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silverpill

silverpill

@silverpill@mitra.social remote
Open link

Ripple/XRP (a cryptocurrency company) just granted 200k USD to Social Web Foundation, "...to research sustainable revenue and operating models for digital publishers and community-run platforms":

https://interledger.org/news/interledger-foundation-awards-200000-social-web-foundation-support-decentralized-social-media

This means they will be able to influence the development of the ActivityPub specification at W3C.

For those who don't know: Interledger, WebMonetization and OpenPayments are basically the same thing, these projects were created by Ripple ~10 years ago in order to insert their cryptocurrency and related payment services into web standards. These projects are sometimes presented as independent, but this is a lie, they are not (not in 2019, not in 2025).

Needless to say, Ripple itself is a borderline scam: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2019/03/01/is-ripple-a-scam/. It's not even a cryptocurrency really, their infrastructure is completely centralized and no one in cryptocurrency space takes them seriously. But they have a lot of money to bribe people, so I am sure that we will hear more about their adventures soon.

RE: https://socialwebfoundation.org/?p=99982

Evan Prodromou

Evan Prodromou

@evan@cosocial.ca remote
Open link

@silverpill

The grant is for four subprojects:

1. Fediverse sustainability. What are the economic, psychological and emotional pressures on instance operators and other infrastructure providers? How can we support them?

2. Creator economy. What social, organizational, and technical infrastructure do content creators depend on? What are we missing on the Fediverse?

Evan Prodromou

Evan Prodromou

@evan@cosocial.ca remote
Open link

@silverpill

3. Cooperatives. social.coop, cosocial.ca and data.coop are all great examples of coops on the fediverse. Does this democratic and participative corporate structure provide an advantage for the Fediverse?

4. Web Monetization. Many Fediverse projects have implemented this API. We'll be identifying two more multimedia projects and helping them use the protocol.

Zergling_man - fedicon 2026 @ C109

Zergling_man - fedicon 2026 @ C109

@Zergling_man@sacred.harpy.faith remote
Open link
@evan @silverpill
>1. Fediverse sustainability. What are the economic, psychological and emotional pressures on instance operators and other infrastructure providers? How can we support them?
import https://blog.freespeechextremist.com/blog/fse-vs-fbi.html

>2. Creator economy. What social, organizational, and technical infrastructure do content creators depend on? What are we missing on the Fediverse?
If you can figure out how to do money transfers in a way that isn't a massive doxxfest and also doesn't constantly get shat on by investors, bankers, governments, etc., you'll probably make a few million from people thanking you for freeing them from that bullshit.
(Hint: BMT Micro is about as close as we'll ever get.)

>3. Cooperatives. social.coop, cosocial.ca and data.coop are all great examples of coops on the fediverse. Does this democratic and participative corporate structure provide an advantage for the Fediverse?
The whole point of decentralisation is that everybody is effectively free to moderate themselves: They choose an instance that they like the moderation of, if such doesn't exist, they create it. So, no, it's good for an arena game and that's about it. (I've toyed with the idea of writing a bot that's capable of parsing rules to some extent that can be set as the head of an instance where people try to manipulate each other into voting for rules that will get themselves banned, but for it to be fun I think you have to allow sufficiently arbitrary rules that a bot would never be capable of enforcing them.)

>4. Web Monetization. Many Fediverse projects have implemented this API. We'll be identifying two more multimedia projects and helping them use the protocol.
ur an fgt, and worse, a mastodonger
Phantasm

Phantasm

@phnt@fluffytail.org remote
Open link
@p @evan @silverpill @Zergling_man At this point I don't care if he nukes my instance. I wanted to discuss why most of the grant is counterproductive to the network and that's impossible now, because he blocked me. He's a member of "trust and safety" on that instance, so it's possible that he will nuke it.

All I wanted was to point out the counterproductive nature of half the points the grant is funding, talk about and maybe convince him to change his mind on some of it. And we ended up here. Honestly expected better from someone who has been here since GS days.
pistolero

pistolero

@p@fsebugoutzone.org remote
Open link
@phnt @Zergling_man @evan @silverpill
> Dude has the same reek that the Newsmast Foundation has.

IT TURNS OUT:

cosocial.ca was one of the instances behind the "Fediverse Governance" paper, https://github.com/fediverse-governance/fediverse-governance.github.io , co-authored by "Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi with the support of the Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund ( August 20, 2024 )" (The Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund is responsible for funding browsers—which should be a capital offense based on the direction browsers have taken in the past 20 years—and describes Free Software as having achieved a "pyrrhic victory", https://infrastructureinsights.fund/projects/what-comes-after-foss/ .)

Erin Kissane ( @kissane ) is an IFTAS advisor: https://about.iftas.org/advisory/ .

Also an IFTAS advisor: Tim Chambers ( @tchambers ), who sold indieweb.social to the Newsmast Foundation, https://www.timothychambers.net/2025/03/27/the-next-stage-for-indiewebsocial.html .

Dear The Entire Fediverse: I am never wrong. As I mentioned in https://blog.freespeechextremist.com/blog/fse-vs-fbi.html :

> I AM A GODDAMN GENIUS and EVERYONE THAT HAS EVER TOLD ME THAT I AM WRONG IS A RETARDED COPROPHILIAC.

Thank you. That is all.
pistolero

pistolero

@p@fsebugoutzone.org remote
Open link
@Zergling_man @evan @kissane @phnt @silverpill @tchambers Dear god. So the Newsmast thing, that came up because of some USAID jokes. Essentially, I'd posted some remarks pointing out the NAFO astroturfing had evaporated ahead of the USAID funding dry-up ( https://fsebugoutzone.org/objects/377a61ff-78e8-47e8-a2b0-0ed60ac406da ). Almost immediately after that post, where I pointed out that Newsmast, despite *claiming* not to scrape, was crawling FSE and using backend.newsmast.org and I suggested other people check their logs, right, because instead of doing their scraping competently by just passively harvesting data out of their Mastodong, they went scraping while claiming not to, and, as noted at the time, they are actively scraping some really creepy shit: https://media.freespeechextremist.com/rvl/full/89af774aade499a509023c56b32f483b77dfd029abbd553f50a7f8b9da063c89?name=Mapping-Fediverse-Communities-1.pdf .

USAID looks like it hit IFTAS in early 2025. IFTAS was running a massive image classification system, ostensibly (if you believe this definitely benevolent and not shady organization) to "combat CSAM". https://about.iftas.org/2025/03/27/content-classification-system-post-mortem/ (I have just reposted that; their blog federates, they're using that Wordpress plugin.)

> In total, of the 1.86 million media files sent to IFTAS for classification, 99.665% were hashed and matched.

:threeletteragentglowsobright: 1.86m attachments sent upstream to these guys just from a handful of instances. :terrylol2:

So that may actually have been a result of the USAID closure, given the timing. It goes on:

> The bulk of the project ran for 26 weeks, and while we cannot afford to maintain the service any longer, the findings below can inform future projects.

And https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-110/ :

> The pilot was shut down after IFTAS did not manage to find the funding they were looking for, and the organisation had to shut down most of their projects this month.

:plasticbottle: *ahem* :cvcvcv:
pistolero

pistolero

@p@fsebugoutzone.org remote
Open link
@phnt @Zergling_man @evan @kissane @silverpill @tchambers

> Jaz-Michael King ( https://mastodon.iftas.org/@jaz / https://toot.wales/@jaz )
> "Newsmast Foundation"

https://jaz.co.uk/2026/03/13/there-are-a-million-fediverses-and-theyre-all-regulated/

> https://www.google.com/search?q=https://about.iftas.org/dsa/
> He has linked to a fucking Google search for an IFTAS URL

Dear god, glowies are stupid.

> Quick Start: "Build a robust and diverse moderation team"

[laughs in :fse:]
quick-start.pdf
Social-Web-Trust-Safety-Needs-Assessment-Report-2025.pdf
fediverse-governance.pdf
linkitylank.png
Phantasm

Phantasm

@phnt@fluffytail.org remote
Open link
@p @evan @tchambers @kissane @silverpill @Zergling_man
>The age of self-regulation is ending.
>The idea of a permanently unregulated Internet is simply not credible anymore.
>This is not because regulators hate our freedoms. It’s because the Internet is a fundamental and vital utility that now shapes childhood, mental health, and physical safety.
>Learning to live with a regulated Internet is not a failure of imagination. It’s the next phase of our shared responsibility.

Red Flags: The Blog Post
pistolero

pistolero

@p@fsebugoutzone.org remote
Open link
@ins0mniak @Zergling_man @evan @kissane @phnt @silverpill @tchambers Okay, so it's just WAPs made in foreign countries; that's fine. Have you seen the, like, discrepancies between the boards sent for inspection and the boards that actually land on the routers sometimes? Tiny, near-microscopic chips added along critical paths.

Also lol: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/12/us-recommends-encrypted-messaging-as-chinese-hackers-linger-in-telecom-networks/
hackedbychinese.gif
Replying to @ins0mniak@fsebugoutzone.org

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