The "Agentic Fediverse" is the idea of a new kind of network federation, a complementary iteration on the concept of federation currently established with ActivityPub. It's an experiment and something that we in Muni Town are still trying to define more concretely.
Note: This is a temporary place for collecting links about the agentic fediverse, until this can be hosted directly on Weird.one.
We are still working on defining the core tenets of the agentic fediverse, but here is what we have so far.
An agentic fediverse is..
- A fediverse of agents; agent-centric, as opposed to server-centric.
- Local-first; solve local problems for local people.
- Accessible by default; inaccessibility is a bug.
- Systematically consensual; architected on the basis of informed consent.
The word agentic occurs primarily in the social sciences, pertaining to an individual's agency, often used interchangeably with autonomy or self-determination.
In social science, agency is the capacity of individuals to have the power and resources to fulfill their potential.
To be agentic is to be agent-centric. An agentic system optimizes for agency in its users, for example by measuring user agency as a metric of system performance.
https://www.anildash.com/2012/12/13/the_web_we_lost/
This isn’t our web today. We’ve lost key features that we used to rely on, and worse, we’ve abandoned core values that used to be fundamental to the web world. To the credit of today’s social networks, they’ve brought in hundreds of millions of new participants to these networks, and they’ve certainly made a small number of people rich.
But they haven’t shown the web itself the respect and care it deserves, as a medium which has enabled them to succeed. And they’ve now narrowed the possibilites of the web for an entire generation of users who don’t realize how much more innovative and meaningful their experience could be.
This isn’t some standard polemic about “those stupid walled-garden networks are bad!” I know that Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and LinkedIn and the rest are great sites, and they give their users a lot of value. They’re amazing achievements, from a pure software perspective. But they’re based on a few assumptions that aren’t necessarily correct. The primary fallacy that underpins many of their mistakes is that user flexibility and control necessarily lead to a user experience complexity that hurts growth. And the second, more grave fallacy, is the thinking that exerting extreme control over users is the best way to maximize the profitability and sustainability of their networks.
Gordon Brander, jamming on recurring ideas in the web3 space, proposes a minimal definition of user agency:
- Own your ID
- Own your content
- Own your contacts
Why do you need all three?
If you don’t own your content, you’re stuck. Owning your content is necessary for agency! However, it is not sufficient, because…
If you own your content, but don’t own your contacts, then you will lose your entire social graph when you switch services. Network effect will keep you locked in.
If you own your content and contacts, but don’t own your ID, you don’t really own anything. Why? IDs are upstream of access. Specifically, this is about who owns your name, and the cryptographic keys that secure your ID, under the hood. If your name is owned by an authority, you lose it if you leave. If your keys are owned by an authority, they are in control. They can lock you out of your stuff, snoop on your private messages, delete your account, or refuse to let you move it elsewhere. So self-sovereign IDs and keys are crucial for agency.
When you own your ID, content, and contacts, you have agency, because you have credible exit. You can seamlessly change services and bring everything important with you, like switching carriers for your mobile phone.
Vendor lock-in, e.g. by way of data lock-in, is by definition an anti-agentic feature. European internet users' right to exit is even codified by law in the GDPR's Right of Access.
From Gordon Brander's Credible exit:
I think there may be multiple dimensions along which to think about credible exit. An app might provide some or all of them.
I can export my data: This is pretty bog-standard due to GDPR regulations now. Often what you get is a zip full of JSON files. Pretty lackluster. JSON isn’t something that makes sense outside of an app.
Export also has the downside of being static. If you continue to use the app, your export becomes invalid. This makes export only really useful for hard exit. Still, it’s better than nothing. I might say “export considered harm reduction”.
I can sync my data, or at least export and re-import it multiple times. This resolves the “dead export” problem. It also makes export useful for other use-cases, like backup and basic interoperability between tools. One way to accomplish this is with immutable data. If the file never changes, it’s easy to sync. iTunes music library is a good example. CRDTs are a promising primitive for data that is frequently updated.
My data is in a useful format: exit happens through a common formats that work in other apps. Plain text, CSV, PNG, PDF, SVG, MP3 are all good examples of useful formats. Camera Roll is a standout example here. You can drag and drop images, in and out of the app freely.
My data lives in local files. iTunes is a standout example. You can always take your MP3 files with you. Files are great because you have the bytes! Files also enable credible exit to emerge retroactively! New apps can come along and implement the file formats of other popular apps, uplifting their file format into a de facto protocol.
Multiple apps can share the same data over a permissionless API. This is where credible exit transcends itself and becomes broad interoperability.
The app is open source. A protocol will never capture the full fidelity of the app experience, but if the protocol and app are both open, you might unlock much deeper credible exit. Mastodon is a great example here.
Continued in Freedom to exit:
Freedom to exit: you can take your data and leave, and no one can tell you no.
The web does not support the freedom to exit. The server owns the data, so the server can tell you no. The same is true of most mobile apps. Some save files to folders, but most trap data in the app. The app can tell you no. This lock-in is used as a competitive moat for aggregators, and a business model for software-as-a-service.
So, how do we fix this? As far as I can tell there are just three ways to guarantee freedom to exit: decentralized protocols, local-first data, or legal agreements.
- Decentralized protocols: no one can tell you no because the data is distributed across multiple peers controlled by different parties. If one peer tells you no, you just ask another.
- Local-first data: no one can tell you no because you already have your data.
- Legal agreements: no one can tell you no because you have a contract or license in place that guarantees access to your data.
https://erinkissane.com/tomorrow-and-tomorrow-and-tomorrow
The structures of our network commons have concentrated our responses to the forces already pressing against our livelihoods and children and futures. Within their engagement-optimized interfaces, we’ve built ourselves into a standing wave: Abusive posts became network-wide events that require a response not only from moderating authorities, but from every user.
In this machine, silence transmutes to approval of the worst thing happening; via entirely real human needs for signals of safety and support, continuous attention and engagement become mandatory. Simply bad posts are opportunities for demonstrations of prowess. People we agree with become footholds for demonstrating all the subtle ways in which they don’t quite understand. Sometimes—rarely—these moves result in policy changes, but fight and flight and status display all taste the same to the machine.
In the machine, we are always forgetting, chasing the same discourses and panics in circles. Instead of making restitution, we wait for the cycle to erase the screen and carry on as before. Stay long enough and everything rhymes with something that gave you scars, but that everyone else has forgotten. Resolution eludes us online even more than off. (...)
We won’t technologize our way out of the ghost machine. I don’t think we’ll mod our way out, either. Actual trust and real safety do require protection from griefers and villains—and abuses of authority—but that’s table stakes: that’s the floor.
https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-iv-only-connect/
The Atlantic Council’s report on the looming challenges of scaling trust and safety on the web opens with this statement:
"That which occurs offline will occur online."
I think the reverse is also true: That which occurs online will occur offline.
Our networks don’t create harms, but they reveal, scale, and refine them, making it easier to destabilize societies and destroy human beings. The more densely the internet is woven into our lives and societies, the more powerful the feedback loop becomes.
In this way, our networks—and specifically, the most vulnerable and least-heard people inhabiting them—have served as a very big lab for gain-of-function research by malicious actors.
The internet in Myanmar was born at a few seconds to midnight. Our new platforms and tools for global connection have been born into a moment in which the worst and most powerful bad actors, both political and commercial, are already prepared to exploit every vulnerability.
We don’t get a do-over planet. We won’t get a do-over network.
Instead, we have to work with the internet we made and find a way to rebuild and fortify it to support the much larger projects of repair—political, cultural, environmental—that are required for our survival.
Another characteristic of fediverse (by which I mean “Activity-Pub-based servers, mostly interoperable”) networks is the ability for both individual users and whole instances to defederate from each other. The ability to “wall off” instances hosting obvious bad actors and clearly harmful content offers ways for good-faith instance administrators to sharply reduce certain kinds of damage.
(...)
A related threat that was expressed to me by someone who’s been working on the ground in Myanmar for years is that authoritarian governments will corral their citizens on instances/servers that they control, permitting both surveillance and government-friendly moderation of propaganda.
I think if you ask people why Meta failed to keep itself from being weaponized in Myanmar, they’ll tell you about optimizing for engagement and ravenously, heedlessly pursuing expansion and profits and continuously f***ing up every part of content moderation.
I think those things are all correct, but there’s something else, too, though “heedless” nods toward it: As a company determined to connect the world at all costs, Meta failed, spectacularly, over and over, to make the connections that mattered, between their own machinery and the people it hurt.
So I think there are two linked things Meta could have done to prevent so much damage, which are to listen out for people in trouble and meaningfully correct course.
https://erinkissane.com/root-branch
To recap: Things are weird on the networks. Weird like wyrd, though our fates remain unsettled; weird like wert-, the turning, the winding, the twist.
I think one of the deep weirdnesses is that lots of us we know what we don’t want, which is more of whatever thing we’ve been soaking in. But I think many—maybe all?—of the new-school networks with wind in their sails are defined more by what they aren’t than what they are: Not corporate-owned. Not centralized. Not entangled in inescapable surveillance, treadmill algorithms, ad models, billionaire brain injury. In many cases, not governable.
It’s not an untenable beginning, and maybe it’s a necessary phase, like adolescence. But I don’t think it’s sufficient—not if we want to build structures for collaboration and communion instead of blasted landscapes ruled by warlords.
Two big root-level things that I think we haven’t properly sorted out:
- Resources: All networks require a whole lot of time and money to run well—the more meticulously run, the more money and time are required, and this is true whether we’re talking about central conglomerates or distributed networks. If we want to avoid just the most obvious bad incentives, where does that money and time come from?
- Governance: Who—what people, what kind of people, what structures made of people—should we trust to do the heavy, tricky, fraught work of making and keeping our networks good? How should they work? To whom should they be accountable, and how can “accountability” be redeemed from its dissipated state and turned into something with both teeth and discretion?
https://berjon.com/user-agency/
Technologists trying to maximise user agency often fall into the trap of measuring agency by looking only at time saved (in the same way that they fail to understand what people want to do when they measure time spent). On the surface, the idea seems straightforward: spend less time on one thing, have more time for other things! That would seem to fit our mandate of improving "What each person is able to do and to be". And all other things being equal that can be true, but the devil is in the details: the enjoyment of doing the thing, the value in knowing how to do it, or the authority over outcomes. Even things that many would consider chores aren't always best automated or delegated away: you may not wish to clean your house but you might want a say in the chemicals introduced into your home, about how your things are organised, or over whether your house can be mapped by a robot and data derived from that map sold to the highest bidder. Not all leisure is liberation.
The more detail we have on a piece of technology that may be part of the Web, the more readily we can assess it in very specific ways that capture aspects of improved user agency. In fact, that's something that the Web community has been doing for a long time. Consider:
- The great level of detail that has gone (and continues to go) into specifying how to make the Web and Web content accessible. These guidelines and techniques can, in exceedingly concrete ways, push for a world in which disability does not limit agency.
- An equally-impressive trove of actionable principles can be found in the Internationalization work. This empowers people to use the Web in the languages of their choice. We will never celebrate the work of the Unicode Consortium enough. Bringing all of the world's languages into a unified system of character encoding is a historical achievement that "respects and empowers users".
- It's hard to act freely if you can't act safely, which makes work on security core to the agency project. RFC8890 ("The Internet is for End Users") captures this well when it states that "User agents act as intermediaries between a service and the end user; rather than downloading an executable program from a service that has arbitrary access into the users' system, the user agent only allows limited access to display content and run code in a sandboxed environment. End users are diverse and the ability of a few user agents to represent individual interests properly is imperfect, but this arrangement is an improvement over the alternative — the need to trust a website completely with all information on your system to browse it." This trust is empowering.
- And the same can be said about privacy, which is key to trust as well. Privacy further matters (as discussed in the Privacy Principles) in that it includes the right to decide what identity you present to others in which contexts. Additionally, widespread data collection creates information asymmetries and information asymmetries create power asymmetries. The issue here isn't so much that data might be used to support mind-controlling AI snake oil but rather that it powers more mundane (and far more effective) manipulation techniques such as hypernudging.
These shared foundations for Web technologies (which the W3C refers to as "horizontal review" but they have broader applicability in the Web community beyond standards) are all specific, concrete implementations of the Web's goal of developing user agency — they are about capabilities. We don't habitually think of them as ethical or political goals, but they are: they aren't random things that someone did for fun — they serve a purpose. And they work because they implement ethics that get dirty with the tangible details.
https://blog.erlend.sh/reclaiming-my-digital-identity
I've grown up in an unprecedented time of connective magic. Unlike my ancestors, I have known not tens, not hundreds, but thousands of people with whom I co-created something of value. Such is the power of the digital age. My deepest connections exist locally, offline. Yet many of those connections were initially mediated through the incredible connective tissue of the internet.
My life as a somewhat odd person would have been a profoundly lonely one had it not been for the online spaces where I found The Others; fellow weirdos interested in play-crafts like storytelling and game development, coupled with an obsession for openness as a means to digital emancipation. To most of the thousands of people I've come across in my two decades as a netizen, the digital expression of my persona is my entire persona. I hope to live long enough to engage in a physical handshake or even an embrace with many of my online friends, but I recognize that a large number of these connections will forever remain purely digital.
Therefore it is acutely important to me that my digital identity properly reflects my truest self. I want the people in my life to have seen and known the real me, regardless of whether they came into contact with my physical or digital being.
And therein lies my predicament: Ever since I first logged on to the internet, I've never had legitimate ownership of my own digital identity. My digital expression has always been mediated through some higher power. Sadly not of the paternal kind that intends to lift my spirit up until I can stand on my own.
https://blog.erlend.sh/weird-web-pages#website I consider the personal website to be the smallest possible building block of web identity. Once you wanna go past the observer (READ) level to the contributor (WRITE) level as a netizen, you’re gonna need a material web-persona to make yourself known. Unfortunately we never made personal websites easy enough to build, so the likes of Facebook became mainstream persona providers.
(...)
The size of the internet can be measured in the atomic mass of the websites it's made up of. We collectively materialize the internet with every additional web page we create.
https://blog.erlend.sh/assembling-community-os Digital autonomy begets individual freedom begets fairness & equality.
The hopeful possibility of this moment lies in the open-social web protocols which make up the foundations of a comms & coordination ecosystem owned and operated by the general public.
https://blog.erlend.sh/weird-netizens To free ourselves of our current predicament, we must simultaneously de-centralize and re-centralize identity.
By de-centralizing the ownership of identity away from platform monopolies and back to individuals, we can re-centralize the agency of personhood.
Once more for clarity: Decentralize ownership. Recentralize agency.
The central authority of ones digital identity must first and foremost be the individual themselves. That's how we regain our digital sovereignty.
(...)
All mainstream identity providers get you hooked into their ID-network by means of a tight coupling between a light identity layer plus a heavy service:
GitHub: ID + git Discord: ID + chat Gmail: ID + email The indivisibility of this coupling weakens our digital sovereignty. Even if I stopped using Gmail for email, I still rely heavily on it for my authentication to hundreds of sites & services. It’s part of their lock-in scheme.
Gmail et.al. make identity confusing because they've made it appear necessarily coupled with an overarching complexity like email or a social network. But identity should stand on its own. In fact it is paramount that our identity is not owned by a personal-data-loving megacorp because there's nothing more valuable for them to keep locked up than the very essence of your digital self.
https://zicklag.katharos.group/blog/how-to-federate/
Wouldn’t it be awesome if your data could be stored locally on your own computer, you could author posts offline, and even host your profile right from home if you wanted, too, just by keeping a tab open in your browser, or installing a normal app!
Servers could become optional. They would be very handy for keeping your data backed up, and for hosting your public data when your computer isn’t on, but they wouldn’t need to have any power over you as a self-sovereign agent on the web.
You could even have multiple servers that keep your data backed up, and you could move from one server to another easily, because it’s all built on data synchronization, not messaging and mailboxes.
I think this model is still technically “federation”, but it’s much more peer-to-peer than Email or Mastodon, for instance. We’re envisioning a fediverse of individual agents, not a fediverse of servers. We want an agentic fediverse.
One of the major caveats of true self-sovereignty for users is that it comes with greater responsibility. For example if you are truly the only one with the power to control your identity, if you lose your password, nobody can help you recover it, unless you setup some backup or recovery method yourself. If somebody else could recover it for you, i.e. a server, then the server would have the power to steal your identity.
But that’s kind of how it’s always been. The server can reset your password, and in many cases, that will be the best user experience. The important part is having a choice, and being able to change your mind later.
https://raphael.lullis.net/a-plan-for-social-media-less-fedi-more-webby/
All these issues could’ve been avoided if the decision-making process was delegated to the client. It’s nice that the server can make search queries, but it would be even better if the client could choose a separate, “global” search engine. It’s nice that the server can make recommendations for accounts to follow, but it would be even better if I had a menu pointing me to external services that are dedicated to this task. By forcing the user to do everything through the server, we become needlessly dependent on it.
The “server-centric” approach to the application development is at odds with the nature of distributed systems. We need to stop treating the client as a dumb terminal and give it as much power (and responsibility) as possible.
If we have the client as the center piece of our social web, why not build it already in the foundation of the web client that is already used by virtually everyone?
https://www.thepaperpilot.org/garden/fedi-v2/
The current fediverse, while in theory fully Decentralized, in practice suffers many of the issues associated with centralization. This is primarily caused by the friction of having to pick a server and the non feasibility of individuals buying a domain and setting up a single user instance - both of these causes lead to a handful of large servers with the bulk of the users. You can see this in action by looking up the relative sizes of lemmy and mastodon instances. Single-user Mastodon Instance is a Bad Idea goes over the non feasibility of self hosting and how it contributes to a handful of servers having the majority of the users.
The promise of federation is the ability to interact with the whole network, while being able to fully choose and customize how you yourself interact with the network. In practice though, clients are severely limited to what they can do based on the server software. Of particular note, Lemmy and Mastodon show content in different formats (threads vs microblogs), and no clients allow changing how they're displayed, or respecting the format of the source of the content. Clients also are unable to change sorting algorithms or how downvotes are handled - those are all dependent on the server. A Plan for Social Media - Rethinking Federation similarly criticizes how much of the decisions are dependent on the server, which most people won't be able to or willing to self host.
The pick a server problem is such a problem because not only do you have to pick what server has moderation policies you align with, but that you're also linking your identity with that server. Smaller servers tend to be more focused or niche, which is unlikely to fully encompass any person's entire identity. Why would I confine myself to being [email protected] if I'm more than a writing lover? Additionally, I'm risking that the community at that instance won't grow away from things I want to associate with, such as fascism or crypto. My identity could end up being associated with things I drastically don't want it to be.
https://zicklag.katharos.group/blog/a-web-of-data/
Today the internet is made up primarily of a web of HTML pages. The HTML usually contains or references CSS and JavaScript that is largely concerned with the presentation or interactivity of that page. We need massively complicated web browsers and web standards to actually view these pages as they are meant to be viewed.
Imagine an alternative internet protocol were each “thing” on the internet is an “Entity”. Entities might represent blog articles, chat messages, tweets, comments, or anything else. Each entity also has a path to that entity, like a URL.
This might help us converge on one shared, flexible data protocol, similar to the internet of HTML pages that exists today, instead of having to make new protocols and APIs every time we want to let other people create custom frontends to our data.
It will inherently be a web of data, and presentation will be an optionally configurable layer on top, not an inescapable necessity for delivering your content.
- https://newsletter.squishy.computer/p/credible-exit
- https://newsletter.squishy.computer/p/redecentralization
- https://newsletter.squishy.computer/p/the-minimal-definition-of-user-agency
- https://newsletter.squishy.computer/p/freedom-to-exit
- https://newsletter.squishy.computer/p/decentralizability
- https://berjon.com/user-agency/
- https://blog.erlend.sh/reclaiming-my-digital-identity (The Great Untangling series)
- https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/autonomous-identity-for-the-pluriverse-based-on-oauth-oidc/3675
- https://blog.erlend.sh/weird-netizens
- Fedi v2 by
@thepaperpilot - How to Federate? by @zicklag