fedi is for losers
Does the fediverse have a vibe? I think that yes, there’s a flave, and with reason: we have things in common. We all left Twitter, or refused to join in the first place. Many of us are technologists or tech-adjacent, but generally not startuppy. There is a pervasive do-it-yourself ethos. This last point often expresses itself as a reaction: if you don’t like it, then do it yourself, a different way. Make your own Mastoverse agent. Defederate. Switch instances. Fedi is the “patches welcome” of community: just fork it!
Fedi is freedom, in the sense of “feel free to send a patch”, which is also hacker-speak for “go fuck yourself”. We split; that’s our thing! Which, you know, no-platform the nazis and terfs, of course. It can be good and even necessary to cut ties with the bad. And yet, this is not a strategy for winning. What’s worse, it risks creating a feedback loop with losing, which is the topic of this screed.
alembics
Fedi distills losers: AI, covid, class war, climate, free software, on all of these issues, the sort of people that fedi attracts are those that lost. But, good news everyone: in fedi you don’t have to engage with the world, only with fellow losers! I know. I include myself in these sets. But beyond the fact that I don’t want to be a loser, it is imperative that we win: we can’t just give up on climate or class war. Thing is, we don’t have a plan to win, and the vibe I get from fedi is much more disengaged than strategic.
Twitter—and I admit, I loved Twitter, of yore—Twitter is now for the winners: the billionaires, the celebrities, the politicians. These attract the shills, the would-be’s. But winner is just another word for future has-been; nobody will gain power in the world via Twitter any more. Twitter continues to be a formidable force, but it wanes by the day.
Still, when I check my feed, there are some people I follow doing interesting work on Twitter: consider Tobi Haslett, Erin Pineda, Bree Newsome, Cédric Herrou, Louis Allday, Gabriel Winant, Hamilton Nolan, James Butler, Serge Slama: why there and not fedi? Sure, there is inertia: the network was woven on Twitter, not the mastoverse. But I am not sure that fedi is right for them, either. I don’t know that fedi is the kind of loser that is ready to get back in the ring and fight to win.
theories of power
What is fedi’s plan to win? If our model is so good, what are we doing to make it a dominant mode of social discourse, of using it as a vector to effect the changes we want to see in the world?
From where I sit, I don’t see that we have a strategy. Fedi is fine and all, but it doesn’t scare anyone. That’s not good enough. Twitter was always flawed but it was a great tool for activism and continues to be useful in some ways. Bluesky has some of that old-Twitter vibe, and perhaps it will supplant the original, in time; inshallah.
In the meantime, in fedi, I would like to suggest that with regards to the network itself, that we stop patting ourselves on the back. What we have is good but not good enough. We should aim to make the world a better place and neither complacency nor splitting are going to get us there. If fedi is to thrive, we need to get out of our own heads and make our community a place to be afraid of.
Just get back on IRC and get on with life.
well free to send a patch is also free as in beer and free from payments providers handling the donations because we’re pleading ignorance of too many compliance obligations and free from having a real plan for fighting back when the kiwi farming coordinated chuds decide to play capture-the-flag. bsky has fedi beat in a lot of ways because they tabletopped and modeled out and borrowed against an economic model which fedi is, thus far, way too free from having anything resembling. in fact, i worry that if someone came up with even the concept of a plan for a fedi economy they would be rejected like jesus at nazareth.
btw i think the regexp checking email addresses isn’t hip to the newer tlds.
I disagree with the sentiment of Mastodon being full of losers, because I don’t think that walking away from a toxic place like Twitter is equal to losing. I also think that a lot of people don’t even want to get everybody on the Fediverse, the reason being fear of importing other networks’ toxicity.
There is an alternative view to the loser-theory, that I often observe on Fedi. According to this view, joining Fediverse was not a loss, but a gain. The switching costs then are not just a price one has to pay to join, but also a filter that sieves out everybody who’s mostly interested in clout instead of all the social interactions. Mastodon is large enough for the latter (although it does require more effort to find people you like to listen to, if there are no algorithmic recommendations), but it’s pretty much guaranteed that you won’t get clout on Fedi.
If your goal is to build a large social network, then it’s true, that Fedi is losing, but if you just want to build closer friendlier social network Fedi is winning big time.
By now, it should be common sense that the Internet is not going to be a force for good. It is a force for humankind, and as much as it has advanced us, the progressive left, it has advanced the reactionary right.
The same is true for the Fediverse: If anything, it is an accumulation space for what you call, in all self-pity, losers. You’re highlighting the problem of the progressive: “Ah, we’re such losers, just look at us”. And the reactionaries are just tooting the self horn, laughing at us.
If anything, the Fediverse is the place where progressives meet. We don’t need to call ourselves losers, that is for our opponents to do. Help us to become more. We need to prove them wrong.
Friend, never forget that trying to “win”, or “dominate”, or become big enough as to “scare anyone”, makes you the loser a priori.
(So does caring about celebrities, politicians, or billionaires. Those are all instituted to trick a primate brain into comparing itself with the person on the picture, so that it can feel like shit, so that it can bleed out out some money.)
To be everything for everyone is the prerogative of those that cater to the lowest common denominator. Big social tried to fill that niche, riding on the lingering remainders of a formerly legitimate techno-optimism. What did it achieve? Make some losers feel like they’re winning? Nice illusion, who paid for it?
All it did was demonstrate that the lowest common denominator is really, really low. Then, having made people exhausted and complacent, it lowered the bar even further. For example when it leaked eternal september back into meatspace. Or when it behaviorally profiled the entire fucking world. When it stood and watched, while genocides were coordinated online.
That fediverse exists, right here and now, in spite of its lack of “strategy”, or “economic model”, or whatever other business words you consider necessary for sustained existence, that it exists with all its problems but without being an institution of abuse by design, is a greater accomplishment than corporate social media — that deeply and inexcusably totalitarian enterprise — could ever hope for.
Have the bells and whistles that were put in place in order to distract you from the power grab of the millenium become something that you now find worthy of striving for? Please take your influencers and clicktivism and bite-sized thoughts somewhere far away from the social arena, then come back. The water’s fine.
The main function of fediverse is to create an epistemic isolate (an “echo chamber”) where one of the core ideological weak spots of tech nerdism cannot be alluded to, let alone challenged. Namely, that infopolitics is inherently politics on neoliberalism’s terms, and that it is therefore doomed to failure if the notional goal is to redistribute power horizontally on the whole. Code will not bring down whatever odious ism it is that you are against. Most of you are objectively working at some flavor of IniTech from which you are trying to achieve escape velocity. The more vehement that left-wing political activism affectations, the more painfully obvious it is that you are failing.
I write this as an anthropology major who runs his own Linux servers with all the usual self-hosted stuff, which is to say as someone in tech but not of it. You have to add this kind of stuff because left-wing tech nerds are in some ways remarkably like right-wing gun nuts. If they sense that you don’t share the milieu’s taken-for-granted assumptions and taboos, they sense an infiltrator and will challenge your right to hold an opinion by demonstrating that you don’t “speak Gun”. I.e. you lack some sort of usually arbitrary bit of trivia knowledge.
Happy to see a humanities specialist hosting their own infra. More power to you! (I do however agree with the preconception that those that don’t can’t be trusted, since they are beholden to those entities that do host infra. Of course, this continues as turtles all the way down. I will once again have faith in grassroots communitarian undertakings when they at least demonstrate willingness to build underground sustainable semiconductor fabs. Pending that, retrocomputing enthusiasts are on to something - there’s little room for backdoors on a 6502)
Your garden variety egalitarian maximalist has a major blind spot about how power tends to agglomerate. By definition, it does that on its own terms. The futile drive to redistribute it horizontally once and for all is also a neoliberal spook. It just temporarily resets that process within a given isolate. The trick here is to keep creating more sources of power - that way the overall balance at least continues to approach “almost enough for everyone” infinitely. This is possible because power can spread fractally, besides horizontally and vertically; for example, a good baseline for freedom is having conscious control over every molecule of one’s own body. I don’t know anyone who can do that, though. Maybe next kalpa.
In present terms, if the established order is maintained by guns, code, and the notions and concepts that form a feedback loop between those artifacts and the humans who wield them, I don’t see how getting some of one’s own would harm one’s cause. And when you have a machinic instrument of power, the locus of control is at the interface between user and machine. (That is to say, we need to radicalize designers.) The fediverse has already succeeded in creating an alternative space that on the surface matches some of the interface language that users have learned from centralized power distributor systems (microblogging), but is internally organized on a different, decentralized basis. This is great - new tools, same skills, new goals. For me, this makes a huge difference: rotting in silence because I cannot bring myself to communicate over a hegemony platform, vs. being able to speak out and reach out towards possibly like-minded people.
Speaking out and reaching out towards possibly like-minded people is really a low bar though. Also, doesn’t that make scribbling on bathroom stall doors the original fediverse? What has it’s influence on literary culture been?
I also seem to recall two earlier fediverse causes that were heavily boosted, around the time of the Snowden leaks, by the same people who are now trying to boost Mastodon etc. into a societally relevant reality: Friendica and Diaspora. How are those doing? Don’t answer, it’s only a rhetorical question. But I’d be surprised if what still goes on there is about more than the process of building Friendica and Diaspora itself, along with some people pushing all manner of socio-political marginalisms.
To put it more bluntly, I think anyone who really enjoys the sort of exchange that goes on on decentralized tech is lying to themselves. Not lying to themselves that they subjectively find them to be enjoyable, but lying to themselves that this is the kind of exchange that a normal person ought to find fulfilling. Life has to be more than an endless series of XKCD “Aren’t we STEM majors smart for getting this joke?” comics, retro computing trivia, retro gaming nostalgia and virtue signalling for obscure left-wing politics that aren’t going to go anywhere (else they’d be on the mainstream media and platforms)... Not all of these things are wrong per se, but its an extremely limited spectrum of social exchange that the fediverse can accomodate.
You see something analogous in FOSS every few months. Every time some new locked-down gadget comes out, the next day there will be an article on Ars Technica about how someone has succeeded in running Doom on it. This periodic ritual has the value of a religious ruling that something is kosher for FOSS people and tech nerds more broadly, which I assume we all are. The substance of the ruling is that this new thing and the evolution it represents (i.e. a further expansion of the scope of locked-down tech) can ultimately be subverted for general computing. Which is true on a theoretical level, but ignores the fact that resources are far too limited too make such a subversion practically meaningful.
The point is therefore that decentralized tech and FOSS, as causes to which those engaged in them attribute a (proto-)political valence, are just ways for tech-involved people to redefine problems and solutions so as to rationalize their continued involvement in tech as a societal phenomenon that is on the whole destructive. Often redefining problems and solutions towards technical aspects that subtly imply the irrelevance of non-technical aspects. When non-technical aspects are addressed, it is often with the societal-scientific naivete of people who have been socialized their whole adult lives to believe that their perspective is superior to that of the social sciences and the humanities. The takes aren’t inherently wrong are odious, the wrongness lies in the fact that people spout of about the non-technical aspects of tech as if as disciplinary expertise holds no special authority, if they even suspect the existence of such expertise. Which is consistent with the broader function of tech nerd culture as a continuous series of performances staged to devalue the humanities.
Online communication has to be a way to facilitate real world communication. For example, our little local DSA chapter uses a Discord chatroom to coordinate meetings, communicate between members, etc. It would be great if we could self-host that stuff, but we don’t know how ephemeral our group will be (so can’t justify even the minimal expense of self-hosting), and we don’t coordinate anything through it that would imperil our safety from agents of the state. Self-hosted solutions also come with onboarding problems. It’s one thing to ask people to join a Discord server, they already probably have an account, etc. It’s another thing to ask people to join our XMPP server, or to have someone with the designated task of creating accounts and managing digital infrastructure security.
I agree with the commenters who suggest that digital technology alone will not move the needle. Of course it won’t, just like stockpiling weapons won’t on its own. These things have to be attached to political projects with a definite aim, some sort of political/social program that it wishes to impose on its opponents (again, we are talking about power here, which is the imposition of our political will onto others, e.g., reactionaries, capitalists, and so on). The blindspot of a lot of left-technologists has been political power. There’s often an anarchistic desire to “abolish power” or to distribute it in an “egalitarian” (i.e., liberal) way, which results in this morass of decentralized and hardly compatible communications systems like Mastodon, unlinked from a political project like socialism. The Pirate Parties of the Snowden era were at least a half-step toward real politics, but divorced from socialism, they devolved into inane market anarchisms which are essentially neoliberal ideologies on steroids.
Oh it’s absolutely a low bar. Except that it’s all we have as social beings. Other than, perhaps, a dubious capacity for violence—and not everyone has even that, for better of worse.
A core aspect of my teleology is minimizing violence while recognizing and protecting the inherent dignity of sentience. A human world where oppression is made permanent, and resistance is made impossible, could also be low-violence—for example, by surveillance-powered behavioral preemption—but I’d still find it morally abhorrent.
Unfortunately, most interactions of which people are presently capable, equate precisely to performances of poorly sublimated interpersonal violence! That’s why I’m sympathetic to the side of tech nerdism which you consider masturbatory: people are channeling the machine-manipulation skills that society has pushed them to acquire, into playful and non-harmful activities. They could be applying themselves to things like spam farms and roofie eshops—but they aren’t, even though it would be more materially productive and thus socially consequential. (This is, by the way, also why the herd human finds the “nerd” disgusting: look at this person imposing their will not upon one’s own kind, but upon complex inanimate objects! Such pervert!)
I don’t see running DOOM on the proverbial toaster as blessing said toaster for nerd use, as much as a cheap flex, itself blessed by the owners of the means of communication (“tech is politically harmless—just look at what its practitioners get up to in their spare time!”). And what social activity can not be seen as futile and ritual through the lens of culturological reductionism? The important thing is for the ritual to not equate partial or total sacrifice: and to me subjugating one’s interiority to the zeitgeist actively propagated by online market-influence campaigns is exactly that. In a world where even pregnancy tests are Turing complete, we are already completely at the mercy of the commodity, incl. the commodification of information, of transfer-of-information, and of ritual social behaviors. Thus, I can’t help but find problematic your unilateral construction of a “normal” person who “ought to” feel fulfilled by certain things.
So where we differ as to whether the Fediverse accomplishes something politically meaningful, is that I don’t find the kind of phenomena that social media has so far enabled (and which, in turn, enable it) as inherently desirable. The contemporary social Internet is disingenously constructed by the entities which benefit from the established unjust order, by way of investing an insane amount of resources into continuing the present relations of violence in the digital sphere—where, one would think, the lack of immediate embodiment would make violence somewhat redundant. They have developed a whole bag of tricks—product addiction, walled gardens, Babylonic mutual unintelligibility of interface languages—just so that even in the virtual world you are still at someone’s mercy, therefore pliable; as with any false consciousness, this remains below the threshold of day-to-day awareness, and it’s only from sufficient distance that it becomes apparent how it changes the way people operate in their lives.
What terrifies me the most in this new iteration of disembodied étatist war machine is its novel and poorly understood instant preemptional capability with complete plausible deniability. Something that, I presume, most humanities scholars—who, I hope you forgive me for saying, often serve as loyal opposition—will only deign to engage with once it’s somewhat safe out there. I have little sympathy for STEM professionals, either, who empower this funeral pyre of humanity quite directly with their labor—except for the case of the enlightened BOFH, who derives as much sustenance from the system while helping its progress not at all. However, devaluing of what amounts to disintermediated control over the means of communication only drives those who have it into the world of fascisms, which offer them quite convincing simulacra of personal power.
The futile, mutually abhorrent marginalisms you speak of serve mainly as a safety valve to capitalism. They are not particularly interesting. Yet even among them one can to hold space for the potentiality of a post-capitalist alternative mode of being. The difference is that the progressive ones are simply lacking in imagination, while the reactionary ones make themselves about their lack of imagination. In that sense, unfortunately, the fash is a lap ahead of us.
Projects like Diaspora and Friendica might not have been able to instantly dismantle this continuation of the offline social web into the online; 2000-2016 techno-optimism did not account for the oil money. However, I’m sure (also without looking at them) that they have served as temporary autonomous zones at least partially outside of the economic mainstream (again, who fabs the chips and runs the networks is at least as important, if not more, as the authorship, capabilities, and usage of the software.) Other than posing a rhetorical question and then instantly answering it being something of a low bar in its own right (sorry): even if such projects were to be involved mainly with the production of themselves, I don’t see what the problem is. It’s perfectly normal for autonomous processes to prioritize self-perpetuation. At what cost they do that, is something of a moral decision. (You can, of course, hack around that by redefining morality for a sufficient group of productive individuals, which is what many historiopolitical processes aspire to.) That these projects do not manage to bootstrap themselves into exponential growth is no great surprise, either, and again whether this is even necessary bears further critique.
Within centralized behavioral aggregators of the kind that require ID to “prevent spam”, I would only be able to have boring interactions, trying to say as little as possible, so as not to draw the ire of the cancel mob, the clique of neonazi content mods, or any conceivable future user of the dataset really. Unfortunately, my formative experiences have rendered me incapable of such communication. Surely, as a person living a life of the mind, you can imagine how horrible it is to have your capacity for speech taken away? I agree that the Fediverse leaves a lot to be desired; in the ideal, one would be able to launch secure communication spaces from their overpowered smartphone without having to get one’s hands dirty with the mental effluvia of several generations of America’s finest. But, in the meantime, Fedi has enabled me to discover this comment section, where, thanks to the person hosting this blog, we can have our conversation in public, yet leaving as little trace of our oppressable identities as possible. It’s sad that in 2024 this amounts to a revolutionary act; nevertheless, it does.