“It is so easy to be immature. If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me. […] Thus, it is difficult for any individual man to work himself out of the immaturity that has all but become his nature. He has even become fond of this state and for the time being is actually incapable of using his own understanding, for no one has ever allowed him to attempt it. Rules and formulas, those mechanical aids to the rational use, or rather misuse, of his natural gifts, are the shackles of a permanent immaturity. Whoever threw them off would still make only an uncertain leap over the smallest ditch, since he is unaccustomed to this kind of free movement. Consequently, only a few have succeeded, by cultivating their own minds, in freeing themselves from immaturity and pursuing a secure course.”
– 1784, Immanuel Kant, translated by Ted Humphrey
300 years ago, Immanuel Kant was born, who revolutionized western philosophy. He was, like many great thinkers, a child of his time: a few decades before, Copernicus came to the conclusion that the universe didn’t revolve around the earth, but that the earth actually circled around the sun and later, Newton came up with laws that explained the workings of the universe. Both of these developments marked a major shift of world view, and with this state of mind, Kant came to the conclusion that as autonomous, conscious beings, we can become moral beings through reason.
A very similarly thing is happening now, 300 years later, but in the digital world. And with the help of Kant, we can apply the same conclusions that he drew, now also here. After describing the process that Twitter’s decline started, which caused a shift in the way we think about the digital, we will take a look at why an access to the Fediverse should be considered a universal, Kantian right and finally, we will see why it could make us actually better digital beings.
Why the Fediverse is no Self-Runner and why we need digital Enlightenment
Our world view determines how we think of the world and how we navigate it, and as already described before, over the course of the last year, our view of what we call “the digital” or social networking more specifically, has changed drastically for many people.
About one year ago, Twitter went down and with it for many people the knowledge followed, that in fact, the digital world didn’t revolve around them, that Twitter in fact wasn’t the centre of the digital world but that there were potentially many alternatives out there. They started to look at an alternative, which was at first exhausting, because the best fit eventually turned out to be not so great either, and eventually outright frightening, because after one service-hopping too many, the realisation followed that the digital home itself is a myth, that migration both in real life and in digital life, is part of the human experience, and eventually, that there is potentially a whole universe of these services out there. Can you remember the first time you decided to try out a different service than the one you were using all this time? How much effort it felt like, how cold and unfriendly it felt like? Well, it required that much effort, because it was more than just the physical act of signing up to a new service, it was more than that: it was signing up to a completely new view of the digital. Because if you once changed to another service, you might always again. And instead of a space that you can stay on forever, it makes your current digital home suddenly look very fragile and temporary.
In this metaphor (which of course also has its limits), Meta could be seen as an institution much like the catholic church at the time of Copernicus, because it benefits greatly from the digital world view still most people have, which has a digital centre, because it effectively means that the whole digital universe revolves around them, Meta. However, at least it seems like they made the decision to consciously destroy that illusion themselves before others do for too many people by joining the Fediverse, although how this will actually look like, remains to be seen. Probably, it’s more of a strategic decision. Up until now, the social web was Meta, the Fediverse and alternatives were either insignificant, or were bought or copied by Meta. However, with the spectacular failure of at least the original idea of the Metaverse, which was the only logical culmination of this strategy, it becomes increasingly hard for Meta to deny the existence of the Fediverse and other competitors. And if they have to admit the existence of the Fediverse at one point anyways, at least they can try to become the centre of it. And that’s also what they will want to sell the Fediverse as: as what they have tried to accomplish with the idea of the Metaverse all along.
Currently, there exists two main camps on the Fediverse: those who want it to become big, like really, world-spanning big, and those that want to keep it small like it is.
In the second group, there is a paranoia, trying to see through Meta’s hidden agendas, when they are in fact so clearly visible and in the first group, there seems to exist a very naïve optimism towards Meta’s decision to join.
The story about the future of the Fediverse that they tell usually looks something like this: the Fediverse is coming, we just let it grow and everything will eventually turn out fine, right? Threads will join, and Medium, and Flipboard and WordPress and Mastodon will still be there, it will be this whole sprawling ecosystem and then network effects will kick in and the whole thing will basically become a self-runner, right?
But what if at the end of this development, everything will effectively stay the same? What if everyone on the world had an account on the Fediverse – but it would actually make no difference, because 95% of all instances were owned by Meta, just part of Threads, or federated Instagram or federated WhatsApp. What if people considered all of that the “Metaverse”? What if they considered it the “standard” social web and the fediverse a niche curiosity by nerds? What do we do then?
After all the years, people are still faithfully praying to the digital gods they hold so dearly, they believe in them, they think that everything will work out fine, they still believe that after all, they have only the best in mind for them and a great enough vision of the future. And it will be very hard to change that. Will it change, when the sky above their self-imposed prisons will break away and make room for the endless depth of the Fediverse? No, because they don’t even consider the sky worth looking at anymore. And even if they did, it would make no sense to them.
In the current docile, immature digital state of its members, Meta has nothing to fear from the Fediverse. Expanding in it will be like expanding in its own backyard.
First, Meta joins the Fediverse all nice and quiet, and then, when they have become big enough, they sell it as their own. They call it the Metaverse at some point, like it has been their plan all along. Sure, there are some nerds that still call it the Fediverse or something, but they are so insignificant that no one listens to them; the average user doesn’t even usually come across another account from anything other than Meta’s ecosystem of franchised fediverse instances. And if the rest of the Fediverse really gets too big, Meta doesn’t show their accounts as prominently on their feeds and keep them in control this way. The social web and the metaverse effectively become the same. Just like it has been before.
You see, the clash for the future of the social web is also a clash of narratives and ideas – and Meta will probably be in a much better position, because it has the money, the social capital and a solid, if somewhat tarnished narrative to begin with. In any case, I don’t see them advertising the Fediverse as their new, big future for free. They won’t rebrand themselves (again) to “Fedi”, won’t they? Hell no.
Many people are asking themselves, why Meta is joining the Fediverse. The question should rather be: why shouldn’t they?
What is digital Enlightenment?
I think it’s clear that it’s not enough to just “let it happen” and it will all work out – we would end up in the same situation, but with a slightly better view, nothing more. We will have helped Meta take a step closer toward their Metaverse and that’s it. But we still want the Fediverse to become big, right?
So, what do we have to do?
Additionally, to pushing the technical development of the Fediverse, we need a new state of mind. We need to become mature, digital actors and we need to convince the rest of the web to do the same. Only with this change of our minds can we actually realize the true potential of the Fediverse for us as digital beings. We need a new enlightenment for the digital age, a digital enlightenment.
But how will this digital enlightenment look like?
For sure, it will be much harder than many people realize because it’s one thing to sign up for a new server, but another to sign up for another world view; a world view, in which you are responsibly for your own digital data, behaviour, security and safety. It’s hard, its unpleasant, but what we lose if we don’t do it is even greater, and if we did it, we be better off than before. But it will be hard.
It will be similar hard than the passage from geocentric to heliocentric world view. Basically, Twitter was the catalyst for many more people than before to become aware of this issue and bring it to public attention. For the first time, many people realized that their service, their go-to microtext messenger, wasn’t the center of the social web, but potentially only one of them, maybe even thousands of hundreds of possible services, in fact a whole universe of services out there, to explore, to innovate, in the so-called Fediverse. For many people, that conclusion is still ahead. But if we cannot change, we won’t come out of the digital immaturity we still find ourselves in.
And before anyone asks: no, we don’t need to kill the metaphorical digital gods. Trying to kill them would only be another act of our own immaturity. We just need to abolish every trace of their authority, which exists mostly in our heads and start thinking for our own. Then we can act as our own gate keepers, by the moral that we have set for our self through reason.
The same holds for Meta: immoral actions against them are of course wrong in any case; and if they manage to stay a monopoly on the Fediverse too, then it’s not their fault but ours, because this would only be possible due to our own immaturity. Rather, we should think about ways to help others out of their own immaturity, because many of us have only come into this position through privilege or luck.
And there is after all, still many reasons to be hopeful: Meta does join the Fediverse. Their idea of controlling everything on the social web has clearly failed, they cannot deny our existence any longer and they are themselves signing up for a digital world view, in which alternatives at least openly exist. Kind of like the transition from flat world to geocentric digital world view. One cannot really hold it against them that they will try to stay at the centre of this, of course, but they won’t be everything. It doesn’t seem like much, but it could be. And we may have to expect that it will take some time.
Different Digital World Models and the three big next things to expect on the Fediverse
Now, let’s take a closer look at this idea of different digital world views. What does that actually mean? Well, we have to realize that many people on the web don’t share our enthusiasm for the Fediverse, in fact, they probably don’t even know what it is. And not, because they are too lazy or too dumb, but because of attention economy: they don’t gain anything by having the Fediverse as part of their view of the social web. It’s a very complex concept and even if they heard of it, it was never necessary for them to adapt it, because it plays no role in their day-to-day experience on the social web.
As we will see, with the decline of Twitter and the joining of Threads to the Fediverse, this has changed drastically, because it made many people (including me) question their view of the social web and form a more complex model. And in the next years, many will follow.
We will take a look at these different models, what leads to changing to a new one, and what advantages it has if large parts of the web community have a fediverse-understanding of the social web.
So, let’s take a closer look at the social web, how it is commonly viewed, and how the Fediverse comes into play here. What does the abstract idea of the Fediverse actually mean? Why was it even invented in the first place?
In my view, the common views on the social web are caused by different models that people form on their journey on the social web:
Provider-Exclusive: “There is only the app of my provider.”
Provider-Centric: “There exist other apps, but the one I’m using is the main one.”
Service-Centric: “There is no main one and I’m trying to use the one that fits my ideal the best.”
Protocol/Ecosystem-Centric: “There exist other protocols/ecosystems, but mine is the main one.”
Fediverse-Principle: “There is no main one and I’m trying to use the one that fits my idea of an open ecosystem the best.”
Let me explain, what they mean in detail.
Usually, a new model is formed when people experience something that they cannot understand in their current view of the social web. For example, with Twitter, the service was bought by Elon Musk, which was a world-shattering event for some people, because they didn’t realize that this actually could be done; the same as with Musk basically destroying the Twitter-Brand and changing the whole purpose of the app to his idea of an “everything”-app.
In their world views, things like these weren’t possible. They came as a shock. They couldn’t understand them in their current world view. For the first time, they realized that there might be alternatives to their app. Maybe they didn’t actually tried them; but it felt reassuring that they existed.
Or another example: for a long time, people snugged at Meta “copying” Twitter, however, over time, people grew less concerned about this, because they entered the next stage of their digital world models: they began to separate the product from the idea behind it. Elon Musk could buy Twitter, but not the basic idea behind microblogging.
However, this led to a revolutionary thing. By separating the product from the abstraction, people suddenly had an ideal with which they could compare the actual thing with. And that’s why many left and started looking for an alternative that fitted their ideal more closely.
Along the way other, irritating things happened regularly: why is it for example that when I’m on Mastodon, I can view posts by a WordPress blog, which is clearly not micro-blogging? Why can I follow a Lemmy-community, which, also, is no micro-blogging but a replacement for Reddit? It didn’t make sense in my world view. Slowly, it made me question my limited understanding.
The next stage came with me signing up to more and more other Fediverse-services beside Mastodon as well as setting up my own Lemmy-server, this way getting to know some of the workings of open-source services on the Fediverse and also the dynamic creation and decline of other competitors to apps like Mastodon or Lemmy, which again broadened my view on the social web. It became easy to imagine a client, in which you could show posts from Mastodon and Reddit, basically merging two social ecosystems that I had never before thought of working together in the same app. And with ActivityPub, it would actually be possible to merge these communities, too.
All of this made me realise that it’s actually not about the apps, it’s about the protocol. Therefore, I needed to expand my model, in which social apps can be connected by a protocol like ActivityPub.
And after that, there is another layer, which I’m just discovering now: that in fact there already are many of these ecosystems out there, but that the idea behind them is rather simple: you post stuff, and you can subscribe to people. And this abstract idea is called the Fediverse; for which most open version also the thing that calls itself the Fediverse can only thrive for.
Now, we can try to compare the different states the web2 apps and their communities are currently in one their way toward an Fediverse-understanding of the social web.
It is interesting that the first two big transitions, Elon Musk managed to do all in about a year, first by buying Twitter and then by rebranding it to X, his “everything”-app, which at least in the common view, altered the service completely from what it once was and with what most of them actually wanted it to be like. But he didn’t realize the innovative energy that he set free with this, just like Ludwig the 14. didn’t expect to greatly influence the age of enlightenment.
The consequence of these drastic changes in world view for Twitter in basically only the last year but in general for the community of any app that experiences such a change are huge. With Twitter, we have seen it the most obvious: after the buying of Twitter, there was a big migration, which is usually called “Big Twitter-Exodus” on related services. After that, when the app is changed without recognition of what it once was, another stage is entered, best shown with Elon Musk renaming Twitter to X, trying to convert it into his everything-app, which made many people realize that their old Twitter is definitely gone and that it is not something owned by Musk, but an idea. This made people separate the product Twitter from the abstract idea behind it: micro-blogging. While for people this is more complicated and also more frustrating, because you could be on a service that realizes the idea less good, its fosters competition and ensures quality of the service way better.
And now with Threads joining the Fediverse, people will be able to experience service-centric-irritations on the current second-biggest Twitter-realization.
A similar thing happened on Reddit and, not so surprisingly, Reddit-alternative Lemmy very soon became the second-most popular app on the Fediverse. And with Reddit now going to stock market, this could lead to the next stage, in which the longing for an “Reddit”-alternative, is replaced with the idea that always laid behind it: a link-aggregator. The idea is decoupled from the primary product; they are separated.
With the other apps, which are mostly owned by Meta, things will probably take much longer, because Meta will not be as stupid to make the same mistakes. This is already shown with Threads: they join the Fediverse and this way, stay in control and avoid enshittification. And this way, people will also stay in the provider-exclusive or at least provider-centric world view, which also plays in their hands.
In stage 3, maybe even in stage 4, many competitors emerge that try to thrive for that lost ideal and in the forth stage, this abstract ideal gives way to all the possibility that the protocol offers.
After that, one realizes that there may be many other ecosystems like that out there. Of course, Google, Microsoft and Apple are also their own ecosystem. Actually, they at least partially already do what the Fediverse tries to do: in their ecosystem, you have a unique user handle, with which you can connect to your friends across various services.
The revolutionary idea behind the Fediverse is that there is no centre to this. The idea of the ecosystem is abstracted into an abstract idea, in which everything could be connected to everything.
Basically, whether it’s the Metaverse by Meta or the Everything-App by Elon Musk, all of these companies and people are trying to achieve this thing. This idea that we call the Fediverse. And I think ActivityPub is currently doing the best job at it; but it, too, only tries to achieve this abstract idea. However, in contrast to their proprietary competitors, it does so openly, and encourages its members to help toward that goal, which for me, already makes it by far the most sympathetic runner.
It is no surprise that Meta now jumps to the rescue of/claims this idea. After all, their grandiose idea of the Metaverse comes closer to the idea behind the Fediverse of all Silicon Valley ecosystems. It goes the farthest in this direction (because its Meta primary focus of course), because it realizes that the massive scale it wants to achieve, cannot be done inside their walled-garden ecosystem. But they will probably not openly advertise it, because they don’t like the openness that much.
But overall, the joining of Meta is not a bad thing. After all, it introduced many people to the next digital world model: that of the protocol-centric one. At least to an open one. Of course, they have known protocols like Sign in with Google or Facebook for all their life. But still, this is a major step.
A very important thing, however, will be that the Fediverse manages to advertise their idea of an open fediverse, rather than being drowned out by the advertising of the semi-open Metaverse that Meta will most likely at some point launch without mercy.
And I think, we might have a better stance here than many expect, because we simply have the best case for a social web that we all want to live in.
What to take away from this? Well, I guess what I’m getting here at is: even for me, a tech-apt person it was a significant effort to really understand the concepts behind the term “Fediverse” and lots of it done both with videos and trying out things. And I think, almost a taboo: there are many people on Mastodon that actually have a Provider-Centric view of the social web. It will be hard to get it across to people, and it will take time, but the changes it causes would potentially be huge.
Think about it: why is the idea of the Fediverse not so popular in the Silicon Valley? Well, because it makes users not mere users but agents that can contribute to drive that change. In the metaverse, the tools and the ground are provided by Meta; there is a limit to how far the ceiling goes, and that limit is defined by Meta. In the Fediverse, everybody can contribute to building it, there is no ceiling above us, only an endless universe with unlimited possibility in the digital. And this view is what Meta, Elon Musk and many other people in the Silicon Valley don’t want us to see. Because it makes us realize our own potential, because it brings us into a position to see a path for becoming autonomous digital actors, because it lets us form a vision for the future of the social web for ourselves, because it makes us independent from their stories.
In this sense, the bird really has been freed. Freed from the product that it was bound to.
That said, authoritarianism could become a problem on the Fediverse. In this sense, also, we don’t need to demonize Meta. They are not playing nice, but they also are a monopoly, and politically, they are not authoritarian, which is a good thing these days. We can look at their Metaverse, if they will call it that, as a digital, social ecosystem, but there are many others out there like it; Meta just has been the most ambitious with it. And if it helps us get bigger, we should get on for the ride. Everything else would be contradictory to our own ideals of the abstract idea of the Fediverse.
So, following this logic, the next three things to look out for could be the following:
- Threads joining the Fediverse: People will be able to follow WordPress-Blogs from Threads. It will be huge.
- Reddit separating its abstraction from its product: Reddit going public will most likely give fuel to that separation; because it alters the product without recognition from what it was a few years ago, in which it was basically non-profit
- Science Community creating their own ecosystem based on the Fediverse: Soon, Open Science Collective launches, which is explicitly created in comparison to other, less open ecosystems. The Science Community seems like the first collective (apart from the Opensource community and parts of the queer community of course) that actually wants to build their own ecosystem on the web that is not proprietarily owned and not sealed off to everyone else (“The scientific method must be liberated”).
The one I’m most excited about personally is Threads joining the Fediverse, because yes, it will be tough, but it will introduce so many people to the idea of the Fediverse and lead to so much innovative ideas.
In the bigger picture that could happen we are at the beginning of the second big opening:
Half of the social web is still on web2 and the other half is already dipping its toes in the open social web.
Even many people in journalism still have an under-complex understanding of these services, which shows for example for the reaction of Reddit going public on the Guardian:
“‘Reddit is one of the last places on the internet where one might discover something new, without any strings attached.’” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/20/facebook-twitter-reddit-rubbish-ipo
For all the understandable sorrow over having lost something dear, you can see here that the author clearly still has a “provider-exclusive” view on things. It doesn’t seem like any possibility that this service, which functionality basically only are forums, will never be built somewhere else. Then, there is commonly the talk that the internet is getting “more and more fractured” and that there will probably never again be “this one place”, which in a way, is true, but given the nature of the internet, sooner or later leads to more connectedness and shows the limit of these authors understanding of the matter here.
That’s also why it’s important that the Fediverse shows an active presence on Threads: to encourage people to think out of their digital world view that they have lived in for all these years, some even since always. Point them towards things that confuse and irritate them; that question their current, limited world view (of course only in a reasonable way) and they will eventually come up with a new model of the social web themselves and start asking questions that Meta don’t want them to ask.
Again, I want to press that this is not a call to smash Meta or any other web2 platform to pieces or take immoral actions against it, on the contrary – it is the view of the digital in our mind that needs to change, and it will push this Copernican revolution of how we look at the digital, additionally to practically implementing the Fediverse itself of course.
In any case, once reached, this Copernican conclusion is frightening as well as empowering, and it was made by many after the decline of Twitter; however, for most people, it’s still ahead. But we can already think about which conclusions to draw from this, and as we will see, with the help of Kant, we will be better off than before. In fact, we will become more mature and moral digital beings because of it. Because with this new, Copernican look on the social web that we have now, we can now apply the same conclusions that Kant drew for moral beings in the physical world, for the digital as well. But first of all, we need to turn our minds to another question that the Fediverse needs to answer for itself: can we consider Fediverse access a universal right? After shown this, we can take a look at what that actually means for us as digital beings.
A Kantian Right to Fediverse Access
Until now, we have always assumed that a universal access to the Fediverse is something that we should thrive for and much has already been written about whether the Fediverse should replace our current social media or stay small, by some deemed “small” and “Big Fedi” standpoints.
However, while usually, these arguments were made based on utilitarism, in the following, I will make another case for the “Big Fedi” standpoint, bolstered by some, hopefully convincing arguments by Immanuel Kant, which will lead to a broader vision on how the Fediverse could help us to become more moral digital beings based on one of the central ideas of Kantian thinking in the last section of this essay.
The idea to declare access to internet infrastructure a universal law is not new. In his paper “Palladium of the People: A Kantian Right to Internet Access” (https://philpapers.org/rec/BUCPOT-6), Christopher Buckman argued for a basic right to internet access, however, what he mostly argues about is for a basic access to social media.
The text argues that access to high-speed internet, including social media, should be considered a basic right due to its significance in connecting people to vital resources and facilitating informed democratic participation. It examines criticisms of social media, highlighting concerns about polarization and misinformation but argues that it can also serve as a bridge between morality and politics, aligning with Kant’s vision of the public sphere. Despite challenges, the text suggests that social media’s potential to unify and democratize discourse justifies the right to internet access. It addresses criticisms and provides examples such as the Black Lives Matter movement to illustrate how social media can influence public opinion and drive political change. Ultimately, it advocates for universal broadband access as a means to uphold individual autonomy, foster enlightenment, and safeguard against authoritarianism.
Notedly writing this in 2017, the timing couldn’t be worse, right? Social media leads to polarization, the movements that it sparked never lead to any real change, or do they? And on the web, people act immoral anyways, right? While these are of course heavily exaggerated, these inconsistencies in his argument exist, because social media as it is today is not helping society, and the problem will not disappear by scaling social media by getting more people internet access, as Buckman argues: “Increased inclusivity, made possible by the recognition of a universal right to internet access, would allow social media to fulfil its potential as a Kantian bridge between the moral and political.” Because the current, walled-garden social media is bad for society by design.
But these inconsistencies could be overcome with the introduction of the Fediverse. The Fediverse actually allows this public sphere to develop as it should, and that we can actually browse it and explore the World Wide Web with it. While Buckman argued that a universal internet access would actually make the public sphere that bridges morality and politics that Kant calls for, the Fediverse could be the more realistic thing to make that happen, and that will not necessarily lose this ability when it scales (at least there is no reason for this). And because the Fediverse so obviously achieves this bridge much better, his argumentation can also be used for a universal right to Fediverse access.
Why I’m worried about Reddit going public, or: the Choice between destroying something or building something
With a good argument for the “Big Fedi” now, there are also things that I do worry about.
Let’s assume for a moment that the Fediverse will soon have some power on the internet. Given that no one seems too aware of this, plus an overall hate against big tech, this is a recipe for disaster.
The Fediverse has to come to terms with the web that it wants to build. And it has to learn to control its own impulses. I just don’t think we are ready for it, yet and still, the whole situation around Reddit looks like a perfect storm for the web2 that will erupt sooner or later. So better speak about these things while we can still influence the outcome.
Some could say that after all, the situation is much like that of Twitter back in the day. But the situation with Reddit could for at least one reason be definitely unique: in the case of Twitter, not many people deny that it was solely be Elon Musk’s fault. The destruction came from the very top. In the case of Reddit, the situation would look more difficult, of course depending on how it will all play out. On one hand, there is the behaviour of spec, which is ignorant but not really surprising and which makes it somewhat like the situation of Twitter – but in many ways also not, because he doesn’t seem too keen to actually change the behaviour of the app’s functionality that much like Musk did with Twitter. His changes to the ecosystem are much more subtle, which doesn’t mean that they are any less impactful.
A crucial thing to keep in mind: violence is, first of all, immoral in mostly any case, and secondly, it also changes the person doing it. People on the Fediverse should be aware of that. It would change us, too, and at least in the way that it might happen again. Some people that would do it, would only be too eager to do the same thing again, they would search for the next thing to destroy. And next thing you know it, the Fediverse is turning on itself, basically dismantling its future.
Instead of destruction, it’s always better to build something new, which is better on its own and not because the old one was destroyed. There is nothing gained by destroying knowledge, by destroying communities. Companies will in any case be a part of the Fediverse. And if we just kick out companies altogether, they will go to another ecosystem that realizes the Fediverse better.
So, the next time, you share a post calling for the destruction of Reddit, think twice and maybe contribute to a Fediverse project instead.
I know this section is more borderline moralistic than usual, but sometimes it’s good to listen to the angsty German. And I’m telling you: universalism is the only option.
Its great the web is crawling slowly towards more enlightenment, but this also comes with new responsibilities. And we must not fuck it up for instant gratification even though we have been trained for so many years to do just that; we need to learn to control ourselves to stay in charge and for building something bigger.
Between blindly believing in the market and wanting to keep it out of the Fediverse completely, there exists another path. That of enlightenment, which we need to follow, because both other paths are so clear to fail.
The question for a set of morals on the social web and the question how to govern these spaces will only become more pressing in the future, and in the near future, regulators will play a role here; but not forever. Let’s take a first look how this could look like in the long run.
The Fediverse above me and the Moral Law within me
It’s obvious that a universal access to the Fediverse still doesn’t solve the problem that people on social media, be it central or decentral, often act without moral. This brings us to another core idea of Kantian thinking: the interconnectedness of objectivity and subjectivity, which leads to applying the idea of making own moral rules based on reason, also in the digital.
Because in the potential that lies in the Fediverse, in the space of rationality of the web that it expands in, we find our own morals just as we do when looking into the infinite potential of the universe, which hasn’t been possible on the web as we know it.
Kant famously wrote: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”
Kant’s idea that the stars above us introduce us to our own freedom, which in turn give birth to our own morals, can as well be applied to the fediverse: it is potentially huge, when looking into it and realizing its potential, we are for a moment annihilated, because we realize that we will never be fully able to rap our minds around this thing; however, we also realize, that we can either thrive for that knowledge or don’t thrive, and anything in between, and this, according to Kant, is freedom. And if we now apply Kant’s ideas to the internet, as we will see in the following, with the Fediverse, we are for the first time actually able to form moral principles in the digital from our own, rational minds in the sense of Kant.
This capability stems from the fusion of two distinct modes of digital existence: the ability to navigate digital spaces freely and the capacity for discourse and thought within social realms. The Fediverse breaks the barriers between these two modes of action, offering users a complete experience where they can traverse vast digital landscapes while engaging in meaningful interactions.
The Fediverse is completely different from the user experiences of web1 and web2. In traditional centralized platforms, users often operate within predefined structures and limitations imposed by the platform owners. They may have limited agency in controlling their online experiences and interactions. The Fediverse, as a decentralized social networking protocol, represents a departure from this centralized model. It enables users to participate in social networks that are interoperable, distributed, and not controlled by a single entity. This decentralization grants user’s greater autonomy, control over their data, and the ability to engage in communities across different platforms without being tied to a single service provider, empowering users to navigate the digital realm with greater freedom and autonomy.
Furthermore, it’s crucial here that we were already before conscious digital beings as well as able to move and alter the digital space; however, never at the same time. Either we were in the world wide web, where we could move around, but not speak and think, or we were in our limited space on a social media platform, where we could speak and think, but not move around.
The Fediverse now combines the two. When we could before switch between a vast, sprawling earth that we could wander at will, but unable to think and speak, and our own mind, in which we could think and speak with others about those things, but enable to interact with them anymore, the Fediverse now enables us to open our eyes, mind and mouth and look at the starry heavens above, were we see the huge potential space that the internet expands in: the world of reason.
This way, the world wide web and the social web are combined into a single experience, and the world of reason and all of its complex structures and our social structures are bridged. This way, we can explore the world of reason as social beings, and we can explore it together.
While with e-mail and social networks, it was already possible to talk about things on the web; it was never really possible to look at them as conscious, autonomous beings. If, for example, I was on a website to buy dog food and realized that the prices had increased, I had no possibility of telling that to my friends, or even imagining how to convey this to other people on the site itself. The only possibility would have been to copy the link, however, that would have changed nothing on the original site. With the Fediverse and ActivityPub, it’s easy to imagine a dog food website, on which you make comments on each site. But without this possibility, you aren’t really there at all. You are just a conscious ghost without a body. You can interact with the world, but no one will see it.
And now stepping out of this, looking in the vastness of objectivity and realizing one’s own freedom in the digital, is also the birth of morality in the digital world since Kant believed that autonomy arises from individuals freely following moral principles that they themselves have rationalized, rather than being dictated by someone else.
All of this also means that people will need to apply digital skills to navigate this space on their own. Because if they cannot create their own ground of space in the Fediverse, they cannot use their Fediverse Access to look into the starry heavens of the Fediverse. The skills to build one’s own Fediverse server are therefore crucial to becoming mature agents in the web of tomorrow. To understand better what this means and also as an introduction to the digital skills required for this, I created “the Ether”, a philosophical thought experiment, in which we imagine a world, in which the concepts of computer science have become natural law. This way, they can be learned similar to a magic system in Harry Potter. I described the concept in the following post, which also includes an exemplary H.P.-fanfiction that applies the ideas in a story: https://fungiverse.files.wordpress.com/2024/02/the-ether-1.2-1.pdf and https://fungiverse.files.wordpress.com/2024/02/avadas-curse-en-2.pdf, and the German original: https://fungiverse.files.wordpress.com/2024/02/avadas-curse-2.pdf (all three are open-source).
It’s the same as with the web2 apps: we separate the idea from the thing itself, and by this make it a matter of public debate, how far the actual thing differentiates from this idea. This way, we make it independent from actual programming languages (which in an abstract sense, don’t change that much anymore) and from the programming community in general, and this way, it becomes something static, that can be publicly debated upon and thrived for.
At one point, programming and data scientist skills will become a part of pop culture anyways just as it has been with engineering in the form of science fiction already. However, now is the time to turbo-charge this development.
It’s not like everybody needs to be able to program, but there should at least be a known path to reach these things. If a kid is interested in fantasy with complex magic system, maybe encourage them to acquire more digital skills. This way, it could also serve as a new heuristic here to spot people equipped to become computer/data scientists.
With these three things: a shift of the digital world view, a universal right to Fediverse access and a bridge to the skills that are required to reach the degree of maturity to become able to set one’s own moral rules in the digital, people should be able to make use of the Fediverse for overcoming their own digital immaturity and make the web again something, in which we can place our hopes for the future.
Conclusion
Our current view on the digital is very limited; by broadening it into the Fediverse, we are faced with new problems, but also new ways to liberate ourselves. But for this to be possible, there also needs to be a change of the state of mind. It’s not only a technical problem that can be solved by getting everyone internet access and developing the Fediverse. After Kant, the starry sky only gives you a sense of freedom, if you have sufficiently measured it and are conscious of the possibility, at least to a basic degree, to do that with your consciousness, even if never fully. Then the look turns from fear and awe to an unbearable realization of insatiable possibility, which Kant calls freedom. In other words, the Fediverse offers us for the first time, to look into the starry heavens of the digital world and become moral, digital beings, but only if we have the knowledge that it exists and that we can discover it with our minds.
Therefore, Fediverse access should be considered a universal right. But to acquire it, additionally to an access to internet, skills are required to make actual use of the theoretical possibility of signing up to a Fediverse service and realizing and making use of its full potential for becoming a moral, digital being. This document tries to be a first step towards this, which of course can be expanded by other people, who have a deeper knowledge of Kant and philosophy in general.
However, if it would be considered a good case, it could solve some of the dilemmas faced in digital spaces by the public and the individual today. Because then, it’s not necessarily so, that they need to be controlled by an outer authority; it is therefore not necessary that they at some point all come under the rule of national states, but it can stay in the hands of the public and becoming its own governing space when having acquired a certain level of “vernunft” (reason). This will give the public more power against the state and the market and could lead to overcoming the hyperpolitics of our current times and hopefully equip both society and individuals to face the challenges that we are currently facing and that of the twenty-first century in general.
In Kant’s sense, we aren’t yet human, but only thrive for becoming so. Maybe the Fediverse can bring us closer to that. And one thing is certain: While of course the most important thing is to build the thing itself, there will be no big Fediverse without a Copernican revolution on the web. This is also a clash of ideas: we have just left the digital dark age, and we need to push for the crack of light that we see in the distance, or it will close up eventually. The tools are all there, in our minds, we just have to make use of them.
“If it is now asked, “Do we presently live in an enlightened age?” the answer is, “No, but we do live in an age of enlightenment.” As matters now stand, a great deal is still lacking in order for men as a whole to be, or even to put themselves into a position to be able without external guidance to apply understanding confidently to religious issues. But we do have clear indications that the way is now being opened for men to proceed freely in this direction and that the obstacles to general enlightenment – to their release from their self-imposed immaturity — are gradually diminishing. In this regard, this age is the age of enlightenment …”
– 1784, Immanuel Kant, translated by Ted Humphrey
Fungiverse Tales 