The organization behind critical pieces of Trust & Safety infrastructure in the Fediverse is struggling to make ends meet. Here’s what’s going on, what the road ahead looks like, and how to help.
The organization behind critical pieces of Trust & Safety infrastructure in the Fediverse is struggling to make ends meet. Here’s what’s going on, what the road ahead looks like, and how to help.
I have literally never heard of this group before now, and my immediate question is "What do they bring to the table? How important can they be if I’ve never heard of them? In what universe can any organization related to the fediverse justify looking for 1.3 million dollars in funding‽”
The two systems they offer (as listed in the article) Fedicheck and CCS, as far as I am aware, already have open source alternatives in db0’s Fediseer and whatever his anti-CSAM tool is called.
They also offer… guidelines for fediverse moderators? Not frameworks for bots or automoderation tools. But their opinions on how others should moderate spaces that this group doesn’t actually run.
Did anyone out there ask for an advisory group for something that thrives on it’s individuality?
Maybe I’m too used to the old reprehensible internet. Maybe I’m too used to spaces that keep an intentional level of friction against new joining outsiders.
Maybe I’m missing something critical here and I’ve only been exposed to db0’s work being on his Lemmy instance.
I would love to be provided with more information on this group, and direct examples of value they’ve provided to the Fediverse.
But at a simple gut check, this comes across like a group of self righteous people who rather than run their own instances, want to be paid to tell others how to run instances.
Anything this group is doing should be open source, should be well advertised, and should be well discussed Fediverse-wide. The fact that I’m only first hearing about this group during what is effectively an e-begging session sets off alarms.
Lemmy has just had it’s first round of spambots in DMs. Does the fediverse now have a group of self righteous non-admin non-mods trying to make something they can make money from and put on a resume?
This would not be the first instance of resume stuffing “guidance organizations” to try and enforce themselves in an online space/open source project.
At absolute best, assuming this is a group known in Mastodon and the various non-lemmy fedi-spaces: This would not be the first time some group that is deeply invested and well known in Mastodon crosses the border to Lemmy to find that despite sharing protocol, there are differences in culture.
Just because your Scout Troop and the AA meetings use the same building, that doesn’t mean that AA members have any interest in supporting the scouts, or in having the scouts tell them how they should run AA meetings.
Let me be clear: I want to be proven wrong and for this group to be a pleasant surprise of a worthwhile force for good and the continued growth of the Fediverse.
But I’m also being honest about my reaction to some group I’ve never heard of before claiming to be so vital to the Fediverse that them maybe not getting $1.3M is something that I should care enough about to donate.
So, we’ve actually been covering IFTAS for a while: https://wedistribute.org/tag/iftas/
The org was initially founded in 2023, and they started as a high-level community effort to try and tackle the following issues:
I’m probably missing some additional things here. My point is, they weren’t some rinky-dink organization that just emerged uninvited out of nowhere, they developed out of common needs instance admins and moderators in the community have.
This may come as a surprise to you, but overlap between efforts can and does exist, and does not lessen the value of the things overlapping. FediSeer is a perfectly legitimate tool and effort, but these other things were being done at an institutional level, so a different approach was taken. Developing tooling to fight CSAM is complicated, regulation-heavy, and in this case depended on the org having to develop their own tooling after spending a long time talking to existing services that did not want to take on that risk.
While I fundamentally agree, I believe there are reasons their software contractually cannot be open sourced. Presumably because of the integration and reliance on NCMEC and their CSAM hash database. As for being discussed Fediverse-wide…I mean, a decentralized network has no center? There’s a pretty big part of the network that knows about them and has worked with them, but your perception of reach is relative to your vantage point.
This analogy doesn’t really make sense in regards to the Fediverse. This isn’t “two different groups in a building”, this is a community-developed Non-Profit organization that mostly emerged out of a desire to help make life easier for instance operators. Nobody has to use anything they produce, but a lot of people have benefited from what they’ve provided.