FediMod FIRES on building better and decentralised social media applications

Continuing our monthly interview series "Building a Free Internet of the Future", we talked to Emelia Smith, who is a software engineer. “Building a Free Internet of the Future" highlights the experiences and perspectives of individuals and communities supported by the NGI Zero (NGI0) grants, funded by the European Commission. 

Emelia is a NGI0 grantee with FediMod FIRES (Fediverse Intelligence, Recommendations & Replication Endpoint Server), a protocol for sharing moderation, recommendations and advisories. She is also working to connect two decentralised social network communities and user bases, Mastodon and Bluesky, through an “IETF specification document and Internet draft” (about which you can find out more in her article “Introducing OAuth Client ID Metadata Documents”).

In this interview, she explains more about her project, shares what she has learned from working with the Fediverse, discusses the challenges involved, and suggests practical steps people can take to help strengthen decentralised social media applications.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Let's start from 2018 when you were working on the Fediverse project. What is a Fediverse?

Fediverse is essentially a network of open source social media applications and they all talk to each other using the same protocol. The largest example of this is Mastodon. In 2018, with changes to US laws, people were looking for a different option from Twitter. So I was part of one of those communities and ended up joining a Mastodon server, and then started to do moderation on that server. At the time, Mastodon didn't really have good moderation features. So I found myself sitting down and writing the features and contributing to the software to make our lives easier as moderators.

So is it a kind of approach of taking care of the people using free software and internet for human interaction?

Yeah! Various of the projects in this space started quite a long time ago and they've each had different protocols along the way, but then in 2016 to 2018, ActivityPub [a protocol and open standard for decentralised social networking] became a standard – and that's the standard with the W3C, which oversees all of the web standards for HTML, CSS, all other sorts of things. And a lot of these open source projects all adopted the same standard in order to be able to communicate between each other.

Can you explain your FediMod FIRES project?

FediMod FIRES is a server that aims to make it easy to share intelligence and recommendations around trust and safety between Fediverse services. So it's both a protocol and a reference server implementation. It's designed for synchronising that dataset and also making sure that the dataset is labelled and has well-formed entities and all of that sort of stuff. And essentially what it does is whenever you add a decision to the software, it keeps a record of them. For instance, you block a domain and you say this domain is bad because it's got spam. So you got that added to your list. Then if at a later date you say, actually, this domain doesn't do spam any more and I'm going to remove it, it keeps a record of that too. Every single change in FediMod FIRES is captured. This means that when another server wants to synchronise with FediMod FIRES, it can do so in a very easy manner because it can just say, “Hey, give me everything newer than this last record I knew about.”

So it's essentially software for distributing moderation recommendations and advisories to Fediverse server admins.

You applied to the NGI0 grants programme for your project FediMod FIRES. How was your application process?

The grant application process was quite long and with quite a lot of questions and it was not easy to secure the money. I submitted the application around 1 October 2023. I didn't really hear anything back apart from delays until I think February or March 2024. And by the time we did all the paperwork and had everything signed it was September 2024.

Admittedly, at that time I was the head of the contract work so I couldn't dedicate a lot of time to FediMod FIRES. I obviously have to prioritise the freelance work over the open source work, so things get moved around and fitted into my schedule where I can.

What did you learn during your involvement inside the Fediverse project?

Probably the biggest thing that I’ve learned over the years of the Fediverse is that it depends almost entirely on volunteer labour. There are a few people that are paid full time to work on the Fediverse. But to actually get the things that you need, it very much largely depends on volunteer labour, because projects are either chasing funding through grants or they're chasing funding through their nations. And those demands can often be at odds with what people overall need or want.

So that's probably the biggest learning from the Fediverse that I have: a lot of it is just run and funded by individuals and volunteers, which often means that it doesn't move as fast as more commercial operations.

So you, as a tech worker, how do you earn money?

I've been working on the Fediverse since 2023 full time, and I’m one of the few people that is sort of working across two different protocols, ActivityPub and AT Protocol. And the way that I earn my money is essentially partly through donations, which help a bit. And then on top of that, some freelance work. So recently I've had a grant for FediMod FIRES. And I've also been doing a lot of freelance work in the “atmosphere”, which is the community around AT Protocol, which is another protocol that powers Bluesky. And in 2024 I was doing a lot of freelance work with IFTAS, the independent federated trust and safety organisation, which has unfortunately mostly shut down now due to funding.

I'm afraid about the conditions for people working in tech. The question in my mind is who takes care of those people and their social condition – their insurance, welfare, etc. If you have anything to say about it I really want to hear about you.

The short answer is you don't make a whole lot of money doing this work, it's more I guess a labour of love. I kind of hate that term, but if you're not working in open social media for fame or money or anything like that, it's just because you want something better to exist.

How about you? Who will take care of your rights as a worker, as a human being, in this industry of open source software development?

That's a hard question, to be honest. It's mostly me because I'm a freelancer and so for instance, I don't get paid sick leave, I don't get paid holidays, I don’t get a lot of things that you would get as an employee. So in Germany, we have really reasonably good employee protection and reasonably good public health insurance. But as a freelancer, you are paying the full amount of the public health insurance, whereas any of your colleagues who are in permanent jobs will only pay half of it, because the employer pays the other half. So that means that I have to earn more money than my full-time employee colleagues in order to survive, because I'm covering health insurance fully, I'm covering my holidays, I'm covering my sick leave, and I’m covering saving money in case there is a downturn in work.

In fact, I've actually had a lot of financial insecurity over the last two to three years. Moments where I didn't think I was going to make it through. Just because I couldn't find work at that given time or grants weren't coming through or whatever it was. Things weren't happening at the schedule that life desires. 

But anyone who's worked as a freelancer probably knows what I'm talking about. And then when you look at the Fediverse and you are like, oh, all of this has run on the backs of volunteers, like all of your moderators, all of your server admins, pretty much half the contributions that you will see will come from unpaid volunteers. And you're like, how is this sustainable, because people need to pay rent, they need to buy food, they need to live. And that's probably one of the biggest problems with the Fediverse at the moment. I think it’s the fact that we take it very much for granted just how many people are trying to do work in order to advance the Fediverse. And it's actually partly the reason why I'm not working in the Fediverse at the moment, and I've actually pivoted out of working on various projects for the time being. Simply because I could not make enough money to survive and certain projects cannot give enough credit to external contributors in order to make it viable and add a sort of crowdfunding level.

It's definitely tough and I think the only way that the Fediverse will grow is if people start seriously thinking about how do we make this sustainable, how do we make whatever it is we're doing into something that isn't just a hobby, isn't just a thing I do on the side, but into a thing that is my full-time job. The more people you have treating it as a full-time job, the more people you have who are doing the round-the-clock moderation, the round-the-clock trust and safety, the round-the-clock development, fixing bugs, because all software has bugs, it has security vulnerabilities, etc.

I’m thinking now that the way and the process we use to produce tech − especially software technology and maybe hardware − also amplifies inequalities and segregation between people.

At the end of the day, you can only build software that reflects humanity or the values of the company that is building it. So in the Fediverse, that means Mastodon is reflecting the values of Mastodon, of the organisation that is doing and controlling the primary development of Mastodon. Each of these projects will have their own things that they're striving towards and each of them will have things that they try to avoid and somewhere along the line you end up making software that is hopefully somewhat decent. But mileage can vary, because obviously time and funds are limited, so there is only so much you can do with the priorities of the organisation that is coordinating the development and with the amount of money available.

Is there any message you want to share with our readers? 

My message to the readers is that the software that your depend on for your social networking and for a whole bunch of other things is made for free. So support the developers, support the community managers, support the people that are operating these services, give them a donation. You don't have to necessarily give a lot of money, because every little bit counts and it's the things that we can do when we join together as a society, as a community, and we rally around things − that is what truly makes a difference. 

For a very good example of this, I recently had one of those episodes of financial insecurity and I ended up publishing an article about it, which was just a very short off-the-cuff piece. And I ended up having the “atmosphere” community − the community of AT Protocol − rally around behind me and they ended up donating in one day the same amount of money that I normally process in a month in donations.

So if you want to see these projects survive, if you want to see better social media, if you want to see better things exist in society, you either have to build it or you have to fund that development. You have to support your server admins, not just necessarily monetarily but also by reducing the amount of conflicts. So on social media these days, it’s very easy to jump into fights with people all around the world, and that just causes your moderators and your admin stress, because they don't want to be police, they don't want to be pulling two people apart from each other because they can’t agree on something. So focusing on the positives and focusing on the things that you can change, you can make it easier on your moderators by trying not to create arbitrary fights. Because these do happen, and they can be massively destructive within the Fediverse. Funding the development, funding the hosting of the service and having a recurring donation for a dollar or two. That actually does a lot as the number of people donating increases, and every dollar counts. 

We don't get to a better world without actively trying to make it. Whereas the past sort of 16 years of technology has basically been, you are a passive consumer and you get what you're given. And those days are starting to come to an end, because people are realising that technology companies don't serve them and instead, it is us that must make the software that the people want to use. Whether that's giving our skills, whether it's giving our time, whether it's getting money, whatever it is, there's usually a way that you can volunteer and help and be the change that you want to see in the world, essentially.

Xavier Coadic is a consultant for the NGI0 consortium, and a free/libre open source software activist with 15 years of experience in free open source cultures and communities (software, data hardware, wetware, policy makers and political groups, research and development).