Seizing social media for the people

Free Our Feeds’ Mallory Knodel on how to escape billionaire-owned social media.

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

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As I mentioned in Monday’s post, I recently deleted Twitter and Facebook. While it’s not a full-on boycott, as many people are now considering following Meta and Twitter’s front-and-center role in last week’s inauguration, it’s a step towards what will hopefully be a better social media world. What that better world is, though, is still a work in progress.

I came across Free Our Feeds in

User Mag

a few weeks ago. This group of former Twitter users, supported by public figures like Mark Ruffalo, Cory Doctorow, and Akilah Hughes, wants to rebuild the digital town square from the bottom up. Right now, our main methods of communication are controlled by a couple of billionaires who now seem poised to use that power to serve the current administration. Free Our Feeds wants to find funding to create a decentralized network of alternatives that we own, and that can’t be taken away from us.

Mallory Knodel, co-chair of the Human Rights and Protocol Considerations research group of the Internet Research Task Force, is one of the custodians of this new venture. Here she breaks down what it means to be decentralized, why it’s necessary, and how we can achieve it.

Who are you and what brought you to this work?

I've worked as a public interest technologist in social movements for almost 20 years, and most of the time I've spent working as a nonprofit staff member. The early days of my work was around building technology for social movements and nonprofit organizations. Somewhere around 2011, 2012, 2013, I transitioned into doing programming work, whether it was around content moderation or censorship circumvention, surveillance and security and privacy issues, so that's when I really transitioned to the work that I do now, which is more being an adviser and an advocate at the policy level.

So part of my time is spent in policy spaces talking about the technology. The other part of my time is spent in engineering spaces talking about the human rights angle to the design and development and deployment of certain technologies. Content moderation has always been one of these things that, for many years, Meta has talked about how it's using AI and algorithms to deal with these complicated issues. This is also after many, many years where they didn't want to do content moderation at all. It wasn't until a handful of years ago that they even embraced the idea that they had to do anything.

Now we're seeing a step back from that, but I think more importantly for me, I've worked for human rights organizations for the better part of two decades. All of the government foundation philanthropic funding that has gone into making these big huge corporate platforms better has been, to me, hugely disappointing, because we've relied on these big companies to do the right thing and a lot of times it does come from the top. And it's great when they make good decisions, like when Meta decides that it's going to use content encryption in all of its messaging applications, but all these things are very precarious and flimsy when you rely on [companies] to just do the right thing. And so what's more durable to me in the long term, and where I'm focused now, is trying to build an alternative that is not just controlled by us but that is controllable by the people who are using it.

How did you get involved with Free Our Feeds?

For me, it was something that came through relationships and connections that I've had for a really long time, and others who've worked in the same field with me. The conversation essentially was: we're going to do this really big thing that has huge goals, we may not reach them, but let's try to do something.

I would say that my main function as as one of the many custodians is that I'm currently working on a different set of protocols and platforms than Bluesky, and there's reasons for that, and I don't know if you want me to get into them but essentially I'm trying to bridge the the world of, “Hey Bluesky is new and cool,” and also, there's been a lot of work already ongoing in a slightly separate but interrelated community that has made more progress, and then trying to make sure that we're not working across purposes and we're actually building a bigger movement.

As you say, this work has been happening for some time, but I think recent events have brought the desire for alternative social media into the mainstream. Can you share why it's important?

I'm maybe going to say something that a lot of people won't remember at all. There was a time in the early 2000s before any of this, what we call Web 2.0, where I was part of activist circles that were building websites for the first time and allowing people, just regular folks, to either write to an email address or they would have these pretty primitive ways that you could input information into a calendar or onto a website, and we were talking about this in terms of citizen journalism where the calendars would be used to organize protests and tell people what events were happening at their local food co-op or whatever it was that. It was an innovation that came from the democratization of information and the vision that the internet could be used to organize people. That was absolutely taken by these big corporate platforms and turned into what we think of as social media.

I don't think that it was that people weren't building their own. I think there always has been this tradition of building our own spaces, they just weren't popular, and they're not thought of as the public square. I think that's the moment we're in. So the big shift right now that's happening is a recognition that these platforms have effectively been the one place to go, like a public square where you can reach everyone you know, and also you can reach a bunch of people that you don't know that you want to reach. So you can't just have these little tiny pockets, you need all of those communities that are online to be able to connect to one another and that's only possible if the different fractious platforms that we all start to use actually connect to each other and interoperate, because otherwise you're stuck with like ten different social media accounts, or when one shuts down you lose all your contacts. What we're trying to build is actually something that is more like the web, where you can use one software to visit all websites. It is effectively an aggregate public square instead of small islands.

Free Our Feeds talks about building on the AT Protocol that Bluesky is on. I'm just gonna ask the stupid question: What does that mean?

So AT Proto is centralized. It's run by one company, but they have opened their code with an open license. You can effectively build a little Bluesky yourself, with a lot of effort. Frankly there's no slick app that's gonna help you set this up. You have to be technical, you have to get your hands dirty, you have to have servers and all that, but you could do it. That's their vision. They want it to be centralized because that is the way they envisioned recreating the public square, by adding a big thing but then taking the limits off of that public square. I would call it centralization with integration and extra operability.

Now ActivityPub is decentralized in that there is no central service. You can't go anywhere and find it, and this is one thing that I think causes users a lot of confusion, is that you have to find a place to create an account. It doesn't tell you, you know, “create an account on mastodon.social.” You could, but you have to know about mastodon.social first, and there are thousands of these. So my account is on one that has maybe 800 people on it. It's not big, it's about tech policy issues, so I feel like it's kind of the home I want. It gives me the URL, like the domain username that I like, and the I'm able to follow anybody else who's using it irrespective of where they found their account and logged in, right? So in that sense it's more durable to capture, like you couldn't shut it down because there are just so many nodes that are operating and as long as one is operating, then they're effectively all working. The code for that is not even so much code as it is a protocol. It's a specification of how you could write your own code to interoperate, whereas Bluesky is code and they're trying to figure out how to describe that code in ways that other people can use. ActivityPub is like, here are the building blocks, go and build your own thing, and so people who have gone and built their own thing are Mastodon, Threads, which is a Meta product, Automatic, which runs WordPress. There's something called Ghost. There's something called Flipboard. Bluesky is one company and one service, ActivityPub is no company, a bunch of services.

So what is the next step for Free Our Feeds to achieve this?

The main ingredient here is going to be a ton of funding. Bluesky has gotten tens of millions in venture capital, and what we're trying to build unfortunately has to be an exact copy of Bluesky, because its architecture is centralized. You can't just create a satellite because when you create a satellite then they can just turn access off to that satellite. It has to be a service that truly replicates Bluesky in a way that gives more control and moves the center of gravity out of the corporation. So we have to raise money and we have to raise more money than we have so far. So we're gonna focus on that. We've decided that we're gonna put more resources into more of a marathon fundraiser rather than a quick sprint.

In terms of what it would cost to actually run a full service, our idea is actually not to do it all ourselves. A big chunk of that funding is actually going to other people who are building some of this themselves and who are experimenting and folks who are best placed to actually grow this. So we would be parceling that money out.

In the meantime, what are some concrete steps people can take maybe both with Free Our Feeds but also to independently move away from these big platforms?

I think a lot of folks are gonna be in the space where they're gonna create a new account on the new platforms, and keep their old ones. I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with that. It makes sense if you don't wanna lose all your data. But staying involved, staying open, trying out these new things, helping them improve, sending feedback when they feel like it should be working in a different way, and helping spread the word about the campaign would be really amazing help.

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Welcome to the weekly scroll, a roundup of articles, links, and other thoughts from being on the internet this week! Ahead: a hot Challengers take, questions about the digital detox industry, and an essay I really needed to hear.

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