FediPact: Why? (SeaGL 2025 talk)

by vanta rainbow black & kasanwa solane aster hope

hello! i'm vanta rainbow black and this is my wonderful assistant kasanwa solane aster hope! welcome to our fun little silly little fuckin SeaGL talk. okay so this is about fedipact. it's a thingy i did. hell yeah. yay

FEDIPACT = Fediverse Pact. i was inspired to name it as such by The Pact in guild wars 2

WHAT IS THE FEDIVERSE?

fedi = fediverse = the wider network mastodon is a part of. mastodon just happens to be the biggest part by far it. has nothing to do with fentanyl. it's a collection of websites that all talk to each other. it is a fundamentally different beast than corporate social media due to this noncentralized nature

i've been on there for eight years so. i know the place inside and out

i find interactions on it tend to be more personable and wholesome than other platforms because it's a fundamentally different beast. it's NON-CORPORATE social media. run by volunteers, because they believe in it. instead of some big corpo for profit. so the whole atmosphere is infinitely more laid back than, say, bluesky or threads or something. and there's no ads. and decent moderation (banning transphobia and the like) is actually possible

it's the only place online i feel safe posting publicly about being trans without having to potentially encounter hate speech. and like. a LOT of the early adopters and people who worked on the underlying tech itself were trans

DOES FEDI BAN NAZIS?

y e s ! ! !

it's such a low godddamn bar to clear

and yet, by and large, the fediverse is the only major social media platform that actually manages to do this (the decent sections of it, at least)

why? well, here's the big secret: BECAUSE WE DON'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT PROFIT

big companies allow nazis to fester on their services because it makes them money, and here we're not beholden to such a corrupting influence. that's kinda the entire point. and that brings us to fedipact and threads...

WHAT IS FEDIPACT?

fedipact is a very prettty hot pink website with floating rainbow hears that has a list of instance admins who've agreed to defederate meta's threads. it currently has nearly a thousand signatures! the purpose of The Pact is to embolden instances to commit to blocking project92/barcelona/threads. a lotta peeps were already talking bout preemptively blocking it since the march leaks, me included. and the idea popped into my head that maybe if we had like, y'know, a thingy peeps could sign to show their support for it... it might weaken that argument that it's like pointless or whatever, and might make that choice easier to make

WHAT IS THREADS?

big bad evil toxic shithole of a social media site that allows hate groups like LibsOfTikTok to fester there. shit that literally gets people harassed and killed. also facebook as a company is just generally extremely evil

WHAT ARE SOME EXAMPLES?

in the early 2010's facebook was found to be doing behavioral experimentation on its users. in the late 2010's facebook's lack of giving a shit directly led to a genocide in myanmar. needless to say letting them into such an intimately curated space as the fediverse will end in nothing but disaster

WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH FEDI?

at the end of the day the whole thing with The Pact blocking meta, for me at least, comes down to one fact: they are absolutely NOT going to moderate their shit properly. setting aside all the genocide and behavioral experimentation and election rigging, why would you give them special privileges just because they're some big tech giant? why should we trust them? they've given us absolutely no reason to and every reason to not. their crimes and unwillingness to do adequate moderation are well-documented. if they were any other instance they'd be defederated immediately for the shit they've aided and abetted in and allowed to exist on their platform. fuck em

HOW DID THIS COME ABOUT?

in march of 2023 the first rumblings of project92, what would come to be known as threads, emerged. just hints. whispers. rumors. news leaked that meta of facebook fame was planning on creating an activitypub compatible social media network comparable to twitter in form and function. like a fediverse thing. the fedi feeds were lit ablaze. so many talked of defederation. preemptively. because facebook is facebook. one of the biggest evillest megacorporations on the planet. and they'd done so much harm in this world. everything from enabling genocide to experimenting on their fucking users

many mastodon instance admins with larger userbases found themselves recieving an email from meta. asking to talk under non-disclosure agreeement. sketchy! say what you will about how normal this is in the wider tech world, the fediverse is a completely different place where shit like this absolutely does not fly

NDA?

it stands for Non Disclosure Agreement. i noticed gargron aka eugen rochko of making mastodon making infamy and dansup daniel supernaut of pixelfed notoriety talking to each other about this on the public timeline. the root post was deleted but those silly little fuckers didn't delete the replies. and that was enough to glean context! so i posted screencaps of what i'd found and it blew the fuck up. there was major drama all over the fediverse. then, an instance admin posted a screencap of an email they'd gotten from meta confirming this

this was the first harbinger of fedipact

there was much speculation about meta's sinister ulterior motive. mark zuckerberg is a coward. many speculated meta was using fedi to appease regulations. after all, why would a huge fucking corpo like facebook care about the relatively miniscule fediverse? they have like exponentially more users than us. we are a small fry to them. they have no reason to care

or do they?

others speculated that meta was interested in the fediverse for purely hostile reasons. to embrace us so they could extend us and then extinguish us

FEDIPACT FORMED?

whatever their ultimate reasoning, i wasn't having any of it. quickly, i leaped into action in creating The Anti-Meta Fedi Pact. so. i had the idea. i wasn't even an instance admin at the time. but i had the idea of making fedipact. and i didn't make it. i posted it, and hoped someone who WAS an instance admin would take up the mantle. but none did, and after a week i started to see peeps asking if such a thingy existed, so i said fuck it i may as well make it myself

it was just a silly little hot pink website with floating rainbow hearts that listed every instance that pledged to preemptively defederate meta's new fediverse platform

it grew quick

there were so many signatures

as of writing it has about 900 iirc

the bettter half of a thousand different instance admins and mods decided to stand up to the evil megacorpo trying to push us around

it gained traction fast. i was overwhelemd. and this was the exact same time during pride month where i was fastly gaining a social life. so i had to try really hard to balance my social shit with my fedipact duties. i got overwhelmed. like really overwhelmed. like wanting to fucking die overwhelmed. like coming close to that overwhelmed. but i didn't! ha! yay.

WHAT CAN ADMINS DO?

defederate threads

WHAT IS DEFEDERATION?

blocking communication between your instance and another one

WHAT DOES DEFEDERATION DO?

it stops your users from being able to communicate with their users

defederation is a touchy subject in a lot of circles. it essentially cuts your users off from a huge part of the network and many argue it creates a "bubble" of similar thought. but when used effectively, defederation is a key part of a competent mod team's toolset. preemptively blocking known malicious or abusive hosts protects your users from all different kinds of horrible people. it is is also an effective response to new, emerging threats.

defederating threads is a big step that cuts off millions of users, but when the threat is so clear, theres no option except defederation. a smaller instance of similar incompetence would not be spared a second thought; defederation would be swift. meta and threads do not deserve special treatment just because they can throw around the weight of a billion dollar corporation and have millions of users. theyve got to go

SHOULDN'T THREADS GET SPECIAL TREATMENT?

no. they've given us absolutely no reason for that and every reason to not. look at facebook's history. the presence of threads as a federation threatens other instances through their poor moderation, of which there are plenty of examples of real world harm and misinformation coming from facebook and that same firehose of abuse would be pointed directly at any instance federating with threads

it's a mess that no instance admins would be able to keep up with, meaning fedi users would be in constant danger. additionally, it means admin and moderator action is responsive, not proactive; it means waiting until someone gets hurt to take any kind of action instead of taking the one step to protect users:

HOW HAS FEDIPACT AFFECTED YOUR LIFE?

fedipact has been mentioned countlessly in various news and radio and wiki and etc. thingies. i got misgendered by the editor in chief of the verge thanks to fedipact. fuck you nilay patel. you fucking asshole

i got interviewed by wired for it! that was fun. also for some slovenian radio show. also-also i was in a book! move slowly and build bridges colon mastodon, the fediverse, and the struggle for democratic social media by robert w gehl

hmu after the talk if you wanna see the part of the book i'm in! i bring my copy everywhere with me to show peeps

some people have asked me why i made the fedipact website so silly and unprofessional if i wanted to be taken seriously. well it's not my revolution if i can't dance. if i can't do this and have fun at the same time why the fuck bother. why clean myself up and sanitize and sterilize and corporatize resistance to meta? i legiterally took a selfie with #fedipact written across my chest and boosted it to the official account. i don't give a fuck. at all. i mean look at me. do i look like the kinda person to fucking care what people like that think

obviously not lmao

if i had the chance to do it all again i would've done a few thingies differently. like asking peeps to post something in the fedipact hashtag to confirm their signature. because we had the issue with people signing for others and peeps had to contact me to ask to be removed. it was a whole fucking thing. that's one thing i did differently for FediPact 2: The Anti Automattic Actitivitypub Accord. it was basically the same thing but with tumblr's intended fediverse integration. the site looks the same but purple!

REFUTATIONS

ONE: but the purpose of the fediverse is openness!

openness for the sake of openness is meaningless. two things that are very valued on fedi are consent and freedom of association. the whole point of the fediverse is that instances are free to choose who they talk to. we don't have to federate with the likes of gab, for example. growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell, chasing a capitalist pipe dream

TWO: it's hopeless because the big instances won't block them, there's nothing we can do

that doesn't mean we shouldn't TRY. it's not black-and-white, win-or-lose. there's degrees of this shit. i wanna do everything i can to keep as many people as possible safe from meta's horrible bullshit. it doesn't matter if the then-larger portions of fedi end up dwarfing The Pact in size. we'll be safer -- that's victory enough to me. it's all we can hope for short of meta cancelling project92 due to backlash

THREE: you're just gatekeeping/want to keep fedi small

the fediverse isn't perfect by any means. but serving ourselves up on a silver platter to one of the biggest evillest megacorporations on the planet isn't the path to meaningful positive change, or anything besides the utter destruction of our communities. there are other, natural ways for it to grow. like every time some big corpo social fucks up and starts an exodus

FOUR: you're just a bunch of radical extremists

yeah come to think of it The Pact IS extremely radical, huh? and tubular, and way cool, not to mention gnarly as fuck

IN CLOSING

so what has come of this? as of writing, meta threads' federation is broken and incomplete and fucking janky as fuck

it just straight up does not work

fedi users are segregated into their own special little timeline

you can't even really reply or fave shit

it's fucked

why did they even bother? who the hell knows. but i will close this talk with fedipact's closing sentiment:

"and if we decide that freedom is impossible then we'll prove ourselves right. but if that is the truth, well then i guess that there's worse things in this world than being wrong"

together, we can all work to preserve this wonderfully successful example of anarchism in action. fuck capitalism, fuck corporate social networks, fuck the tech oligarchs, fuck their dreams of a fascist eugenicist future, fuck meta, and fuck mark zuckerberg personally. okay that's all folks! thank you for coming to my TED talk

uwu