fediverse in a pretty selfish way – ie. the first stage seems pretty one-sided, with Facebook pushing their content into other people’s servers, but not reciprocating.

This feels neither completely fair nor completely unfair. My first sentiment was similar – to what extent is this an integration rather than a colonization? You could view this as Facebook attempting to erase the fediverse – to take it over. After all, it’s unclear what the fediverse gets from having hundred million Facebook users pushing their content into their space without any ability to seriously reply and engage with them.

I still think that this first stage is likely to be the least popular and will drive the most discussion of Meta and whether they’re engaging in hardcore extractive and exploitative capitalism. I suspect many in the Fediverse will find this first move pretty repulsive.

On the other hand, I’ve worked in large companies. And I’ve worked with privacy and policy teams in complicated new areas (I built a product called Fire Eagle a million years ago which was pretty much the first one to handle user location data, and that triggered a good amount of terror among Yahoo’s privacy and compliance teams). 

And I’ve also had a (fairly sporadic and not always effective) place on the advisory board of the UK’s Open Rights Group. I know how hard this stuff can be and the dangers in the data and the space. Meta will have to deal with a lot of regulatory questions and privacy concerns before they can launch anything, they will have to figure out how they can engage with content and users who never signed up to their TOS and privacy policies, they’ll have to figure out what impact that will have on their other systems and business units, and they’ll have to develop a sense of the issues that campaigning groups, the FCC and the EU are likely to have with this new development. All of this stuff is a Big Deal. 

For me it makes sense they’d take this stuff slowly and carefully, and it also makes sense that they’d start off focused on what functionality they can offer their users who have signed up and opted in, before they start confronting the larger issues. It’s really the only way they could progress. And I guess they’ll just choose to suck up any negative response they get as a result.

I want to be very clear here – whether or not the way Facebook/Meta/Threads choose to handle this ends up being ethical or appropriate is really anyone’s guess at this moment – and I’m sure a bunch of people reading this have their suspicions that it won’t be. However—ethical or not—I believe they’re going to be very focused on being legally compliant and very conscious about avoiding (as they see it) the threat of further regulation. People often think large companies are more cavalier with the law than small ones. I can assure you in my experience exactly the opposite is the case. Large companies are mostly much more cautious about breaking the law, and instead invest much more of their money in trying to change the law in their direction. But that’s a story for another time.

Back to Meta’s roadmap: this project is also intensely technically difficult of course. It’s worth remembering that they didn’t build Threads out of pre-existing Mastodon open source code and they didn’t start with ActivityPub as a basis. They built it out of the Instagram codebase and community with a view to expanding that one network into this new parallel open and distributed space. As such, a bunch of core concepts and technical decisions are not directly and immediately compatible and will have to be rebuilt or redesigned to connect amicably. 

By the way, as someone who has built large products for a number of companies—including the BBC, Jawbone, Nokia and Yahoo, and run two start-ups—I have to tell you based on my limited knowledge at this point I think this roadmap is probably wildly optimistic. But I guess we’ll see.

Who was in attendance

Before I continue, I want to give you a sense of the people who were at this meeting. If I had to guess I’d say there were roughly twenty people present, falling roughly into three chunks – the first third were representatives of the Threads team, the second a group of legal, privacy and policy representatives from Meta and the rest of us were sort of roughly ‘representatives of the Fediverse’. 

As is probably obvious from a community that is specifically and self-consciously uncomfortable with monolithic organizations and wants to find a way for lots of smaller groups to cooperate, the Fediverse group was not particularly unified in our responses, nor were we representative of the ecology as a whole. There are a thousand projects and hundreds of talented and interesting people with more or less impact on the space. 

Still, some of the people present did have very, very really deep and long-standing engagements in Fediverse and ActivityPub projects. One of them said that of probably the ten most significant people trying to corral the space at the moment, three were in the room. I want to make clear that despite my deep interest in and work in the area I’m almost certainly not one of those three.

So, both a pretty serious group of people but also not representing the full range of opinions and views in the space. As ever, none of us can speak for the whole community. In fact at this point that would slightly miss the point.

Why are Meta doing this?

Anyway, despite our different perspectives, one question was clearly on everyone’s minds – Meta had talked about what Threads was and made it clear that openness and interoperability were key to the project – but they hadn’t talked about why they were doing it?

What on earth was motivating them to make this thing so – in theory – open? 

Their answer was that they simply felt it was the direction of travel for ‘social’ generally – that the area had been growing steadily, particularly post-Elon’s takeover of Twitter, but that they’d also had a lot of conversations with high profile people who build communities on their platforms and they were increasingly uncomfortable with Meta or Facebook or Instagram effectively owning their followers. They were looking for the ability to know that if they needed to they could move elsewhere. 

I’ll be blunt – I didn’t find this enormously convincing but it was interesting and I’m sure there’s some truth to it. It just didn’t feel like the whole story. We asked about the business side of things and they said obviously they were a business and moreover an advertising business, so probably that would be the way they made money in it long-term, but it wasn’t happening for a while. The representative said something along the lines of, “obviously we have a business model, and it’s fair to ask how this squares with that; the answer is we don’t actually know; there will likely be ads but not in the near future.”

After the event many of the Fediverse representatives speculated about other motives. They varied between the following:

1) Meta thinks Twitter’s part of the zeitgeist is important and powerful and are interested in that space – and they’re following Google’s response to the iPhone by promoting an open competitor they can benefit from;

2) Meta is concerned about greater regulation and are building out a space that perhaps they can still dominate but which they can make absolutely clear remains open, in order to shut down arguments (particularly from the American right) about how they’re censoring conservatives (they can move elsewhere) or antitrust laws (we’re directly creating an open environment where people can switch easily);

3) Someone down in the hierarchy doing a PM job just added in Fediverse support as a line item in a pitch deck to act as a differentiator and it’s just risen up through the ranks somehow surviving each time because many people simply didn’t know what it was. And now they have to build it; 

4) Mark Zuckerberg just hates Elon and is just doing everything he can to destroy Twitter.

I have absolutely no idea which one—or combination—of these is most accurate, but I can report one interesting story that I’ve now heard from two separate sources, one in attendance at the event and another friend in another part of the industry. According to both of them, at a hack day inside Meta someone presented this concept and a rough working prototype and said it was really interesting and exciting and that they should work on it and that it should totally be open, and that person, bizarrely, was Mark Zuckerberg himself. I have no idea if that’s true, but it’s certainly interesting and it would explain a lot of the enthusiasm for the venture inside the organization.

Anyway, I don’t think that’s necessarily incompatible with the motivations above, but I did think it was interesting. Come to your own conclusions, I guess.

(A note on that: I have many issues with Mark Zuckerberg’s approach to things—he’s definitely focused on business as the first priority and social responsibility is … well, it is somewhere on the list I’m sure—but he’s an intelligent man, and an engineer, an investor in some early decentralized and distributed social tech and someone who attended, with me and many other peers, social computing FOO Camps, organized by O’Reilly Media in the early days of the social web. He knows about ActivityPub and all of these open standards and has done for years. So if he’s the one who was pushing for it – I guess I’m not surprised! What’s more interesting – and actually quite excitingis that he thinks this might be the future of the social web!)

Godzilla & the Fediverse

Now, I mentioned above that the people we met at Meta seemed like decent, well-intentioned people attempting to do the right thing. However, this may not be enough to be a ‘good citizen’. And to understand why I think it’s worth talking briefly about the scale of the various parties. 

The community that Threads is planning to participate in is that of Mastodon servers federating with one another via Activity Pub. The estimates of this community are that there are about 9,500 separate mastodon instances participating in this ecology, with roughly 1.5 million Monthly Active Users (MAUs). This is a fairly substantial number but of course it pales in comparison to Meta more generally, which has closer to three billion active users. Or to put it another way, Mastodon users represent about 1/2000th of the number of people using Facebook/Instagram/Threads/WhatsApp etc. worldwide.

Threads itself has only been around for a few months now and it still towers over the rest of the Mastodon community in terms of users. It’s based on the Instagram user base, and Instagram users can opt in to use Threads with a single tap. Because of that—as of a recent earnings report—Meta can currently claim around 160 million total users and about 100 million MAUs for Threads alone. So, again, maybe we shouldn’t be thinking about Threads ‘integrating’ with the fediverse and instead think about Threads attempting to engage with the Fediverse without entirely crushing it in the process.

Effectively you can think of the existing Mastodon / Fediverse community as a pretty decently sized US city of people, with each server being a separate building within it. Meanwhile, Threads is an apparently friendly version of Godzilla, hundreds of times as tall as the nearest building, wanting to say hi to people, but every time it makes a move, there’s a risk its tail will kill thousands.

Or perhaps it’s more like the spaceships from Independence Day, only—you know—trying to be nice. It’s not hard to imagine that however well intentioned they’re going to be, their presence is going to be absolutely enormous and potentially catastrophic. 

Anyway, I mention all of this scale because I think it’s really important to keep it in mind when thinking of other issues that came up at the event – including how content moderation is likely to work, what kind of public education work they need to do, and what the rest of us need to think about in order to make sure that their arrival actually does open up social media, rather than completely destroy the independent communities that already exist. 

Content moderation

So let’s start off by talking about Content moderation. This was an issue that came up regularly during the day. Clearly, Meta moderates its own content on its own servers and will reserve the ability to remove that content and ban any user it wants. That is unlikely to change. 

However, the Fediverse presents some interesting challenges here. The goal of integrating with the fediverse is specifically to have Meta users’ content appear in someone else’s mastodon instance, and vice versa

This definitely appears to be an area that is causing them some concern and confusion – and they don’t seem to be 100% clear on how to handle it. For a start, all their users opt in to using Meta, but third party users do not. Nonetheless from the discussion it seems obvious that they’re going to have to reserve the right to exclude content and users from being cached on their servers or from being visible in their app if it breaks their rules even if it originates in another Fediverse instance. The same will presumably be true the other way around – individuals in public will be able to ban Meta’s instances from engaging with their instance or ban or block abusive Meta users.

One conversation that emerged around this was whether there was a way that Facebook could usefully open up these decisions more widely to benefit the larger community. This is an idea I’ve been keen on for a while – that an entity that is doing moderation work could open that up as a service which third parties could subscribe to. This might be a way that smaller instances could actually benefit from Meta’s presence, resulting in a better moderated space overall.

Of course the negative side of that is that Meta is not actually known for being particularly rigorous in their moderation, and in fact only has around one moderator for every 100,000 users last time I checked. Plus of course, this would entrench their already vast power as the arbiter of what is acceptable or unacceptable speech on the internet even further than it already has been. So, there are some significant risks.

Bluesky’s content tagging was mentioned during the day – they appear to have a system whereby reported content could be marked – to be crass – as more or less ‘offensive’, and then the user gets to choose what they want to see. If you’re comfortable with slurs like the n-word or the f-word being used between members of each respective community then – in theory – you could indicate so. If you weren’t comfortable with it then your community could choose to filter it out. If you wanted full access to everything no matter how vile or offensive you could choose that on your end.

There’s an obvious possible extension of this kind of approach in a distributed environment, with one (or later more) parties tagging the content, and each instance choosing what limits it placed to content visible within its bounds. I think this is a very interesting approach, and one I’d really like to see people develop more – perhaps every Mastodon instance has a plug in, subscribes to a moderation server, and pays some money towards moderation based on the number of users they look after. In return, they get a fully moderated environment, and they can tailor their settings as to what can be seen on their instance. We’re not there yet, but it’s an interesting future direction.

Another question emerged regarding users moving their content off Meta’s servers. I mentioned this possibility above – that Meta was aware that people wanted ownership of their communities, and to be able to move them to another server if they didn’t like Meta’s content moderation or monetization. An obvious question that emerged was whether or not a user who had been banned on Meta should be able to export their content and users and start up again elsewhere on their own Mastodon server. Again this appeared to be a conversation that they hadn’t quite dug into yet, but the sense I got from that was that they’d end up saying that was acceptable, but the banned user’s content would still not be visible inside Threads no matter where else they went.

Identity systems and educating the public about the Fediverse

One conversation that emerged was about the current way in which identity works in the Fediverse. Generally it’s a bit like an e-mail address. If you have your content on an instance running at example.com, and your user name is @tomcoates, then your full identity is (@)tomcoates@example.com. 

In order to make this work with the whole ecosystem, each instance (for example Threads) needs to ‘federate’ with others, or index people’s identities from different places so when someone wants to write a post that mentions me, the client can look me up and help by autocompleting my identity. Otherwise you have to know the full address of everyone you’re talking about and that’s probably beyond most of us.

This presents a few obvious questions for Threads – (a) whether they’re going to index everyone’s identity across the whole ecosystem, which could cause some problems and (b) whether or not the general public will understand the way these addresses are constructed. The indexing obviously presents some data retention issues – how do people opt in to being indexed? What are the legal implications. This stuff comes up a lot in these discussions – with search, identity and algorithmic timelines all presenting data use questions. And it’s clear that without it—and even potentially with it—this user addressing style is likely to confuse the hell out of people.

This led to various other conversations and ideas – whether or not it was Threads’ responsibility to educate people about how the system worked more generally (for example – does a user know that your content will be cached on other servers which other people may run ads against, or how the identity system functions) and whether or not other identity systems should be created. 

One option presented that has been talked about a bunch recently was using a domain name as an identity, one separate from the service you were currently using to write or consume your content. A common response to this was that this was another step into confusion and complexity. Others argued that it was impractical to try and make Threads take on the responsibility of explaining things to people and to hold their hands through the whole process, and that people would just gradually pick it up and come to understand it over time.

I want to argue exactly the opposite – that a service like Threads is very clearly going to have to explain to people how this all works. They’re going to have to find a way to make it understandable and ideally simple to the general public. And the reasons for this are twofold – regulation and bad PR.

They’re going to be legally required to write a reasonably clear Terms of Service document and Privacy policy that articulates exactly how everything works. And if the public end up not understanding what is happening, then the next time they’re hauled in front of regulators in the EU or in the US Congress they’re going to find themselves in very hot water.

I’ve written documents before explaining to people how decentralized systems work and what happens to your data and content. They are not easy things. The concepts surrounding them are tricky. It is hard to do it well. The hardest bit is to explain to people precisely how everything works (which is not that dissimilar from e-mail) but to make it sound as non-threatening as it generally really is. You have to explain to people that if you write something, it may get cached on someone else’s server and may never completely be erased from the internet, without scaring them. And explaining that the same is true of writing a post on Twitter or Facebook doesn’t generally help.

I think I’ve done a decent job of these explanatory documents in the past – I’ll post an example at some point in the near future – but it is tricky. Nonetheless, it simply has to be done.

But it’s also not such a hard thing to do. It is within the scope of human endeavor! Every single concept we take for granted today regarding the Internet and how it works was initially confusing as hell. Web addresses, cookies, user accounts, secure sign-in, privacy policies, user moderation rules, private/public accounts, using browsers, setting up e-mail, that if you send an e-mail you can’t then delete it. All of these things are things people have had to learn, and all of them started off quite hard for a member of the public to get their heads around. It was education, good interface design and clear instructions that got us to this point. And none of that will change. If Meta tomorrow set up an identity system where you chose a user name and a TLD and they said, “now you’ve made an identity that you can to login to a thousand different services” then people would start to get the hang of it. 

Still, it’s annoying work that adds friction and the general public will almost certainly start off being confused by it. Frankly, if there was any area that Meta could really help everyone with, it might be by putting its weight and presence into getting its three billion users up to speed with how the Fediverse works

Personalization and algorithms

When you sign up for Threads and follow some people, you do not by default then get dumped into a reverse chronological list of the posts they’ve written. You end up in a space that’s very similar to Instagram’s algorithmic feed. That is to say – your feed will be a mix of particularly ‘good’ (as determined by the algorithm) posts from the people you follow, mixed in with other posts from other places that the algorithm thinks you’ll like (read: engage with).

I’ve been thinking about this stuff or a while, and I have some fairly strong opinions on it. The conclusion I’ve come to is that this kind of approach is absolutely great for entertainment-style products, but actually very dangerous for news-based or informational products. TikTok is the prime example of an entertainment style product, as perhaps to a lesser extent are YouTube and Instagram. These products simply track what you watch or like and then deliver you other things that you might find delightful and interesting. A good proportion of the time the recommendations are at least fine, often they’re brilliant and 99% of the time the choices they make have little to no impact on your life or environment.

This simply isn’t true for informational or political content. In these situations the algorithm is quite capable of heavily influencing someone’s opinions and views and distorting their view of the world in a way that damages our ability to function as citizens – simply by choosing what content is put in front of them. My ‘For You’ section on Twitter is relentless in pushing right-wing messaging and commentary, even though I have no interest in it whatsoever. This is probably because I spend a bunch of time angrily debunking the worst excesses of it. The same tricks that feel honorable and positive and fun in an entertainment context (choosing things it things will get a reaction and engagement) start to feel a bit more sinister in news and political content – like the algorithm its optimized for generating fights or controversy or clickbait. It feels nasty and risks promoting division or conflict.

Meta thinks that Threads should not be fundamentally used for political commentary, but bluntly good luck enforcing or influencing that. And if it’s going to be used for those things then the presence of the algorithm is – in my opinion – a problem.

Various people spoke up about the algorithm during the meeting although it’s possibly fair to say that none of them were quite as exercised about it as I am.

I feel quite strongly that at the very least the user should be able to choose whether to use an algorithmic timeline or not, in a clear and easy to find way, without it automatically switching back after a period of time. There are some ways you can make this work in less dangerous ways – showing ‘highlights’ from your feed but giving the option to see everything for example, or having a separate algorithmic and reverse chronological feed that a user can switch between easily. And I would strongly recommend that Meta switch to one of these approaches.

In the meantime there are some very specific issues which came up during this session which are worthy of a mention – one in particular was whether or not content from third parties in the wider Fediverse should be part of this algorithmic feed. “Would they expect it?”, was one comment. “Would they be horrified by it?”, was another. 

I actually think this is a little more complicated than it initially appears – and again gets to the necessity of creating databases about people who have not opted in to Meta which I mentioned above. For Meta to be able to do recommendations of third party content means doing some kind of analysis and indexing of that content – ie. creating a profile of a user who never signed their TOS with information about them and who to recommend their content to. Quite apart from whether or not people are comfortable with that, I’m not sure what the legality of that might be from a (in particular) European GDPR perspective. I suspect if they’re careful it will be legally okay, but it still slightly sets my teeth on edge.

The final workshop

The last thing we did on the day was take a few significant groups – instance owners, Meta users and third party fediverse users – and break into work groups to answer a few questions, which I managed to rapidly capture. They were as follows:

  1. What do you think your group’s core expections are for their experiences in a federated social network environment?
  2. What do they expect of Meta vis a vis data collection and use?
  3. Are any of these expectations mutually reinforcing? Are any in tension with each other? Do they introduce any new or additional risks eg. to privacy, safety, free expression
  4. How can meta be considered a ‘good citizen in the fediverse’

I’ll be honest, these sessions were too short to be particularly useful, and I don’t know that we came up with much that was particularly interesting, but I thought it was worth posting the questions Meta were asking to give some sense of how they are at least at the moment trying to be decent citizens.

Other questions

Before I wrap up, here are a few pithy questions that people presented and the answers that Meta came back with, for the sake of completeness.

Could each person’s feed have an atom feed so people could subscribe without using the core app? 
The general sentiment in the room was effectively ‘we don’t know’, but my guess would be the answer will eventually be no. 

Would the content from third parties using Mastodon be presented as equivalent to the ‘native’ content or would it be like Apple’s blue and green iMessage bubbles?
The sentiment here was again – don’t know. Work in progress. But people obviously were keen to make sure that users understood what they were looking at.

Should Meta lead or follow in the development of the commons or the standards?
The opinion here was that it would be best for Meta to be involved but do not want to do it alone. “The real goal is not for it to be lead on all of the issues which are issues across the fediverse”.

Conclusion

My sense after this meeting was that Facebook are seriously interested in integrating Threads with the Fediverse. They do not want to crush the Fediverse. They perhaps think the future is a few large companies maintaining clients in a shared social space, where there’s also a long tail of other independent clients. This is going to weird out a bunch of people but it’s a goal I also share, so I’m okay with that. It’s worth saying that I want this world because I think it is a realpolitik alternative to one large company owning everything. I think a multi-client/company/instanced system like this would be better than now and solve a bunch of problems. But is it the utopian vision of how the world could be if we didn’t live in quite such an extractive system? Nope.

Back to Meta – I think they’re trying to engage positively, but I think that is going to be very difficult for them given the size of their userbase compared to the tiny environment they want to connect with. And I think they’re desperate for – and need – some bodies or organizations that represent the interests of the fediverse more wildly with whom they can coordinate standards and listen to desires for technical change, and can stand up for the interests of all parties. Such an organization doesn’t exist yet. Perhaps someone needs to start one.

All in all though, despite some very major misgivings here and there, overall I came out of this event much more sanguine about the way this is unfolding, a bit more optimistic about the future of the decentralized or social web, and interested to see where things go from here. I suspect we might see someone from Google or the BBC or Yahoo or Microsoft or LinkedIn make a similar move in the not so distant future. Who knows? Maybe we’ll get the interoperable shared, open social web that many of us have wanted for the last twenty plus years? Wilder things have happened. Fingers crossed?

Thanks for reading. I know it’s long and needs some editing. If you were there and want to be explicitly mentioned as an attendee, let me know – again on @tomcoates on twitter or email at tom [at] plasticbag [dot] org. It’s worth restating that these are my notes and represent what I understood from the day, and that I may have misheard or misunderstood some of the sentiments expressed. If you were there and think I left out anything important or misrepresented anything, let me know and I’ll consider a correction. Hope everyone’s having a nice day. Yours, xx Tom

Categories
Journalism Politics Social Software Technology

Trump blocked me on Twitter. But for democracy’s sake, we can’t ban him.

I was commissioned to write this Op Ed by NBC News after discussing the matter on Twitter at length. It was a fun if surprisingly hard thing to write. I never managed to get paid for it and never signed anything, so I think it’s probably okay that I republish it here. The original home on NBC News is here: Trump blocked me on Twitter.

A little over six months ago the President of the United States of America blocked me on Twitter. He or his people decided — over the course of one weekend in June — to purge those of us who had been fact-checking him online. By Monday morning, most of us were gone forever.

In a normal administration, a fairly minor micro-scandal like that might represent the high-water mark of public interest in the president’s social media life. Even in this case, there’s more to the story than perhaps meets the eye — blocking critics from official public fora could arguably be illegal — but still, I can’t imagine any previous president spending much time worrying about the effects of Twitter on their agenda.

But things have changed. Today, the censoring of President Donald Trump’s critics represents only the tiniest part of the Trump and Twitter love story — a never-ending 24/7 horror show focusing on and around a profoundly irresponsible and incompetent man’s willful and occasionally terrifying use of social media.

Let’s review: Trump — in the last year alone — has used Twitter to systematically lie to the American peopleattack the very idea of the free pressundermine public trust in America’s core institutionsunderplay racist terror actssupport alleged child molesterscall himself a geniusalienate America’s allies and perhaps worst of alltaunt the world’s most autocratic and unstable nuclear power.

It’s no wonder that so many activists now argue that Twitter has a moral responsibility to ban the president. At protests outside Twitter’s San Francisco offices earlier in January — protests that eventually triggered an anemic and half-hearted response from the company — activists argued that Trump’s appalling behavior had broken the company’s Terms of Use regarding abuse and harassment and should result in him being banned.

They also said that Twitter’s founder Jack Dorsey — by creating a space where Trump could circumvent normal media checks and balances — had directly contributed to the president’s rise to power. Enough is enough, they argued. Ban this man.

I have a lot of sympathy with this argument. I also know some of these activists personally and they are honorable and decent people. But ultimately I believe Twitter must fight to keep Trump on the platform.

For good or ill, Twitter is one of the closest things we have today to a de facto “public space” on the internet. I believe we need such a space. And I believe over the last couple of years, under extraordinary (if deserved) pressure, Twitter has just started to really understand the full range of responsibilities that occupying such a role entails.

One of these responsibilities is to provide a space for the political discourse of a country to play itself out. These are the spaces we now use to debate the issues, to campaign and — now — even to discuss and announce policy. Ideally they wouldn’t be spaces owned by for-profit corporations, but truly public places with rights and responsibilities defined and protected by law. But the U.S. government has shown no inclination or ability to fund or build or run such places, so instead we are where we are.

And where we are is in a country where almost half of the electorate voted for Trump. He did not organize a military coup. It wasn’t a massive administrative error that secured him the job. It was, as much as some people may dispute or dislike it, the will of the people. And until such a time that he’s removed from office, if Twitter is to remain the de facto public space we all need, the will of the people matters.

I’m not going to pretend there isn’t realpolitik in play here too. Let’s face it: Banning the president from Twitter would not remove his platform, he’d simply move to Snapchat, or Facebook or Ello. And if he were banned, the partisan outcry over the decision would probably rend Twitter in half in the process, potentially killing the product and the company in the process. There are no victories there.

Because in the end, the only victories can come from the same processes that got us here. We need to take responsibility as an electorate. If we want him to stop debasing the presidency on Twitter, we need to remove him from the presidency, not remove him from Twitter. We need to support our courts in the fair implementation of the law. And we need to hold our elected representatives to account as they attempt — in turn — to keep Trump from going off the rails.

Meanwhile, there is something we can ask of Twitter. We can ask them to be clear about how they see their role in the world. We need to know what they believe in; what they stand for. We need them to demonstrate that they fully understand they’re not simply a neutral communications mechanism. Today’s Twitter is a place where business happens, elections happen, government happens — and with the arrival of Russia onto the scene — international tensions play out. We need Twitter to show us they understand this and that they’re up to that challenge.

And perhaps we can ask them one more tiny thing — to review their policies on politicians blocking or banning users engaged in legitimate, non-abusive political debate. Twitter’s own statement stood up for “necessary discussion around [politicians’] words and actions, but we can’t have that discussion if those politicians shut us down. And in this post-truth world, we need all the help we can get.

Tom Coates is an entrepreneur and technologist who has developed software products for the BBC, Time Out, Yahoo, Nokia and Jawbone among others. Over the last 20 years he’s written and spoken extensively about tech culture, social platforms, location and the Internet of Things and his work has been featured on the BBC, The Guardian, New York Times, MIT Technology Review and in the Daily Mail. His most recent project was the smart home software company Thington, which was acquired last year by eero inc. 

Categories
Design Personal Publishing Radio & Music Social Software

Visualising your last.fm listening…

I’ve been having enormous fun playing with Lastgraph over the last week or so. You tell it your last.fm username and it runs off and plots you a nice colourful graph that visualises your listening behaviour.

I’ve been with last.fm for a very long time (since 2003, when it was still really audioscrobbler) and have scrobbled a good 50,000 tracks. As a result, my graphs are pretty nice. You can get them visualised in various ways, but I would recommend using the ‘rainbow’ style and allowing it even to plot artists that you’ve only played once. That gives you the greatest detail and most beautiful results.

The most important thing about any visualisation is that it should give you another perspective on a dataset you already knew, and these graphs certainly do that. You really can get a sense of what kind of listener you’re dealing with. When you look at mine you’ll see a hell of a lot of thin lines. I listen to a lot of different artists, normally as part of ‘Most-played Five Star’ playlists and stuff like that. But alongside those classics there’s a decent and consistent injection of new albums and artists that are played more consistently. If you compared it with one of Cal’s graphs (download / pdf) at similar levels of detail then you’d see a very different picture. He listens to albums–only albums–and he listens to them over and over again until he gets bored of them. Then he sticks another album on. This is because he is from the past and hasn’t worked out that it’s all about disaggregation and stuff like that. Foolish boy.

The graphs that lastgraph generates are pretty enormous and full of detail, and because they’ve been generated as vectors, you could quite easily get one printed out onto canvas and put it up in your sitting room. I’m thinking about doing that now. I quite like the idea of decorating my home with beautiful infographics about my behaviour. When people visited they’d get all this extra easy-to-parse information about me, just as if I were a variety-sized packet of Fruit’n’Fibre. I’m a little concerned that it might seem self-involved, but not quite concerned enough not to do it. Perhaps we should make it obligatory for people to put up information on their electricity usage in their sitting rooms and see what impact that had on global warming.

If you want to see my whole graph then I’ve put up a decent-sized jpg of it that you can download and move around. It’s pretty beautiful and interesting, although I have no doubt your graph would be more interesting to you.

And if you’re interested in knowing more about the music that I’ve listened to over the last few years then my Overall charts on artists will reveal my love of Beck, Goldfrapp, The Arcade Fire, Nina Simone and Pixies. Meanwhile my most played tracks would reveal Goldfrapp’s Number 1 and Utopia, The MFA’s The Difference It Makes, Orbital’s Halcyon + On + On, Nouvelle Vague’s Friday Night, Saturday Morning among many others. It’s nice to be able to see the soundtrack of the last four years. I wonder what it’ll be like four years from now.

Categories
Books & Literature Net Culture Personal Publishing Social Software

On Andrew Keen…

Andrew Keen makes me furious but I don’t write about him as a rule. Why not? Because you don’t feed the trolls. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so clearly acting like a troll. I mean, you only have to read his post Etes-vous elitiste in which he declares that people have labelled him an anti-Christ and then uses that as a platform to sell his speaking gigs, while the right-hand column of his website lists all his media appearances. He wants to stir up an argument to get attention. We’re not supposed to enable behaviour like this in our children. We have to be firm. He must be placed on the naughty step.

Andrew is the chap who thinks that the whole internet is full of amateurish morons and that nothing rises to the top and that professional media has become corrupted and less good as a result of all this stuff. I could agree with his comments about mainstream media losing the plot if it didn’t seem to be quite the other way around. As far as I can see in the US at least, mainstream news became about entertainment way before the bloggers came along, there’s lots of money in cinema still and Harry Potter sells by the ton. I watched a TV programme about how in the US they sold Life on Earth as basically animal on animal bestial snuff movies. Presumably also the effect of the nascent internet, even if about four people in the world were using it back then. And clearly the blunt utility of Wikipedia counts for nothing, the beautiful pictures in Flickr aren’t worth looking at, Keen’s own blog presumably yet another indication of how low you now have to stoop to make an impact in the world rather than something we should celebrate – another citizen gets to express their opinion and try and persuade the world he’s right.

The thing is about this, all this conversation is a total waste of time. I don’t understand why he gets the traction he does. I mean, what is he actually trying to accomplish? Does he think that the millions of bloggers will get bored and go home if he explains why their voices don’t count? Does he think that Wikipedia will stop being useful to people (even with its inaccuracies) or YouTube will stop being entertaining? No, of course he doesn’t. He can’t honestly think he can accomplish anything. The future comes, for good or ill, whether you like it or not. The best you can do in such a situation is try and work to fix the issues you see. No market for decent commentary and opinion? Look for a business model that could support it! No way that Encyclopedia Britannica can compete with Wikipedia? Well then why not move some of the resourcing of Britannica towards creating a trusted version of Wikipedia? Check articles every so often for factual accuracy, pull them aside and enhance them and make that your business.

The world we have as a result of technologies of the internet is not a world I find particularly troubling, because it’s a world finding its feet and its a world that has also created significant beauty. It’s a world I feel comfortable in, and there is always a market for what people want and often for what people need. I don’t doubt that journalism will survive or resurge but it will have to adapt.

People like Keen are professional complainers, stirring up fights, decrying the state of the world that we find ourselves in without facing the fact that it is where we are and wishing won’t make it not so. If you don’t like the way the world is, then use the tools that exist and push them further and find a way to compensate for the problems that you think the existing technology has created. I’m afraid it’s a clich√© but it’s true. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. The world we have is the world we can work with, and anyone wanting to push it back to the fifties will fail.

And that’s what really gets to me. Because it’s pretty clear that he knows this. He’s writing his own bloody blog for a start. He knows he can’t win the battle, but he’s put himself on the side of respectability, trustworthiness, reliability and is decrying all the terrible new things in the world. As I once said of Nick Carr, this is a brilliant strategy to make yourself like a terribly intelligent and responsible, serious person without actually having to go to any of the trouble of thinking. That’s why he’s a troll – because his opinion cannot do any good, cannot change anything for the better, but in its decrying of the nascent environment of millions of people finding their voices for the first time, he can get nothing but attention, media coverage and book-sales. It’s not an appeal to better standards, it’s not an appeal to quality or tradition. It has no aspirations to honour. It’s disingenuous to the core, manipulative of the people, anti-progressive, cynical and hypocritical.

Categories
Design Social Software Technology

Methods for the social archiving of mailing lists…

Imagine you’re on a mailing list that archives URLs that people share in some form, and that this creates indirectly some kind of archive or directory. Imagine that this archive has generally been maintained by hand and in a formal taxonomic structure. Imagine that the weight of maintainance started to get the list owner down and they decided they could no longer justify the time they’d need to spend on it. How to distribute the work effectively? How to maintain the utility of the directory without killing the people upon it? What follows are some freeform, stream of consciousness-style notes written off the top of my head. Better out than in.

Your most obvious territory for thought might be the categorisation scheme and how to dismantle the formal structure in favour of something lighter and less complex to maintain. The most obvious direction change you could make here would be to move towards a folksonomic tagging approach. But a true folksonomy must emerge from the overlaying of many people’s efforts otherwise what you’ve got is a personal, informalor just plain badtaxonomy. So straightaway you may end up having proliferated the work rather than reducing it. It may be more distributed, but is it any more likely to get done? That’s a difficult question to answer.

Skipping away from the question of annotation for a moment, let’s look for a moment at how to get the first order objects (links) in the database in the first place. one approach would be to put every unique URL sent to the list directly into a database. Conceivably you could organise those URLs by tags imported from other locations – for example you could just go and get the folksonomic information for that URL from del.icio.us.

There are problems with this approach of course. For a start, you have then a repository of information about links that’s completely editorial free and doesn’t necessarily represent the context in which the URL had originally been shared. That is to say, you don’t have any of the original posters thoughts on the link, just the link and some tags. You could apend the whole e-mail to the URL, but then you you’re stuck with what happens if the list is private. Obviously then you’d be stuck.

An alternative: when an e-mail is sent to a list containing a URL, why not get the server to reply immediately to the original poster with a post containing a link to the place they could annotate or categorise their link to be added to the directory. That way the link originator could take responsibility for their particular piece of maintenance and the directory could grow through the individual actions of multiple individuals. Conceivably, links could be added to the database immediately they’re sent to the list, but not made ‘public’ until they’ve been annotated by either the link originator or the list owner. Because you’d be able to track the originators of the e-mails, you could then easily create a queue of URLs to subsequently annotate or approve.

There’s still a problem here, although it’s not a big one. If you take the folksonomic approach to categorisation then you’d have to rely on the individual’s personal taxonomy rather than on the wisdom of crowds bubbling up ‘correct’ categorisations. So then you have to ask yourself whether there were ways that you could usefully allow other people to enhance these URLs with more information after the originator or site owner has done the initial work. One option is to mine del.icio.us or another social bookmarking site as I proposed above. The other might be to allow other users in the mailing list to add their own annotations and tags to the link concerned. A server could usurp all e-mails containing links and add in additional link to a place where they could be annotated subsequently. The readers would automatically see the original link and then a link place where they could annotate the item. My big concern here is that individuals would be compelled by the software to move the conversations about links off-list and thus deform or split the conversation more than necessary.

One sideline… Of course you don’t necessarily need to get people to follow a URL to add in their information about a link – particularly if they’re the originators. Another approach might be to send the originator an e-mail (as above) with an identifiable string in the subject. Then simply replying to that e-mail with a message only containing a paragraph of text or a few Flickr style tags could add those tags and that annotation to the database. One anxiety there might be people incorporating accidentally great tracts of their previous e-mail into their annotations. Not ideal. Too fragile.

On the other hand, instant messaging in the Twitter model might provide some good options. Imagine if all users on a mailing list added their IM details to their profile, and added a bot to their IM friends charged with handling their mailing lists. When a message was sent to the list with a URL in it, the originator could be sent an IM request to describe the URL and everyone else on the mailing list could be sent the URL without comment. Once they’d observed the link, they could simply reply with their own comments or annotations which would then be saved to a database. Easy. If they didn’t want to keep getting URLs, a simple ‘off’ command could cease the flow…

The most obvious problem there would be if another URL came in as you were typing or if there were substantial communication delays, but I suspect these could be resolved one way or another.

Another option: individuals could choose to categorise URLs within the mailing list by hand using a third party service like del.icio.us which could then be aggregated by a local piece of software. They could either use their own personal accounts and mark things ‘for:{name of list}’ or they could use a shared account. This way you could bootstrap off other tools rather than build everything yourself. The most obvious problem: Is this work that people would want to do? If it is, would using del.icio.us (and conceivably then having to change accounts if you were already a user or having to mix in other people’s links with your personal linkstream) be a greater impediment than another approach? Tricky one.

A few other approaches leap to mind, but I think I’ll leave it there. If anyone has any other ideas, I’d really appreciate hearing them. A good way to think around the territory would be to think about which groups of people could do the various tasks associated with saving or annotation. In some models it’s likely to be the posting user who does everything, in others their peers take on spotty bits of work and all the annotation. In still others you can imagine a dedicated admin doing all the work, and in others still, people off list completely could be categorising and annotating what people on-list are doing. Finding the correct approach will rely on working out where the motives for contributing might be for each group of people and how to build something that meets that particular groups needs. Any thoughts?

Categories
Social Software Technology

Social whitelisting with OpenID…

My ex-colleague Simon Willison has recently been doing some profoundly good work out in the wilds of the Internet promoting and explaining OpenID. In fact, the best articulation I’ve seen anywhere on the Internet of the OpenID concept is his screencast which I think neatly sums up the value of the concept as well as how easy they are to use.

You’re going to need to understand OpenID before I go much further, so if it’s an area that’s new to you, this is the point where you need to either go and watch that screencast or follow carefully the simple description of the service that follows…

OpenID—fundamentally—is a solution to the problem of having a million user accounts all over the place. Instead of getting hundreds of user names all over the place you go to a site that provides OpenIDs and choose one username and password. These sites then give you a pretty simple web address which is probably easiest to think about as a profile page for you. Then when you want to sign into any other site on the Internet with an OpenID all you do is type in the address of this profile page. The site you’re on wanders over to that address, the other site asks you for your password, you tell it your password and then you’re bounced back to the original site where you are logged in and can get on with your business unfussed. Sometimes the local site will ask you if you want a different user name. That’s all there is to it.

Having the same ID across a number of sites can also make a number of other things possible. You could hook up all the stuff you do over the internet really easily, and aggregate it and get a handle on it. You wouldn’t have to share your passwords with lots of different people either. All good. From my perspective, given my long term interest in technologies of moderation and social software, Open ID also provides one super-significant thing – relatively stable, repurposable identities across the web as a whole that can develop levels of trust and build personal reputations. But more on that in a moment.

Of course with new solutions come new problems and the most obvious problem associated with OpenID is ‘phishing’, which is to say that a site could ask you for your OpenID and then pretend to be your central provider. You type in your password thinking that you’re safe, but in fact you’re giving out your details to a rogue third party, who now can use it across all of your registered sites and services. This—let us be clear—is a very real problem and one that Simon talks about again in his piece on OpenID phishing. I’ve heard some really interesting ideas around how you might do this stuff effectively, but I’m still not completely sure that I’ve heard one that I think is totally convincing. This isn’t such a problem for the phishing-resistant old dogs like the people who read my site, but could be an enormous problem for real people. In the endif such a project is to take offI suspect this problem is going to be solved by a combination of design and education. People are going to have to get their heads around web addresses a bit more. Or we’re going to have to build something into browsers that handles distributed identities a bit more effectively.

The area that I really wanted to talk about today though was social whitelisting, which Simon and I were discussing the other day and which Simon has already written about on his site. This emerged out of some conversations about a very weblogger-focused problem, ie. comment spam. I’ve written about problems that I’ve been having with trackback and comment spam before, but every single day it seems to get worse. I get dozens of comment spams every single daysometimes hundreds. And this is even though I use extremely powerful and useful MT plugins like Akismet. And the spam is profoundly upsetting and vile stuff, with people shilling for bestiality or incest pornography, or apparently just trying to break comment spam systems by weight of empty posts.

Over the last year or so, it’s stopped being a problem that I’ve been able to deal with by selectively publishing things. Now every single comment that’s posted to my site is kept back until I’ve had a chance to look at it, with the exception of the few people that I’ve marked as trustworthy. It has now very much become a problem of whitelisting for meof determining which scant number of users I can particularly say it’s okay to post. And if this is where I am now, with my long weblog history and middling okay technical abilities, I can only dread where everyone else is going to be in a couple of years time. This is unsustainable and we have to change models.

Which is where the social whitelisting concept comes in. Most whitelisting has been around approving specific individual people, but this doesn’t scale. A large proportion of the people who post to my sites are doing so for the first time and may never post again.

The solution that Simon and I came up with was really simple and sort of the opposite of Akismet. Jason Kottke deals with a hell of a lot of comments every day. So does Techcrunch and GigaOM. Every day they approve things that people have written and say that it’s okay for them to be more regular posters. So each of these people is developing their own personal whitelist of people that they trust. More importantly I trust Jason and Techcrunch and GigaOM along with Matt Biddulph and Paul Hammond and Caterina Fake and about a thousand other people online. So why shouldn’t I trust their decisions? If they think someone is worth trusting then I can trust them too. Someone that Caterina thinks is a real person that she’s prepared to let post to her site, I should also trust to post on mine. This is one of the profound benefits of OpenID – it’s more reliable than an e-mail address that people can just spoof, but it’s just as repurposeable. You can be identified by it (and evaluated and rewarded for it) all across the whole web.

So the idea is simplicity itself. We switch to a model in which individual sites publish lists of OpenIDs that they have explicitly trusted in the past. Then individually, site owners can choose to trust anyone trusted by other site owners or friends. People who are trusted by you or your friends or peers can post immediately while the rest are held back in moderation queues for you to plough through later. But with any luck the percentage of real comments held back over time would rapidly shrink as real people became trusted and fake people did not.

Another approach to this idea would be to create a central whitelisting service with which you could share your specific trusted OpenIDs and associate them with your weblogs. Through a central interface you could decide to either accept a generic trusted set of whitelists from the top 100 weblogs on the planet to get you going, or add in the specific weblogs of friends, family and colleagues that you know share the same interests or readers. And of course individual weblogs can be rated subsequently for whether they let through people who subsequently turn out to be troublemakers, or rewarded for the number of real people that they mark as trustworthy. I want to make this particularly clear – I’m not talking about one great big web of trust which can be polluted by someone hacking one whitelist somewhere on the internet. I’m not talking about there being one canonical whitelist anywhere either. I’m definitely and specifically talking about you deciding which site owners (or groups of site owners) that you trust and that being the backbone to your personal service. People that your peers trust may be different to the people that my peers trust. And so it should be.

There’s even a business model here. I’d pay (a small amount) for any service that allowed me to have vibrant and enthusiastic conversations on my weblog without having to manually approve every single message. I’m sure other people would too. And of course, much like OpenID itself, there’s no reason that there should only be one such whitelist provider online. There could be a whole ecology here.

So what do people think? Does this have legs? Is it a sufficiently interesting idea to play with further? Where is the OpenID community on this stuff at the moment? Could social whitelisting of OpenIDs be the thing that rescues distributed conversation from death by spam? There’s a discussion over on Simon’s original post on the subject, or feel free to post below (but be warned that it may take me a while to approve your messages…)

Categories
Conference Notes Social Software

Thoughts around "Social by Design"…

No doubt tomorrow when they’ve sobered up there’ll be a good bit of reportage from the Techcrunch UK guys about the Beers and Innovation: Social by Design event that I got back from a couple of hours ago, but since I wasn’t drinking I can catch a bit of a march on them and give you my thoughts straight away. All in all, not a bad evening – it was lovely to catch up with some of the people that I don’t really see that often and see what people are talking about, although it’s also a little frustrating to see some of the same conversations making the rounds that we heard three years ago about Friendster and six years ago about Six Degrees. Still the speakers were pretty good value with Meg Pickard‘s talk being particularly cool. I should expect that, I’ve known her for years and I count her as a friend, but still, it’s worth saying.

It wasn’t all super good fun. There were a bunch of questions and comments from the audience that I got really tense about and wanted to jump in for, but being stuck in the audience meant that there was a limit to the amount I could effectively stick my oar in before I felt I had to be quiet, but hey – I’ve got a weblog, so I can give my opinions on a bunch of them now instead.

Things that particularly stuck in my head – a statement about design being irrelevant in social media environments, which I’ve heard around a hell of a lot, normally with MySpace presented as evidence. I’ll agree that shiny graphic design doesn’t always carry along a conversation or make a place feel friendly and informal enough to talk and connect, but there are two things that it’s important (albeit obvious) to say about this – firstly that design is not about purely the visual layer. Design in social software is about creating functional social environments that fulfil user needs, extend or enhance the social or collaborative abilities of the people within them, are clear and easy to use and avoid falling foul of trolls, griefers and internecine conflicts. If you can create mechanisms for helping people create something collectively of aggregate value as well, then that’s profoundly important too. These are all places which involve considerations of design and I’ve yet to see a single site that doesn’t take these seriously do well in this space.

And secondly, I think it’s worth debunking the MySpace example for a minute – people find it genuinely entertaining and engaging, it meets social needs, but sure it’s not totally usable and it’s ugly as all buggery. But on the other hand, it was bootstrapped with a list of millions of e-mail addresses and heavily marketed towards aspirational communities (musicians). If you look for the features that distinguished MySpace from Friendster before it, there were only really a couple. One of which was massive personalisation, which is definitely a big deal however badly it was implemented. The other is in the sheer innovation and focus of the marketing. The fact that it flies despite the fact that it doesn’t look great doesn’t mean that it thrived because it didn’t look great. There are other factors involved in a site’s success other than what it looks like and MySpace did a pretty extraordinary job in a bunch of these.

Another comment or question that arose from the crowd was about the social benefits of social software – was there any evidence that it might engender a cultural revolution? How was it being used for the good of mankind? I heard a room full of people talk around this stuff but absolutely none of them said the obvious things which we really need to be aware of. I look to the net and I see Wikipedia (a massive repository of free data available for everyone to use), Open Street Map (a collective effort to map the world for the good of the world) and Flickr a photo website full of millions of photos free for anyone to use. I see a resurgence in the commons, with creative work being made collectively by hundreds of thousands of people across the world. I see fifty million weblogs giving individuals the ability to express their opinions and organise and collectivise, forming relationships and arguing their particular political perspectives helping to form the news (for good or ill). One way or another this stuff is having an impact and it’s such early days. It’s not obvious what changes this stuff will engender over the next twenty years, but this stuff has already changed the discourse forever, even if at the moment the way it’s reshaping the world is far from clear.

And a final comment that I’ve heard frankly far to many times already but which we have to start refusing to take seriously – where is the money? Some people seem to find it impossible to believe that social media can create value even as all around them people seem to do so. Look to the grandfather of ecommerce – look to Amazon and tell me that there’s no money. Look to MySpace and eBay and Flickr. And don’t just look to advertising. Look to premium accounts. Look to affiliate sales. Look to brand building. Look to the creation of content with financial value. Look at the creation of marketplaces. There are endless possibilities, and it’s time peopleparticularly in the UKjust recognised that and moved onto the more interesting discussions…

Categories
Social Software Talks Technology

Slides from my Future of Web Apps (SF06) talk…

Last week I talked at the Future of Web Apps conference in San Francisco as detailed in my euphoric debrief on Saturday. It was not a talk that I looked forward to enormously, but I have to say that the response has been really positive with a decent number of people asking me to post up the slides. So that’s what I’m here to do – providing one (large/75Mb) PDF version: Greater than the sum of its parts and the other a Keynote-produced (and partly self-optimised) small web version.

The talk is about how to generate systems and models wherein large groups of people can publically create something together that’s more than the sum of its parts. It’s about Wikipedia, Flickr, motives for social engagement, how to derive value from innumerable small contributions and what challenges this form of creation may be causing in a world of proprietary data. All fun stuff. Hopefully.

Much as with my last Future of Web Apps talk there’s an extent to which the slides will only make sense if viewed alongside some coherent notes of the talk around them. There are luckily some of those available online. I want to make sure to thank Matt Webb, Simon Willison and Matt Biddulph again (in addition to everyone else who helped me get it together) before I post up the thing in question. Mr Webb in particular deserves a mention since there’s a great chunk of thinking in this piece that – while I’m not sure he’d agree with all of it – was definitely the result of conversations that we had together at the BBC.

Like last time, I will promise right now to properly write up the talk in question, but – again like last time – it’s quite likely to be a while before I can get my act together!

Categories
Gaming Net Culture Social Software

On things that aren't fun, and fun that is bad…

Last Friday – around ten in the evening – Pentheus, my main character in World of Warcraft, hit level sixty. Thinking back, I’m now not entirely sure where he was when this happened, although I believe it was in the wastes of Silithus. I waited until I’d got to the Altar of Storms to start my quests for my Dreadsteed before I took the above picture.

I honestly don’t know how I feel about the whole thing. It was – frankly – sort of an anti-climax. Nothing happened, I just remained being level sixty. There was no sense of a threshold being reached. My character – the same character I’ve been playing on and off since November – was just slightly more powerful than he was before. And a whole range of long extended new quests wandered off before him. There would be no new spells, no new pets, no real development – except in sets of armour and property. Each quest, each raid will now be longer and more involved than they were before – a dungeon taking two or three evenings to explore properly and requiring a group of people to play with that I’ve struggled to collect along the way. The whole game now feels very laborious and slow – the simple pleasures of earlier in the game, where you were picking up new abilities and developing quickly have just disappeared, to be replaced with something more drudgelike, robotic and … as the people in game describe it … grinding.

Now the interesting thing about this is you’d think that was a very good reason to stop playing the game immediately – but somehow no. My relationship with World of Warcraft is a lot more complicated than that – so complicated that it’s forced me to reconsider a lot of my assumptions about gaming. These assumptions have been further challenged by reading Raph Koster’s book and weblog, A Theory of Fun for Game Design. The two experiences – reading and playing – have not pushed in the same direction however – they’ve not led me to the same conclusions – and this has resulted in me spending a lot of time wondering about the relationship between entertainment and productivity, fun and work, drudgery and compulsion. I’ve started wondering whether a game could still be considered good if you want to play it a lot but at the same time resent the time that it takes from you. What if you find it boring but still somehow can’t put it down. Can you love and hate a game at the same time and still call it ‘fun’? Can a game be a narcotic, or a guilty secret or an addiction? Can it be a fruitless activity without value that still feels good

Raph’s book includes a really interesting analysis on what games are, and what fun is and is not which is far too long to quote in full here, but which includes this summary:

Games aren’t stories. Games aren’t about beauty or delight. Games aren’t about jockeying for social status. They stand, in their own right, as something incredibly valuable. Fun is about learning in a context where there is no pressure, and that is why games matter.

This sort of fascinates me because it contains a weird twist of logic – that fun is learning without pressure, and that therefore games matter – presumably because learning is de facto a good thing. But what if you’re learning a system or a landscape with no transferable value – what if a specific game presents you with a structure designed to purely generate the sensation of perpetual fun by short-circuiting the learning impulse and misdirecting it into valueless territories? There would be a memetic advantage in being a game that could be intoxicating in that way without requiring that people learn skills that were transferable elsewhere. For a start, real-world skills are harder to develop and perhaps less short-term satisfying. Secondly, a process that teaches you real-world skills would result in you evolving and changing. A game that could short-circuit your learning instinct wouldn’t have to do that. There would be no reason for you to leave.

There’s another quote in Raph’s book which is about what happens when you get older and why people stop playing games. He says, “We don’t actually put away the notion of ‘having fun’ as far as I can tell. We migrate it into other contexts. Many claim that work is fun, for example (me included). Just getting together with friends can be enough to give us the little burst of endophins we crave.”

I think this is really interesting, because it hits on a few more weird contradictions – working can be a learning exercise, it’s true, but there’s normally some risk involved. if you do bad things in a job, you can be fired. There are consequences. So that seems rather at odds with his earlier sense of fun. And a work environment has no formal ruleset, has no structure that you’d recognise as game-like. And of course it can have real-world rewards. If work can be fun, then I’d argue that’s not because it’s like games – an environment in which you can learnwithout risk, but precisely because it’s not like games, the productive element generates a satisfaction that is totally missing in World of Warcraft. The creative and generative element is also absent. Perhaps the reason we think of games as a childish activity is because play in our youth is supposed to inform work in our adulthood. Perhaps then, a game that feeds on our desire to learn and our childlike instincts but cannot give us the satisfactions of creation or real dangers, is a con, a short-cut, a parasite. Perhaps adult gaming is nothing more than an opiate, designed to provide satisfactions and a sense of development or progress that the real world is unable to provide for most people, or that people are too nervous to fight for.

Apparently you can get a character on World of Warcraft to level sixty in about three months of consistent after-work play. Personally, my experience has taken me three times that length of time, and has been squeezed around long hours on work projects and more travelling than I’ve ever done before. Given that it hasn’t massively compromised these parts of my life, I’m guessing that the level of compulsion I’ve felt to play has not been massively excessive – but it’s still felt like a time sink that somehow claims me for my out of work creative time. That really worries me.

Let me put it this way – while I feel no massive compromise to my life is occurring now, while my relationship with the game is merely grudging at the moment, I can imagine coming to hate the game and yet still wanting to play it. Is that an extraordinary statement? Is that a piece of self-insight there, or is it something about the game? I can’t tell where the fault lies if there is a fault? Can you build something that is too addictive simply in the way it presents challenges and rewards, to the extent that it becomes psychologically addictive. Can something with no pharmaceutical components be a drug? Or is this simply a matter of self-discipline and self-control? How tempting does an alternative world filled with mechanisms for alleviating status anxiety have to be before the space between fun and craving gets crossed? Is television any different? Am I just coming to some weird form of Protestant neurosis in my mid-thirties?

One of my older posts is currently full of people talking about their problems with World of Warcraft in particular – wives saying that her husband ignores his children to play, men who say they would rather play WOW than have sex with their wives, teenagers who say that they’re failing school so they can play, and it’s led me to this weird point. Are they all making excuses? Is the game a scapegoat? Are they weak-willed and to be pitied? Or are we as a culture starting to construct toys that are too effective and end up hurting people? I know it sounds alarmist, but I really want people’s opinions. What do you think?

Categories
Politics Social Software

On Massively Multiplayer Propaganda…

Simon drew my attention to a site called GIYUS.org the other day and it’s been in my thoughts ever since, and I’ve come to think of it as a really troubling kind of troll-supporting political malware, representing a technologically-empowered massively-distributed form of propoganda that I’ve never seen before. The site’s full name is Give Israel Your United Support and it works like this – individuals download a tool (the Megaphone Desktop Tool) which then alerts people to new articles and polls around the web that question Israel’s policies in the Middle East or ask for public opinion about them. The people concerned are then supposed to visit the site directly and respond to the poll or story or write an e-mail or whatever. They present an example on the page of one of the things that you could be alerted to:

The reason for this activity? Stated at the top of the page, “Today’s conflicts are won by public opinion. Now is the time to be active and voice Israel’s side to the world.” The software is designed to do two things – firstly to make it clear that there’s a large active pro-Israel population in the world, but also it’s there to make sure that the pro-Israel point of view is over-represented in the popular media. These are – let me repeat – the project’s stated goals.

Now I want to make it very clear here very early on that I’m not going to be making an anti-Israeli tract. It’s pretty much irrelevant to me who is using this particular tool – just that the tool exists. Or more specifically – since there’s no way to put the genie back in the bottle – that tools like this exist and will continue to exist from now on as ways to attempt to deform the social discourse – whether that be for Democrats, Republicans, Israelis, Iraqis, Americans, Conservatives. This should be troubling to all of us, although I’m not sure that there’s very much we can do about it.

The short term consequence will be that all large scale public discussions and polls on the internet will become highly suspect – none of these groups are set up to deal with this kind of political spam yet. And that has to heavily affect the ability of organisations that deal with feedback from their audiences to do so fairly or to respond to a real constituency rather than just innumerable interest groups. This is, in effect, a way of harnessing hundreds of thousands of people to massage the public debate – the massively distributed conversation of the internet now has a form of PR – a form of propoganda – to match.

In substance, of course, there is little that has changed here – politicians and religious groups have always wanted to get out their vocal supporters, they’ve always wanted to move public opinion and help people spread the word. And they’ve used all kinds of techniques to do it – right back to the simple letter-writing campaign. And it’s far from the first time that new communicative, democratising technologies have been co-opted or bought ought by organisations who believe that they have to – or simply wish to – take every advantage they possibly can to win, even if it devalues the environment for all in the process. But it’s still something to be pointed towards with anxiety, to be acknowledged as it is recognised – if only so we can mourn the passing of a particular open spirit as the gamers and the trolls colonise the public spaces and set-up shop. We can expect to see this kind of campaigning tool being used in the next US elections I should think, and who knows – perhaps people I know, people like me, will feel they need to use them to see the change they want in the world, or to fight fire with fire.

Of course there is another way this could end. Because a tool that alerts people to points of debate around Israel isn’t only useful to Israelis, any more than a tool that alerts the Green lobby to big issues is of use only to environmental activists. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see the same tools exposing the same data being co-opted by the direct opponents of the various groups that set them up. Each poll or news article may become nothing more than flashpoint fights between radicals of every persuasion in which the quieter, more average voices get completely drowned out. So there you have it – flashpoints of argument, massively multiplayer campaigning and propoganda techniques, the loss of the common voice and a scouring of the commons. So much for a democratising medium…