Part of this is that I’m new, a Reddit refugee, and still learning my way around.
Part of it was prompted by Beehaw’s choice to defederate with lemmy.world & other instances - there’s a clear disagreement on how to keep difficult people from dropping turds in the punch bowl.
And part of it is from watching the enshittification of Reddit.
Perhaps it would be a good idea to set up a nonprofit organization for the purpose of promoting independent distributed social media. Conceivably, it could fundraise to help keep servers alive, have some people promoting the Fediverse elsewhere on the Internet, lobby and keep lawyers handy to keep government from squelching free speech. Something along the lines of EFF or FSF.
There could be a mutual agreement among members on ground rules for users (for example, requiring all member instances to ban/block/delete hate speech). Or it can operate services like anti-spam/anti-hate blocklists so mods have better tools to keep the riffraff out. And it can serve as a venue to resolve disputes in a civil way.
And I say it needs to be a nonprofit so it’s enshittification resistant. For-profit companies are required by law to maximize profit for owners/shareholders, which makes enshittification inevitable. A nonprofit’s mission in life is to perform beneficial things for the community, be it stopping teen suicide, running an orchestra, or promoting independent social media.
Just my random brainfart, I’m sure half of this has already been done.
The design of the activity pub protocol (of which lemmy, kbin, beehaw, mastodon, etc. are built) is such that there could never be a central authority that controls the entire fediverse.
Consider the world wide web, which is the biggest federated service in history. There is no central administrative body that can exist for all websites because anyone can set up their own web server and host whatever they want on it. The same is true for lemmy instances.
The beauty of this system is that people who want a more curated experience are free to use instances that ban the kinds of behaviors or views that they find problematic. Compare that to Reddit where hate subs get removed only when they become a financial liability.
There doesn’t have to be an entity that controls the Fediverse, and in fact, there shouldn’t. What this nonprofit would be is a resource for admins, mods & users of social media.
No dictatorial control, more like if instances choose to, they could, for example, get certified by this nonprofit to become part of a group of instances that mutually agrees to a set of rules in order to help each other keep trolls under control. Don’t want to be part of that? Don’t have to.
Also, what I’m suggesting is a form of democracy for social media. This nonprofit would be controlled by an executive director and a board, which would ideally be elected by us. Much better than digital dictatorship under the thumb of Spez, Elon or Zuck.
The EFF doesn’t control the Internet, it does advocacy work. That’s part of what this organization would do. Or have some lawyers on hand for when the religious right tries to legislate us out of existence.
There is an analog to what you’re talking about for the internet, it’s iana/icann, and that evolved from user-groups, committees, early governance structures that existed to establish standards and resolve disputes (like two organizations trying to claim the same IP space or dns names). The EFF is a different thing, and more an advocacy group than a governance body.
If the fediverse becomes massively successful, I have no doubt that along the way it will develop formal governing bodies with representation from major instances voting things around abuse management. Right now though there’s just:
If there was a proper governing body, it would be very useful to manage the Beehaw defederation situation. Not that they could force Beehaw or another instance to do anything specific, but they could set standards around registration verification (or lack thereof), cross instance moderation, vote to prioritize or fund development of specific moderation tools, and define coordinated sanctions for major instances that fail to meet the agreed upon standards.
I don’t think we’re ready for a formal group yet, especially because the personalities involved have such varied ideologies and in many cases deride the value of formal structures. Over time though, if the infighting doesn’t kill the lemmyverse… typically reasonable compromisers ascend in influence through individual negotiations until the ecosystem is in a place where there’s a critical mass behind setting up some minimal governance processes to resolve disputes rather than splitting the network everytime someone gets crabby.
To be fair, there are governing bodies that try to control the web protocols. They just can’t invalidate the old versions of the protocols.