IFTAS is In a Funding Crisis
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The Fediverse’s premiere Trust & Safety organization is struggling to make ends meet, and needs help with meeting its goals.

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.

  • Sean Tilley@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
    31·
    2 days ago

    Look, open tools are great. I assume you’re referring to FediSeer, or efforts like it.

    For IFTAS’ purposes, they found themselves in a weird situation. Their CCS system for fighting CSAM had to be developed independently, by contractors that were paid. This is because they needed a service that:

    • Could integrate with a national database of CSAM hashes
    • That could be plugged into a federated, open source network
    • That could report on hash matches detected on the public network to the requisite authorities (a legal requirement for instance admins)
    • That would be willing to work with them and take on risk.

    There are off-the-shelf products for this. But, they’re prohibitively expensive, typically geared towards large corporations, and generally unwilling to take on a network of thousands of instances. As a consequence of going their own route of development, their work is beholden to a number of constraints. For example, access to the hash database for the National Center of Missing and Endangered Children (NCMEC) more than likely has legal constraints on implementations not releasing source code.

    TL;DR - they built some things that were designed to solve very specific problems. That development depended on grants and donations. Some things, like FediCheck, may actually be open source and simply exist in parallel with FediSeer as using a different scope. They probably have more plans in the pipeline for stuff that generally doesn’t exist for a big part of the network to use today. They’re running out of money.

      • Sean Tilley@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
        11·
        2 days ago

        I’m just saying, there’s tangible things to point to which explain the current situation, and how we got here. At the end of the day, compromises had to be made to have a working thing in the first place.

        We can sit and wring our hands about a piece of software not being open source, but ideological purism doesn’t always get things made. Perfect is the enemy of good.

        Besides which, a larger problem is that FOSS devs of critical projects aren’t really making much money, either. You could advance the argument that FOSS isn’t about money, but funding sure helps the longevity of FOSS projects. The Fediverse is practically anemic in this regard.