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.

  • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    121·
    3 days ago

    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.

    • Sean Tilley@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      4·
      3 days ago

      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:

      • Fighting CSAM in the Fediverse (massive undertaking, requires collaboration with NCMEC)
      • Giving admins tooling for coordination against known troll instances and curation capabilities
      • Providing documentation and guidelines for how each platform is distinctly different
      • Providing mental health resources and digital privacy protections to moderators
      • Surveying admins across the network regarding needs their organization could provide.
      • Policy recommendations for instance admins, such as how to handle EU’s Digital Services Act

      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.

      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.

      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.

      Anything this group is doing should be open source, should be well advertised, and should be well discussed Fediverse-wide.

      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.

      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.

      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.

  • haverholm@kbin.earth
    41·
    2 days ago

    There is probably no doubt that this at least in part has to do with the current political climate in the US, and I think there is a potential here to grow a US-centric org and try to establish instead a network of national organisations coordinating their efforts internationally.

    This might — on a longer timescale than “by April we can’t pay our bills” — make for a broader field of potential funding from national, regional, and other grants applicable to local organisations. Certainly, the EU would be amenable to funding an organisation like IFTAS.

    On another level this decentralisation would not only chime well with the nature of the fediverse (indeed, the internet), but also add a diversity of international perspectives to the IFTAS’ efforts.

    This might also dispel the notion in some quarters that the internet is somehow a thing for North Americans to govern. From a European point of view — and certainly in my personal bubble, as a Scandinavian who does a lot if not most of my online communication in English — there has probably never been as much distrust in US decision making as now, and it might become IFTAS and other organisations to recognise that.

    Once again, none of the above would solve IFTAS’ immediate finances, but if the org struggles through the lack of funding somehow, it might benefit from the broader perspectives.

  • Vendetta9076@sh.itjust.works
    22·
    3 days ago

    Being non-foss makes this a non starter for a lot of people, especially when there are foss tools for this stuff already. Hopefully the devs can land on their feet but I’m not surprised theyre sinking.

    • Sean Tilley@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      21·
      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.