Christine Lemmer-Webber - Building a Humane Social Internet
2026-04-28 16:35 UTC
Mastodon: @cwebber@social.coop
The co-author of the ActivityPub protocol and co-founder of Spritely Institute, building the next generation of decentralized networked technology, delivers a critique of the Fediverse from one of its co-architects.
The Fediverse’s real strength is participatory structure: any one server can fail and the network keeps running. But it isn’t decentralized enough to survive the threats coming for it, including age-verification laws rooted in anti-queer politics, hardware-level lockdown of what you can run on your own computer, and data-centre concentration that turns information infrastructure into a kill switch. The answer is to push further: content-addressed messaging, peer-to-peer chat with no host to subpoena, and technology built around joy and empowerment rather than defensive compliance.
Replies (6)
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@maikel@vmst.io 2026-04-28 17:19
@squirrel is that video available somewhere that has enough bandwidth to be watchable ?
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@emc2@indieweb.social 2026-04-28 19:23
@squirrel @cwebber I am actively working on some of these.
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@5PACEBAR@piefed.ca 2026-04-28 21:44
FediMTL was amazing! 😁
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@chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-04-29 03:41
Wow, that was a great talk. I liked the bit about the importance of joy to making effective software/platforms.
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@eleijeep@piefed.social 2026-04-30 10:49
Fantastic and inspiring talk.
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@daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-04-30 11:51
As for chat I think simplex ticks a lot of decentralization boxes. As far as I know, each single person could host their own relying server without much issues.