Continued from Part 1: Netribution’s first act revisited

My shock and sadness at Stephen Applebaum‘s death, within a year of Leslie Lowes and Jess Search passing, was a big motivation for this year of issues to reconnect with others from that time. While some of my emails have fallen into a ghosting-or-spam filter pit, others have paid off many times over; e.g. with old friend Eric Dubois that brings Netribution our first new book in 15 years and a wonderful tour around one of Paris’s best kept secrets when we met in April.

But it’s a strange time to be trying to build a standalone publication – just as most of the planet is focussed on funnelling their audience onto monopolistic platforms whose algorithms filter content like a dealer cutting attention-crack. If Tom and I were starting out today we’d probably be forced to use Substack, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or LinkedIn – even if we had our own Podcast (one of the few decentralised parts of the old web that’s not yet been monopolised, despite Spotify’s best efforts).

But I’m a parent now – I don’t need to be popular, I can stick to my principles and hope the world changes, as the arrival of [New Tech Concept Incoming] ActivityPub offers for the first time since Web 2.0 exploded in 2005/06, a path for that. That’s why I moved from Netribution’s 18-years old (!) Joomla to a brand-new, still being finished WordPress site – WordPress recently added ActivityPub with Matthias Pfefferle‘s plugin. This web-changing technology was central in Netribution’s final 2022 R&D project: Monetizing Open Video and is something we’ve been dreaming of in Netribution at least since 2007, when I wrote this:

“With social networks evolving into operating systems for how you stay in touch with your friends and family – as well as share and consume media – the advantages of an open system (like the web itself) over a closed system, controlled by one company (like Microsoft) are pretty clear… Sooner or later a user-owned and run system will evolve, and we can finally talk about web 3.0. If only someone, like a public agency, would invest in creating an open source / open standards social network…” August 2007

ActivityPub?

The name refers to ‘publishing’ but pubs make a good analogy for the problem with giant social media – it’s like a pub with 100 million drinking in it. You have to shout to get heard, and if the Nazis don’t get kicked out, then you’ve ended up in a Nazi bar, but one that’s really hard to leave because your friends are spread all over the place in the middle of conversations.

ActivityPub is a protocol – like email, jpeg, MP3 and ‘http’ (behind every website) – that’s built for a world with millions of ‘pubs’ with 1000s or 100 or even just one or two people in them. But it’s not just a mini-social network builder – there’s the key extra ability to connect with anyone in any pub, and chat/subscribe/like/repost not-to-mention change venue, at any point. So I can be sat a the table in The Lion, and have a chat with a pal at The Plough, provided their landlord hasn’t barred me or my local pub. This is a completely new approach to the challenge of moderating social media: break it into smaller human-run ‘pubs’, and then let those pubs federate with those with similar values and moderation skills, and block those that are only bots selling crypto and conspiracy theories. So the technology itself isn’t where censorship happens – but between communities (just like many English towns have a bar known for Nazis it’s very easy to avoid).

A driving philosophy – in principle– is that small pubs are easier to manage than 100 million user mega-pubs, as you can have a human landlord (aka moderation team). I’m a believer because I witnessed this being how Shooting People worked as an open publishing email list of 40,000 users 25 years ago, without bringing the hate-filled rage that’s normal online today: community guidelines and paid, human moderators, keeping the calm in the Sony vs Canon DV camera wars.

I didn’t explain this in the first two issues, because most film people I know love technology when it helps make or watch films, but start to glaze over with web tech talk. Maybe it’s because, like most tech, it’s easy to sound authoritative and difficult –without investing lots of time– to know if the authoritative person is talking crap. At least if James Cameron used the ‘widgie-dongle with Pro X glide’ on his last movie, then it’s probably ok, but most web talk is normally about how the biggest platforms (and superstars like Musk or Zuckerberg) have got it wrong. It sounds like a classic geek-supremacist ‘I’m an expert and everyone else an idiot’, rather than someone explaining in the 50s what a seatbelt is.

So WordPress + ActivityPub is fascinating as it turns a tiny blog like this one into a node of a network of millions of users, 10,000s of communities and hundreds of new apps and platforms – all using ActivityPub, allowing users on any of them to like, subscribe, read, boost, comment and bookmark to all of the authors on the little blog. The goal is ‘create once, publish everywhere‘ and it’s growing: WordPress, like its competitor Ghost have adopted, and platforms from Flipboard and Medium to Threads and Tumblr are rebuilding things around ActivityPub. This takes us closer to the small, personal website publishing that Netribution was built on 25 years ago, but with the network effects that Web 2.0 brought.

What about BlueSky? Isn’t that ‘decentralised’? When Jack ‘Twitter’ Dorsey founded BlueSky, like many in tech, he figured he could do it better than those who’d come before (ie the many people working with the W3C to develop ActivityPub), so created his own: Authenticated Transfer Protocol (‘AT Proto’). It has some nice things ActivityPub doesn’t have, but also seems to have added making it impossibly expensive to run your own independent server, meaning for now there’s just BlueSky running it. With some 33 million BlueSky users it’s a bit of a VHS vs Betamax split – but it’s not too much of a problem as there is a good bridge to/from ActivityPub/Mastodon.

I find all of this vaguely hopeful as it’s the first viable architectural alternative to the web monopolies – all the previous attempts are versions of ‘here’s a nice new social network who promise not to be evil – please help them rule the world’.

When I first tried out the video tool built on ActivityPub in 2020 (PeerTube) I rewrote Netribution’s last funding project to work with it. This tech isn’t just a concept, it works really well, has millions of users, and it’s not owned by VCs or big monopolies, (even if Meta, with Threads, are on standby for ActivityPub ‘Fediverse’ to take off). It’s like the old web.

Our project – Monetising Open Video Architecture (openvideo.tech)– finished at the start of 2022 and looked at ActivityPub as a way to recreate the 20C indie media ecosystem of indie producer >indie distributors >art cinemas/video stores (ntm indie bands > indie labels > indie record stores / radio stations). These structures resisted monopolisation, and supported a world of music and film, and the careers of those who created them. We see in ActivityPub the potential to do the same online – but without the old media gatekeeping that the web broke down.

But we finished our work at the end of 2022 and I went quiet, and didn’t talk about why. A week after our project finished, Russia invaded the Ukraine, calling it a ‘special military operation’. The world was at war and ‘truth’ as always was its first victim: that’s not new, but the web facilitates this, and I could picture how one part of the tech we’d developed might facilitate easier, cheaper state censorship (it was open tech that already existed, but we gave it a nice, friendly interface) – and there were too many unknowns for me. There were other reasons to go quiet but this was the one that scared me. Our history of championing new empowering media web tech before it goes mainstream, be it crowdfunding, the new craze YouTube, or a promising college-run alternative to Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace, ‘TheFacebook’ – has left me cautious-bordering-paranoid about championing new tech with too many known unknowns. In 2013 I went to meetups from a group of guys plotting to launch a competitor to Bitcoin called Ethereum – and after questioning their founder, Vitalik, ran a mile (they’re now valued at $300bn). So I spent a year quietly presenting MOVA’s three components (RevShare, Mova.claims, open.movie) alongside three events, and then went quiet.

Continued in Part 3: Three Reason’s that’s now changed

Fediverse reactions

It’s not easy to quickly summarise award-winning Ugandan Dilman Dila’s work: he’s made Nepalese documentaries like The Sound of One Leg Dancing, published a short story collection A Killing in the Sun and acclaimed novels, made hit YouTube shorts like What Happened in Room 13, shot an African Academy Award-nominated feature the Felista’s Fable, and thru his production company Dil Stories, produced multiple TV series for DStv (pan-African Satellite TV channel). He blogs and advocates extensively, and has made the Fediverse his home at @dilmandila@mograph.social & on PeerTube and, like Netribution@25, turned his WordPres blogs into a subscribeble social media node. His next film is the Night Dancer – about a deadly dance-off, with crowdfunding invited here – on his own site because Kickstarter and IndieGogo disallow projects from much of Africa (unlike Patreon), which he discusses here.

video.ploud.jp/videos/embed/65…

How I quit my job to become a full-time artist

“It started with Maisha Film Lab. When I was selected in 2006, I got the green light I had been searching for all my life. Before that, I stumbled about blindly, not knowing if my writing was any good, not knowing if I had that something that makes you a good artist. I did not have confidence to even think of becoming a full-time artist, so I snuggled comfortably in my salaried job. In Maisha I met people like Steve Cohen (RIP), who thought I had something. He took me under his wings taught me screenwriting, by helping develop The Felistas Fable, over a four year period. That was my film school. Then there was Musarait, the then Program Coordinator of Maisha, who pulled me aside one day and asked, ‘Have you ever thought about directing?’” Continued…

The inequality facing African filmmakers seeking film funding

I did not want to rant, but as I researched crowdfunding options for my next feature film, Big Tree, it pissed me off to discover that all major platforms, including kickstarter, backerkit, and indiegogo, allow creators only from certain countries to set up campaigns. Yet, anyone anywhere can give them money? Funny.” Continued…

Why my film crew is full of women

“There’s something you are doing right,’ a male Ugandan film director told me, as we discussed the crew of this TV series I created, Mama and Me. ‘Do you follow some kind of feminist agenda? Why is your crew so full of women?’ I’d just told him that I was the only male in the writer’s room, and that most heads of department were female. ‘It wasn’t a conscious decision,’ I replied. ‘It somehow just happened.’ And he said, ‘Well, if you can put together a film crew that is sixty percent female, then you are surely doing something right.’ I got similar remarks about Her Broken Shadow, with some critics saying it as feminist, and lauding me for having an all-female cast.” Continued…

DillmanDella.com
DilStories.com
@dilmandilia@mograph.social
video.ploud.jp/a/dilmandila

I'm currently self-hosting several services and looking to harden my setup. I already use Nginx Proxy Manager (NPM) with wildcard Let's Encrypt certs, but I'm thinking of moving to something more robust with:

A proper WAF (Web Application Firewall)

Deep network monitoring (ideally per-container or per-service)

Possibly some bot protection and anomaly detection (ai scrapping is annoying)

I've looked into Traefik, BunkerWeb, and Pangolin. Each has pros and cons, BunkerWeb seems WAF-ready, but has some limitations (SSL setup is nightmare). Traefik is very flexible, but I’d need to add middleware myself (also runing non docker services). Pangolin looks great but werent able to get it work in my setup.

Main goals:

Secure exposure of HTTP(S) services (wildcard certs with Cloudlfare)

Easy rules for blocking bad IPs or patterns

Optional: rate-limiting, automatic fail2ban-style bans

Bonus: nice dashboard or at least logs that make sense

I also have a mix of Docker and bare metal services, so proxying non-container stuff cleanly is important.

My final goal is setup like this: OVH (Reverse Proxy - Firewall) - Tailscale - Hetzner Server)

Heute, am 17. Mai 2025, endet eine der emotionalsten Spielzeiten, die ich je als Fan und Mitglied des FC St. Pauli erlebt habe. Ein letztes Heimspiel am Millerntor gegen den VfL Bochum – und ja, wir haben den Klassenerhalt geschafft! Nach Jahren des Wartens, des Träumens, des Hoffens, war die Rückkehr in die Bundesliga schon ein Triumph. Aber dass wir uns in dieser ersten Saison behaupten konnten, ist ein echtes Statement. Ein lautes, herzliches, ehrliches: Wir gehören hierher!

Der Weg war kein Spaziergang – aber es war unser Weg

Ich will ehrlich sein: Diese Saison war ein Kraftakt. Für die Spieler, für den Verein, aber auch für uns Fans. 34 Spiele mit Zittern, Jubeln, Fluchen und unzähligen Momenten, in denen das Herz stillstand – oder explodierte. Mit 34 Punkten schließen wir die Saison auf Platz 15 ab – direkt über dem Strich. Das klingt knapp. Und das war es auch. Aber genau das ist ja das Wesen des Fußballs am Millerntor: Kein Hochglanz, sondern Haltung. Kein Glamour, sondern Kampf.

Mit durchschnittlich 0,75 Toren pro Spiel, einer Passquote von 78 % und nur 44 % Ballbesitz gehörten wir rein statistisch nicht zu den Stars der Liga. Aber Fußball ist mehr als Zahlen. Fußball ist Leidenschaft. Und die haben unsere Jungs geliefert.

Unsere Spieler – mehr als nur Namen auf dem Trikot

Ein paar Namen möchte ich hervorheben – einfach, weil sie mein Fanherz in dieser Saison besonders bewegt haben:

• Morgan Guilavogui – unser Top-Torjäger mit 6 Treffern. Kein Lautsprecher, sondern ein Arbeiter mit Torriecher.
• Johannes Eggestein – mit 3 Toren und 4 Assists ein echter Offensivmotor. Immer unterwegs, immer anspielbar, immer da.
• Jackson Irvine – 5 Assists, 166 gewonnene Zweikämpfe. Unser Kapitän, unser Anker, unser Australier mit Herz.
• Nikola Vasilj – zwischen den Pfosten oft der einzige Grund, warum wir in engen Spielen nicht untergegangen sind.

Diese Jungs – und viele andere – haben in dieser Saison nicht nur Fußball gespielt. Sie haben für den Verein, für die Kurve und für uns Mitglieder auf dem Platz gestanden. Und dafür: Danke. Von Herzen.

Ein Verein wie kein anderer – und die Zukunft

Ich habe in dieser Saison wieder gespürt, was den FC St. Pauli so besonders macht: Es ist die Haltung. Die Menschen. Die Verbindung. Der Verein ist mehr als Bundesliga-Fußball. Es geht um Diversität, Antifaschismus, Solidarität, eine klare politische Haltung – und die ehrlichste Fußballkultur Deutschlands.

Und doch tut es gut zu wissen, dass wir auch sportlich mithalten können. Die Bundesliga braucht Vereine wie uns – und wir werden bleiben. Vielleicht nicht als Tabellenführer. Aber als moralischer Kompass. Als Ort, an dem Fußball noch etwas bedeutet.

Mein Fazit: Wir haben es geschafft – gemeinsam!

Diese Saison war ein Beweis dafür, dass man mit Überzeugung, Teamgeist und einem großartigen Trainer die größten Hindernisse überwinden kann. Ich bin stolz, ein Teil dieses Vereins zu sein. Und ich freue mich jetzt schon auf die Saison 2025/26.

Denn eins ist klar: Am Millerntor wird weiter Geschichte geschrieben. Braun-weiße Geschichte.

Forza St. Pauli – für immer.

– Krisú