In the Hall of Nerds — also known as the Fediverse, which is a hall for web nerds where I hang out — this week’s big news was the launch of the Social Web Foundation, a U.S. nonprofit organization dedicated to fundraising for and finishing the job of making the web-standard ActivityPub protocol the definitive future technical implementation of what we think of from the user-facing side as “social media applications.”

The news raised a predictable hue and cry because it is a formal partnership with, among other large entities, Meta Platforms, Inc., née TheFacebook, Inc., whose exploits need not be recounted except to say that their newest consumer application, Threads, is increasingly interoperable with ActivityPub, and therefore with applications like Mastodon, which is where most of the Hall of Nerds lives.

(The Tiger Pajamas Activity Pub Server is also on Mastodon, in fact, and you can follow us all at @jon@wears.tigerpajamas.com, @ashley@wears.tigerpajamas.com, and @phil@wears.tigerpajamas.com.)

There is a widespread — but who can say how pervasive — sentiment in the Hall of Nerds that Meta’s involvement is terrible, because something-something embrace, extend, and extinguish, and also because Meta has done terrible things on social media servers it owns, which will spread to ones it does not own somehow, and also because something-something scraping my posts for AI using this new protocol integration as though that were necessary to scrape posts that were published on the worldwide web, but mainly — I speculate — because it means normals will infiltrate the Hall of Nerds.

So that sentiment exists, even though the obvious implication of Threads implementing ActivityPub is that Meta just guaranteed the Fediverse will win, but, look, to be fair, as my replyguys never fail to remind me, Meta has done a long litany of terrible things, and I don’t like them, either. I do, however, like my friends, and they use Instagram and, increasingly, Threads, so I’m really looking forward to being able to tweet with them again from my Mastodon account.

But those who game out how this works a little bit will understand that Threads is not the endgame here. All of the above hand-wavey theories are attempts to back-solve for an evil reason why Threads exists, when the truth is Threads exists because Twitter has become a Nazi bar, Meta wants to absorb some of that cultural energy, and also it needs its own entrant in its real future strategy, which is to provide maximum-scale social web infrastructure that complies with 21st-century Big Tech regulations by supporting interoperability with smaller players.

Meta can, for example, (basically) moderate content at planetary scale, which is legally necessary to keep online services legally online. With many already-big enterprises running ActivityPub-compatible applications and many more sure to come, this sort of lower-level infrastructure stuff — surely also including hosting and content delivery, at which Meta is also a world leader — is sure to become a meaningful business for them, as Meta employees working on this are already happy to talk about.

The way I understand Meta’s involvement in the social web is as the “DMA-ification of social media.” Personally, I feel like it’s a much better application of the European Commission’s logic by which the DMA is applied than, say, Apple’s App Store is, and Meta is surely seeing this and changing proactively.

Like the iPhone in the EC’s imagined monopoly over… iPhones, Meta’s apps are too big to fail in social media. I’m sorry, but you know it’s true. The vast majority of humanity is there, and that’s the way it is.

As Meta has already seen and dramatically — horribly, inhumanely — failed to adapt to many times over, the world is too complex for a single company to moderate instantaneous worldwide publishing from every living person.

Furthermore, there is a growing appetite amongst national governments to restrain the power of multinational tech companies because they cause legitimate harms and also threaten governments in ways a dispassionate observer may or may not care about.

So, in “pivoting to infrastructure” — a thing at which Meta is exceedingly competent and which has a much narrower scope than moderating ALL PUBLIC HUMAN (and computer) SPEECH — Meta brings to bear its capacity to comply with regulations and creates a new business in which it can charge “local” (in many senses of the word) social web providers for the convenience of push-button compliance.

Now, what does “compliance” mean in this world, and also what about muh freedoms?

Well, I feel it’s about time that Internet People™ started to really reconsider their views of what content belongs in public, because that’s what’s actually at issue here.

The Fight for the Decentralized Federated Social Web™ is a fight with governments over which private entities are allowed to host publicly available information and software, and how they are to do it. The answer to that is always going to be “the ones that comply with the law” and “by complying with the law.”

That will be ever-shifting, ever-tightening terrain, subject to the winds of politics and perverse incentives, ever-improving (or at least ever-increasing) surveillance, and it is also ever-increasingly entangled with the market economics of the entire Earth.

Do you want to deal with that? No. I don’t either. Meta has to, because approximately everyone on Earth communicating via public internet messages is already doing so on their infrastructure.

Is that good? No. But it’s true.

So now the global baseline for posting — in public, remember, meaning on services accessible by theoretically anyone — is using services hosted on compliant infrastructure.

Enter DMA-ification.

In order to live in the new world, Meta has to at least allow other providers to be interoperable, have their own business models, and compete on consumer-facing differences. Features. Experiences. From the user’s perspective, that’s the world we want. Pick your app, and so forth.

Which would you rather have:

• A world in which social web infrastructure is concentrated in the hands of a small number of companies no one likes, whose business is complying with the whims of governments and allowing their customers to host whatever (compatible) social web applications they want, including ones they roll themselves?
• Or a world in which social web infrastructure has to fly under the radar, which is impossible, and then regimes will crush it?

Now. What about content that doesn’t belong in public?

What worries many people about World A is that the more concentrated mumbles is, the more mumbles will CENSOR THE INTERNET! What follows is likely an explanation of Big Tech’s history of blocking or taking down content ranging from true and legal to kookoo-for-cocoa-puffs.

Well, something I’ve been ineffectually yelling about for a long time is that I’m really, deeply, intensely doubtful that posting anything remotely sensitive on social media is ever warranted.

People have this goofball idea that social media is The People’s Medium™, and that it’s Essential™ for Civic Discourse™, and stuff. And there are, like, 0.75 examples of that having ever been true in practice, which people will cite. And so, these people contend, if there is any danger of being rounded up by the Bad Men for posting in public, we’re living in a totalitarian nightmare scenario.

First of all, that danger will always exist. But much more importantly, SOCIAL MEDIA IS NOT THE PEOPLE’S MEDIUM!

You know what the people’s medium is? WhatsApp. Yes, an app Meta owns and operates. There are two significant differences between it and the social web, though. One is that it’s an app for private messaging, not posting on the web. The other is that it’s end-to-end encrypted.

I assure you, this is where distribution of sensitive information is going. Search for terms like “dark forest” and “cozy web” if you don’t believe me.

The regulatory and infrastructural considerations here are totally different, and if there’s anywhere I’m throwing my body into the gears of the machine to stop the spread of tyranny, it’s in the efforts to break encrypted messaging. That is the threat to freedom and democracy and so on.

Posting posts? No. That’s for funsies and advertising.

So personally, the social web I hope to see realized is one where big tech’s lowest-common-denominator experience — which, again, approximately everyone will always use — is interoperable with other providers who can make good apps that compete on quality, and those providers can rely on a company like Meta — or others! — whose entire jobs are to do the stuff that’s too onerous for small groups or individuals.

It’s just posting. If you need to actually communicate, there are ways.

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You can hang out with all of Tiger Pajamas on the social web at @jon@wears.tigerpajamas.com, @ashley@wears.tigerpajamas.com, and @phil@wears.tigerpajamas.com using your ActivityPub-compatible application of choice, except not Threads yet, though we can follow your Threads accounts, as long as you turn on Fediverse sharing first, but anyway hopefully by the end of this year I’ll be able to delete this whole disclaimer about Threads.