Notices by 𝕤𝕙𝕚𝕓𝕒 𝕔𝕠𝕞𝕡𝕦𝕥𝕖𝕣 (shibacomputer@post.lurk.org)

In 2020, I published *This is Fine: Optimism & emergency in the p2p network*(https://newdesigncongress.org/en/pub/this-is-fine). It laid out a clear argument that the #fediverse is irreparably vulnerable because of its p2p nature and political naivete:

*"Anyone with administrator access to an Instance can read anything that travels through that Instance’s infrastructure – including direct messages. The level of risk correlates with the number of cross-Instance interactions between users. If users from different Instances communicate, an attacker need only compel one Instance to reveal the direct messages between all of the interacting accounts. [...] In a peer-to-peer network without encryption, there’s no structure, no agreed-upon governance, and absolutely no protection. Compromising or compelling an Instance or its staff means that all of network traffic is laid bare to its assailant. [...] The decentralised community seeks to antagonise a powerful status quo whilst making tradeoffs that do not acknowledge how societies directly threaten their communities."*

Today, Kolektiva - a anti-colonial anarchist instance - announced an FBI raid of one of their admins, which included the seizure of an entire copy of the Kolektiva instance.

This is *literally* the kind of situation I warned about nearly three years ago.

https://kolektiva.social/@admin/110637031574056150

At the time, *This is Fine* was shared pretty widely across Mastodon, Secure Scuttlebutt and other related communities. The piece generated a lot of discussion, but ultimately nobody wants to confront this undeniable reality: ActivityPub and all of the platforms that fall under the umbrella of the #fediverse will betray even its staunchest champions of decentralisation or anti-capitalism. The same is true for all other p2p or federated protocols. This digital movement is built on tools whose authors deny the very reality that even they themselves face.

From the forensic immutability of Manyverse/Secure Scuttlebutt, to the backyard-run, un-encrypted, metadata riddled design of every Mastodon/Pleroma/whatever servers, to the utterly insane non-consensual and moderation-free data-storage design of Lemmy, you are all organising on platforms built by people who, quite simply, *have delivered a shockingly dangerous set of tools that will eventually be used against you.*

It beggars belief that any such project could be seen as #queer or #feminist or #anticolonial, because every single server, every single instance is a packaged gift rich with data and ready to inform movements and structures that are out to destroy us.

it's going to be super bad for Mozilla's legacy if it turns out that Jack fucking Dorsey builds the alternative mobile OS that challenges the Apple/Google duopoly.

#Mozilla should've been all over projects like #Electron, #ChromeOS, #KaiOS and the #Framework laptop. Mozilla Foundation should've researched the future they wanted to build instead of dumping money into making Youtube (owned by their biggest competitor) slightly less fascist.

We should never forgive the the 2010s tech activism grift, flush with cash dedicated to making huge companies "less evil" despite a constant slide towards a barbaric technofuture. And for what? Who gives a shit about your design ethics when the whole thing can be wiped out in an instant by a strategic purchase.

Mozilla Corp and Foundation had access to talent, goodwill and community to be the leaders of a true alternative to FAANG.

Instead, the world's best browser is stagnant; infused with a featureless password manager, a resold third party VPN and a 'me too' email relay plugin.

The Foundation is busy attending to "trustworthy" AI, "re-imagining" web monetisation thru tech (a legislation issue) and trying to make their unaccountable competitors ethical. "New approaches to data stewardship," an absolute surrender to the violent status quo of the serialisation of everything.

In 2019, Mozilla ran a campaign demanding Venmo add better "privacy controls", aka "not public by default." Now in November 2022, they're re-running the campaign. Nothing changed, but you can still donate. Venmo doesn't give a shit. Why would they?

Equally egregious is Mozilla Foundation's insatiable demand for donations in the face of humiliating failure to pressure a firm who felt exactly zero pressure from the campaign.

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/campaigns/open-letter-to-venmo-make-privacy-the-default/

On the corporate side, there's KaiOS -- a fork of FirefoxOS that was successful almost the moment it was sunsetted at Mozilla. In my opinion, the decision to cancel #FirefoxOS remains among the worst mistakes at the company -- a blunder so severe its true effects may take decades to fully understand.

Even in the immediate term, KaiOS is now #India's second largest mobile OS. In 2020, Mozilla had to negotiate a partnership with KaiOS to bring the modern Gecko browser engine to the platform. At the same time, the Gecko renderer remains completely banned on all iOS devices, and Google uses its market dominance to gently suppress Firefox by running pro-Chrome ads in Youtube -- a company Mozilla Foundation has invested campaign money into "fixing."

Utterly humiliating. What is going on at Mozilla and why is none of this taken into consideration?

https://www.kaiostech.com

Let me be very clear. This is not a gripe against the fight against repulsive big tech platforms built by a well meaning but ultimately cushioned developer workforce.

Youtube for example is a disgusting platform, a whirring high speed monstrosity of dark patterns stuffed to the eyeballs with exploitation and nazi dog whistles. It bays for attention and howls at creators to work endlessly for its algorithms. It alienates and destroys worker solidarity. It thrives on harassment.

The solution to Youtube is the same as any mooching cancerous entity: tourniquet it, starve it of resources and kill it off. It deserves nothing more than to be completely exiled and asphyxiated through technology and economic means.

I believe Mozilla Corporation had the technical prowess to accomplish this. Mozilla Foundation had the political capital to do this. It is a disgrace that Mozilla's answer to Youtube's desecration of the mind and public discourse is a series of noble campaigns to analyse and improve the algorithms of a capitalist, unfeeling monster.

The same can be said for Mozilla's work on analysing and promoting ethics on Twitter. By 2022, Twitter's peanut gallery and private owner are in lockstep, openly baying to murder LGBTQ people using the same demonstrably false hate speech their grandparents deployed.

Now Mozilla is set to jump on the fediverse bandwagon by spinning up a mastodon instance and framing it as "exploring healthy social media alternatives." Much like @nextcloud plans to reboot their social app as an absolute MVP activitypub front end, this reads like visionless me-tooism, chasing the zeitgeist rather than anticipating and shaping it.

If you buy into the idea that Nextcloud at Mozilla should be spending resources on mastodon, at the very least one of these two orgs could do something meaningful like finance and supply labour to build better moderation tools, end to end encrypted DMs or some other meaningful effort. Yet this is not what is proposed.

Maintaining a mastodon instance is a full time gig for moderation and sysadmin. Do we currently need more instances right now? I imagine we are saturated with options for the time being. And yet here we are, another time sink. I just don't know what to say about it all, lmao.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-launch-fediverse-instance-social-media-alternative/