Christine Lemmer-Webber - Building a Humane Social Internet

Mastodon: @cwebber@social.coop

The co-author of the ActivityPub protocol and co-founder of Spritely Institute, building the next generation of decentralized networked technology, delivers a critique of the Fediverse from one of its co-architects.

The Fediverse’s real strength is participatory structure: any one server can fail and the network keeps running. But it isn’t decentralized enough to survive the threats coming for it, including age-verification laws rooted in anti-queer politics, hardware-level lockdown of what you can run on your own computer, and data-centre concentration that turns information infrastructure into a kill switch. The answer is to push further: content-addressed messaging, peer-to-peer chat with no host to subpoena, and technology built around joy and empowerment rather than defensive compliance.