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

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