Robert Gehl: The Dark Web & the Fediverse | Logos Podcast with Jarrad Hope

Robert Gehl

The coverage has been. It's full of, you know black hat hackers, and it's full of drug dealers, it's full of child exploiters and so on. And the unfortunate, unfortunate side effect of that is that, you know, that's what people think it's for. And I think that that social construction of the dark web, as for these activities, is a very powerful force.

Jarrad Hope

Well, thanks for for joining me, Robert. I,

Robert Gehl

But.

Jarrad Hope

I came across your work,

Robert Gehl

The.

Jarrad Hope

You know, weaving the dark web, your book weaving the dark web, legitimacy of Freenet and Tor and I.t.p.

Robert Gehl

That.

Jarrad Hope

And currently, like, I'm working on the sort of next generation cipher space called logos.

Robert Gehl

Okay.

Jarrad Hope

And I'd been thinking about public programable blockchains and how they can have their own sense of legitimacy.

Jarrad Hope

And I hadn't really come across anyone else thinking about these ideas until I came across your book. And I sort of. I just wanted to chat to you about it and see, you know, your thoughts and convey that to, to our viewers. But moreover, I think you're working on a new book as well, right? I think called Move Slowly and Build Bridges about alternative social media and

Robert Gehl

And what?

Jarrad Hope

With a focus on you know, the metaverse and the ethics around that.

Robert Gehl

Yeah.

Jarrad Hope

And for the past nine years or so, you know, one of the main projects we've been working on is status, which is you know alternative, decentralized, peer to peer messaging or super application built

Robert Gehl

Butler.

Jarrad Hope

Around Ethereum. So, so yeah, I guess, like, before we get into the weeds, would you like to introduce yourself? Tell us a bit more about your background and then what you're all about.

Robert Gehl

Sure. Yeah. My name is Robert Gale. I'm an associate professor at York University. I'm in the communication and media studies department. I saw affiliation with a big grant project called Connected Minds. I have a research chair. It's got a longish title. It's the Ontario research chair of digital governance for social Justice. But basically what I take that to mean is focusing on how communities govern themselves online, how they use various technologies to build communities and connect to one another. So, as you mentioned, my current book project, I'm focusing on the metaverse. I've had this long standing interest in alternatives to what I call corporate social media alternatives

Jarrad Hope

And.

Robert Gehl

To Facebook and Twitter and so on. Which was a pretty sleepy topic until November or so of 2022 when Elon Musk bought Twitter. And the connection there with the dark web book you might have picked up is that the the one of the entry points I had into the dark web was that people running alternative social media on the dark web. And I found that to be really fascinating, particularly at that time when Facebook was so dominant and so concerned with real world identities. I thought, this is really fascinating that people are leaving that behind for socializing in these networks that are meant to protect anonymity of readers and creators of content. So that's kind of the thread I would draw between the two projects there.

Jarrad Hope

Brian. Okay. Interesting. And like, what are the motivations for

Robert Gehl

The.

Jarrad Hope

Even caring about this? And, you know, obviously you're dedicating

Robert Gehl

One.

Jarrad Hope

A large portion of your life to, to to these ideas.

Robert Gehl

Yeah. Personally my, my my motivation was my doctoral research. So I was a PhD student at George Mason in the cultural studies program, and this was in 2005 to 2010. And this was right as the whole web 2.0 discourse was exploding. So user generated content I think in if I remember rightly, it was 2006 when you were was a person of the year. And so time magazine had like this special edition with a mirror on it, so you could hold it up and be the person of the year. And the argument in that issue was that. We are the media, right? It's no longer a top down, centralized broadcast model. And I was looking into this and seeing at the same time YouTube get purchased for something like $1.6 billion by Google, Facebook growing rapidly and seeing this, you know, monopolization of social sociality online and getting really concerned. So here on the one hand, we have all of us socializing online, connecting to each other, making posts, liking those posts, sharing and that, feeding these growing monopolies. And so my first book, which grew out of the dissertation, it's called Reverse Engineering Social Media, was a critique of the political economy of that basically our free labor fueling these now extremely valuable companies.

Robert Gehl

And working through that, I got to the end and realized, like, it's not enough to do criticism, right? We can critique Facebook, meta, Twitter, Google all day long. What we need to do is embrace activists who are building alternatives that keep that ideal of us being the media, alive. So that's when I started turning to look at various projects. And their motivations are somewhat similar often stemming from a criticism of the monopolization of online sociality. But also, you know particularly post-snowden privacy concerns trying to keep privacy or anonymity alive on the internet. So you see a variety of motivations, and sometimes those motivations clash. I think we can see that even today, with the fediverse as popular as the fediverse has been. But at the end of the day, I, I would argue to my fellow academics, you can't just critique. You have to explore potential solutions and then, frankly, critique the solutions. Right? Like we need to use our critical faculties to to improve the solutions that people are bringing forward.

Jarrad Hope

All right. Okay. I guess, like,

Robert Gehl

We.

Jarrad Hope

When it comes back to that political economy. You know, with big tech or, you know, corporate social media there's corporate social media concept. Do you view that as kind of like a form of, like feudalism in a way where, like, the users are almost like serfs

Robert Gehl

Right.

Jarrad Hope

That are having their data harvested from them, and then obviously that being turned into revenue in some in some form.

Robert Gehl

I think that's that's not the worst metaphor in the world. And

Jarrad Hope

Okay.

Robert Gehl

A lot of people have reached for that metaphor. So the most recently, the work of Nathan Schneider, he talks about implicit feudalism, I believe, is his

Jarrad Hope

In.

Robert Gehl

Term in his book on online governance. And there are several other books I can look them up and, and share links that basically

Jarrad Hope

Yeah,

Robert Gehl

Use

Jarrad Hope

Please.

Robert Gehl

The feudal metaphor.

Jarrad Hope

Right.

Robert Gehl

I came at it really from a marxian political economy perspective, where, you know, you work, you produce value and the values, the extra value is taken from you. So

Jarrad Hope

Gotcha.

Robert Gehl

What is the value that we produce? We produce ourselves. You know, arguably we produce who we are through social media. We we declare what our interests are, who our family members are, who our friends are. We explore media, we talk about, you know, do all the things that we do, you know, offline. And we do that through these systems and the exchange. You know, the classic phrase, you know, if if it's free, you're the product, the exchanges.

Jarrad Hope

We.

Robert Gehl

We give up our data for access to become ourselves, which I found to be, frankly, deeply offensive. And so that's why I started turning to people who, like me, said we can do better. But then the question about what that better looks like is where, you know, the devil is in the details, so to speak.

Jarrad Hope

Right? Yeah. So it sounds like, you know, you've you've been you are tackling this on the sort of academic or theoretical front, but it sounds like there's almost like a frustration that you want to become more practical and see more explorations in this.

Robert Gehl

Yeah.

Jarrad Hope

Do you have an active hand in that as well or like, you know, what's your role? Are you working towards a solution? For alternative social media?

Robert Gehl

Yeah, I see my role as mostly supportive and documenting.

Jarrad Hope

Then.

Robert Gehl

But I do. It's tricky because one of the pressures you face as an academic is to be an objective observer. I

Jarrad Hope

Getting.

Robert Gehl

Don't believe that that's possible, but that's one of the the poses or ways of being as an academic. And so I would sit back and document what I see and, and criticize. Right. But there are other strands of academic engagement that are much more participatory. So ethnography is one example. I'm not saying that I do full on ethnography. I don't go and, you know, live somewhere else. But I do a variant called digital ethnography where I participate in communities. And so to give an example from the dark

Jarrad Hope

It.

Robert Gehl

Web book, I participated in a dark web social networking site. As you know, I came to it anonymously. I built a pseudonym, I built a stable identity over time. And there's a variety of ways you signal that on these social networks, on the dark web. And at one point we were talking about privacy, and we realized that the site didn't have a privacy policy. So I collaborated with one of the site admins to write the privacy policy, and it was basically about collective privacy act in a way that will protect the privacy of all members of this,

Jarrad Hope

The.

Robert Gehl

Social medium. So there are moments when I feel compelled to engage in. Currently, I and one of the admins of a mastodon instance. So this is a fediverse technology. I'm one of the admins of the instance that the Association of Internet Researchers, which is an academic professional group. They set up an instance of Massa and asked me to run it. And so I worked with content moderators on our, in our community and community members to write our code of conduct. And so, you know, these are active engagements and they can shape, you know, networks, however small, I think. I think the real payoff here is that. To go back to Meta and Google. Like I can critique them all day long. They're not going to listen to me. Or

Jarrad Hope

Right.

Robert Gehl

Maybe they might. They do hire academics from time to time, and then you can be inside and maybe believe that you're shaping them from the inside.

Jarrad Hope

Right, but they have a stronger set of incentives that are pulling

Robert Gehl

No.

Jarrad Hope

Them in a different direction.

Robert Gehl

Yeah.

Jarrad Hope

Right?

Robert Gehl

Whereas

Jarrad Hope

Yeah.

Robert Gehl

If I get actively involved in a Fediverse instance or a dark web social networking site, I can actually help shape it using

Jarrad Hope

Yeah,

Robert Gehl

My

Jarrad Hope

Right.

Robert Gehl

Research and ideas.

Jarrad Hope

Yeah. Very cool. Yeah, I'm kind of curious, like you know, a code of conduct, you know, helps establish basically a set of norms,

Robert Gehl

When

Jarrad Hope

You know,

Robert Gehl

I look.

Jarrad Hope

For that community to adhere to. And there's a couple of things that I want to unpack here, like, I want to I'd

Jarrad Hope

Love to talk about,

Robert Gehl

And.

Jarrad Hope

You know, the sort of different motivations,

Robert Gehl

He's.

Jarrad Hope

That you've seen, like, we touched a little bit on privacy, and I'd like to go into that and, you know, maybe the different approaches

Robert Gehl

Yeah.

Jarrad Hope

That are expressions of those motivations and then like downstream from that, you know, like what are the sort of enforcement mechanisms that are involved, you know, around upholding the social norms within these different approaches, such as a code of conduct? But then like the other thing that I, I think I'd be very curious to hear about as well is, is you know, this intersection like, identity becomes very important

Robert Gehl

Mm.hmm.

Jarrad Hope

In social media,

Robert Gehl

Yes.

Jarrad Hope

Right? And I'd be very curious in your participation through these different mediums how they may have, like, shaped your identity or influenced your identity and, like, maybe they've carried into your, your core identity in the meat space.

Robert Gehl

Early.

Jarrad Hope

I don't

Robert Gehl

Oh.

Jarrad Hope

Know if, like, you've thought about that at all,

Robert Gehl

I,

Jarrad Hope

But Yeah.

Robert Gehl

I have. Well, there's a lot there. Maybe we can turn to codes of conduct really quickly,

Jarrad Hope

Sure.

Robert Gehl

Because I think

Jarrad Hope

Yeah.

Robert Gehl

I have a chapter on them in the new book. I think they're extremely important in the the case of the Fediverse. So I don't know how much you know about the history of codes of conduct in open source communities, free and open source communities. But they were in, to a certain extent remain controversial because in free and open source software development, the traditional norm has been be excellent to each other. You know, we can all just interact and be human to one another and we, we can produce code. And the second norm

Jarrad Hope

That

Robert Gehl

In.

Jarrad Hope

A Wayne's World reference

Robert Gehl

What's

Jarrad Hope

Like

Robert Gehl

That?

Jarrad Hope

That?

Jarrad Hope

Is that

Robert Gehl

Yeah,

Jarrad Hope

A Wayne's

Robert Gehl

I

Jarrad Hope

World?

Robert Gehl

Think

Jarrad Hope

Yeah,

Robert Gehl

It is. I

Jarrad Hope

Yeah,

Robert Gehl

Do

Jarrad Hope

It's

Robert Gehl

Think

Jarrad Hope

Like

Robert Gehl

It

Jarrad Hope

This.

Robert Gehl

Is. Yeah. Be excellent. Man.

Jarrad Hope

Or is it Bill and Ted, I can't remember. It was one of those. Anyway.

Robert Gehl

You

Jarrad Hope

Carry

Robert Gehl

Know, I think

Jarrad Hope

On.

Robert Gehl

You're right. I think it was

Jarrad Hope

Yeah,

Robert Gehl

Bill and said, yeah,

Jarrad Hope

Yeah.

Robert Gehl

But yeah, you would see that. And a second value there is. It's a meritocracy. So,

Jarrad Hope

Right.

Robert Gehl

It doesn't matter who you are, it doesn't matter what you believe. It doesn't matter your politics. What matters is your code. Your code.

Jarrad Hope

Right.

Robert Gehl

The best code is going to inevitably bubble up to the top. But critics of both of those positions have argued that in the first case there's been some frankly abhorrent behavior at free and open source

Jarrad Hope

Anyway.

Robert Gehl

Conventions. So the Geek feminist with geek Feminism wiki has documented I think it's no longer active, but it was documenting, you know, harassment and abuse and misogyny and transphobia at free and open source conferences. And as a result I haven't looked at the latest demographic data, but a few years ago, there were reports coming out saying that, like among all these different tech sectors, free and open source software actually has the worst diversity least representation of black and brown people, the least representation of women. The activists who put forward codes of conduct argue that that's because the the VPS onto each other man approach is inadequate to addressing those concerns. And so you need a code of conduct. You need statements about values. And you need, as you mentioned, sanctions for people who violate those norms. That's controversial because obviously, you know, you'll you'll hear people say, well, this is Orwellian. How do you define good conduct and that sort of thing? But

Jarrad Hope

Yeah.

Robert Gehl

By and large, I think the codes of conduct argument is one, because if you go to GitHub, you'll see contributor covenant dot MD documents, and a lot of free and open source projects are governed by that. As for the meritocracy approach, there's the the criticism there is that it's not a meritocracy. It's what's called a pushy ocracy. And it's related to the issue of codes of conduct. And that is, instead of the best code bubbling up, it's whoever's the most vociferous and arguing for their code. So, you know, for many years, people would point to Linus Torvalds of Linux and say that that was basically the approach he took, you know, tell people to kill themselves. And, you know, your code is terrible and harassing people until they gave up on contributing. He sense, I think rightfully apologized and backed away from that sort of approach. So codes of conduct come in to try and establish community norms of, you know, humane behavior to each other, ethics of care towards one another and allow more and more people to flourish. And this is all important for the Fediverse, because the Fediverse mastodon in particular, which is the most popular federated social media adopted codes of conduct relatively early on, and that became a culture of Mastodon instances. So my instance has a code of conduct. And let's say you're running an instance and you have 200 folks on your instance, and you have a code of conduct that's relatively in line with mine in terms of our values. We're more likely to keep that connection going. We're expressing

Jarrad Hope

Three.

Robert Gehl

Our ethical values to one another. This is something that I call with a colleague. The covenantal approach. We have an ethical covenant. We all, you know, we have variations on it from community to communities. But we

Jarrad Hope

Sure.

Robert Gehl

Agree and we build out a network that way. And you can see this in action when a network, a instance arrives, it says, you know, we're free speech absolutist, which typically is not necessarily typical, typically code for like, you can say racist stuff, you can be a total asshole to people. And those instances get blocked. That's one of the sanctions there. You know, if you show up, you don't have a code of conduct and you're letting your members kind of run amok. You'll be blocked. And that's one of the major sanctions that the feathers has. So that's the hopefully the code of conduct side of things. But you asked a question

Jarrad Hope

Yeah.

Robert Gehl

About affecting

Jarrad Hope

I mean,

Robert Gehl

Me as well.

Jarrad Hope

Well, I mean, like, there's a couple of rabbit holes there as well, right? Like we can go into, like,

Robert Gehl

Sure.

Jarrad Hope

You know. I, I'm generally a proponent of, like, establishing a code of conduct,

Robert Gehl

But

Jarrad Hope

Like,

Robert Gehl

I.

Jarrad Hope

We do that in, like, you know, in trying to establish norms for contributing to our code bases, for example just so there is like, you know, a peaceful discourse or respect

Robert Gehl

Yeah.

Jarrad Hope

Towards one another and, you know, don't entering like flame wars of the 90s

Robert Gehl

Yes.

Jarrad Hope

Or something like this you know, but then like in the case of, like Linus Torvalds and some, you know, some other people from, like the peer to peer foundation and so on, they've kind of seen the more militant side of other groups coming in and probably maybe even abusing, you know, codes of conduct

Robert Gehl

Lerm.

Jarrad Hope

Or, you know, gaps in their right, like, I'm, I'm alluding towards, like,

Robert Gehl

He.

Jarrad Hope

You know, the concept of like, cancel culture, for

Robert Gehl

Learning.

Jarrad Hope

Example. And and like, is there anything that you can introduce into your code of conduct that can like, help against that and then like even if you could, isn't that like kind of the issues with like constitutions in a way. Right.

Robert Gehl

Right.

Jarrad Hope

Like the Nomos actually lives within the people and like, the document is good as a kind of material artifact to point to, but it's not ultimately the thing that makes the decisions. Right.

Robert Gehl

Yes.

Jarrad Hope

There's a.

Robert Gehl

The first thing that I interview, a lot of Mastodon and Fediverse administrators and I talk about codes of conduct with them, and the first thing they'll say is this is really, really hard. So

Jarrad Hope

In.

Robert Gehl

In the case of somebody being an outright racist, right. That's easy. You block them, remove them, ask them to leave, and so on. In the case of somebody who is crossing a line and maybe not realizing it or like, like gray areas, I should say,

Jarrad Hope

Yeah,

Robert Gehl

Like in

Jarrad Hope

Yeah.

Robert Gehl

Any in a sense, it becomes incredibly hard. Here's where I'm hopeful about codes of conduct in terms of the metaverse. There's a culture on many fediverse instances of wanting to remain relatively small. So if you go to a lot of Mastodon or other federated social media instances you may run into, you can't sign up. Which

Jarrad Hope

Yeah.

Robert Gehl

Is just weird. I think coming from the world of corporate social media, where they're like, of course, sign up, sign up, give us your data. Right. They they won't shut down their sign ups. But the reason for that, among many Mastodon and other you know, Fediverse admins is I want to stay small. I want to keep my instance, you know, 400 people, because that's what I'm comfortable doing. Content moderation.

Jarrad Hope

He.

Robert Gehl

Then you can even start to get to know people. And in those instances, in those cases, I should say those negotiations over those gray areas become a lot easier. The issue arises more on the bigger instances when you get like hundreds of thousands of people and you have ten content moderators, then it becomes very tricky. So one of the things I like about the metaverse, I think is very positive, is that many of the instances

Jarrad Hope

You.

Robert Gehl

Want to remain small, but they want a big network. So you can imagine

Jarrad Hope

This.

Robert Gehl

A massive network of many small communities all setting their norms and connecting to one another. But that doesn't, you know, at the end of the day, as you say, you're absolutely right. These documents are are useful, but they don't make the choices. Moderators make choices. And, you know, sometimes you see cases where people have a great code of conduct, but they don't act on it. You know that that becomes an issue on the fediverse as well. But for me. As an academic looking at social media, I think this is all very valuable. Again, to go back to meta, to go back to Google and Twitter and so on. You know, if we have an issue like YouTube, shadow Bans or Blocks, me or what have you, I can fill out a form. Where does it go? You know, we have a sense that there's somebody somewhere looking at the form or maybe it's automated, it's handled, you know, through automation or something. I can't talk to anyone at Google. Really? I've signed a terms of service agreement saying that if I have a dispute with them, I can't do a class action lawsuit. I have to go into arbitration, I have to go to California, etc., etc., etc.. Whether or not that's enforceable is another thing. But my point is I can't go to meta. I can't go to Google and say what's going on. If I'm on an instance of 400 people, I can go to my admin, I can go to the content moderators and talk. And hopefully there's a civil conversation about, you know, does this behavior violate the code? How so? What can I do? You know, that sort of thing. But it's difficult. But it puts governance in our hands as opposed to. Handing it off to big corporations that, as you've mentioned earlier, have very different incentives and building up a community.

Jarrad Hope

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, like

Robert Gehl

He.

Jarrad Hope

A lot of these sort of big tech platforms, you know, make just a very, very large global village,

Robert Gehl

Right.

Jarrad Hope

Right? And then what I also don't like about them is then they use algorithms to essentially continue engaging regardless of. And it's it literally just shreds like any semblance of community in some way.

Robert Gehl

Indeed.

Jarrad Hope

Right. And like approaches like, you know, the, the fediverse in general, like, you

Robert Gehl

He.

Jarrad Hope

Have much smaller

Robert Gehl

And.

Jarrad Hope

Communities

Robert Gehl

Right.

Jarrad Hope

And you feel more emotionally attached to

Robert Gehl

He?

Jarrad Hope

Them.

Robert Gehl

Yes.

Jarrad Hope

I find, you know, and you developed I would consider almost real relationships with the people that are also participating in them. You know, and that's also a reason why I like protocols, like scuttlebutt, for

Robert Gehl

Yeah.

Jarrad Hope

Example. Right. Like it just they all have, like, these unique feels to them. I guess, like, you know, we've talked a little bit about the positive aspects of, you know, Mastodon and like, you know, federated applications. Do you have any, like, critiques of them?

Robert Gehl

Yeah. I have a chapter on the environmental impacts. And so

Jarrad Hope

Okay.

Robert Gehl

We talk about these networks as decentralized. The term I prefer to try and deploy is non-centralized, because I'm interested in people building systems that couldn't be centralized, that actively resist centralization. Whether or not that's

Robert Gehl

Possible is another matter.

Jarrad Hope

Yeah.

Robert Gehl

Whatever term we use non centralized, decentralized. But if you look at where many fediverse instances are hosted, they're going to be you know exactly where you expect Amazon Web Services, DigitalOcean, OVH and so on. And

Jarrad Hope

Listen.

Robert Gehl

So one of my concerns is, you know, we we know that, you know, large server farms are energy intensive and tend to use water. You know, where I came from, I used to live in Utah. There were be a lot of server farms in the high desert of Utah. And so they're going through water and you can't just put that back into the water table. That water is effectively used up. So can the fediverse be better in that regard. And right now I would argue it's not. Now, again, on the same theme of our ability to experiment. It can be there are people working on running fever servers on low power intensity servers deleting media files after a certain period of time. So pushing back against the expectation of, of the infinite scroll which is one of those, I think, addictive aspects of corporate social media, you know, basically saying, no, we have finite resources. It's not infinite. We can, you know, cut off data storage after a period of time, make things a little bit more ephemeral maybe reduce the insistence on high definition for everything and try

Jarrad Hope

His.

Robert Gehl

To reduce our environmental impact. But that's that's all relatively experimental in small scale. And currently, you know, particularly after Elon Musk bought Twitter and we saw that massive uptick of people trying out Mastodon, most

Jarrad Hope

Using.

Robert Gehl

Of the admins just basically paid for higher tier cloud service,

Jarrad Hope

Right?

Robert Gehl

Plans. And so

Jarrad Hope

Yeah.

Robert Gehl

There's a bit of centralization in this decentralized slash non centralized network and that needs to be addressed. Another big criticism is is pretty pretty easy to, to guess. It's like how do we pay for this right. This this doesn't cost nothing. And so, you know, many of these fediverse instances basically rely on donations from their members that can be an unreliable source of funding. Some of them have formalized into nonprofit organizations. That's pretty onerous for a lot of people to, to set up a nonprofit organization.

Jarrad Hope

Sure.

Robert Gehl

There was an umbrella organization I say was because I'm not sure what the current status is called open Collective. That

Jarrad Hope

Fishy.

Robert Gehl

Basically started to collapse. And so a lot of people could join that as a group. And Open Collective would handle the kind of paperwork of being the nonprofit in exchange for a cut of funds, much like Patreon would take a cut of funds. But with that kind of crumbling, there's a lot of Mastodon instances that are a little bit at sea, so.

Jarrad Hope

Yeah.

Robert Gehl

As if this network is to become a large network of many small servers. Can it is it sustainable from you know, funding perspective? And

Jarrad Hope

Right.

Robert Gehl

As soon as you start talking about that, people will start to broach the dominant political economy of the surveillance internet, which is, well, we need to start selling ad space, and that's anathema to many people

Jarrad Hope

Yeah,

Robert Gehl

In the service.

Jarrad Hope

Yeah. I think you've touched on a lot of the points that I've also come across. Right. I. Particularly when it comes around to the infrastructure. I

Robert Gehl

What?

Jarrad Hope

Am not particularly as concerned about the environmental. Not because I'm not concerned about it, because I haven't put my mind into thinking about,

Robert Gehl

And

Jarrad Hope

You know, how to solve that problem.

Robert Gehl

Right.

Jarrad Hope

But

Robert Gehl

With.

Jarrad Hope

You know, there is almost every system ends up being

Robert Gehl

Not.

Jarrad Hope

Subject to some kind of power law, which

Robert Gehl

That.

Jarrad Hope

Is, you know, one of the issues with trying to keep things non non-centralized. But this is we've been trying to address a lot of the same issues with, with Waku, for example. So the idea is that, you know, like bandwidth or sending messages or routing messages through the network is not for free, right?

Robert Gehl

Right.

Jarrad Hope

And so you need to have a token economy that is able to subsidize or pay for or subsidize that, that cost. And then who actually subsidizes or pays for that cost is, is unclear. Like it can be the users, but like you

Robert Gehl

But.

Jarrad Hope

Can also build other mechanisms on top if the community owner wants to, to help facilitate that. But in doing so In keeping things as decentralized as possible. And it kind of in keeping things decentralized as possible. One of the issues that I see with the fediverse is just simply the fact that you have a, a Guardian, let's say that is running a node.

Robert Gehl

Right? Yeah.

Jarrad Hope

And by virtue, they then have power over that little

Robert Gehl

Yes.

Jarrad Hope

Section or partition of the network. And so for me, I find it into in order to achieve that goal, you almost need to make the service network that is routing the messages politically agnostic to the actual communities that are building on top of that. And that has some other downstream effects that are, that are positive.

Robert Gehl

In.

Jarrad Hope

So, like marginalized communities that might be cut off or cannot, you know, cannot access other members

Jarrad Hope

That they would like to have have associations with in this system. Like they can still benefit from the entire service network, but also yeah, I reached them.

Robert Gehl

And.

Jarrad Hope

But have their own internal communities on top of on top of that network.

Robert Gehl

Yeah.

Jarrad Hope

So yeah, like the infrastructure part is,

Robert Gehl

Okay.

Jarrad Hope

Is a real problem. And like coupling the networks or the infrastructure to the social relations. I think, you know, it has its benefits. But if you're going up, you know, if you're let's say you are

Robert Gehl

You.

Jarrad Hope

You know, an activist group or you're a dissident of some kind then those relationships become very clear within the network traffic.

Robert Gehl

Yeah.

Jarrad Hope

And so in Waku, we, we try to mix mitigate that with effectively, a next generation remailer. In a way. Right. Now, it's not without its trade offs, of course. Like you need to subsidize the costs for, like, noise traffic in the network.

Robert Gehl

Yeah.

Jarrad Hope

You know, and it can be slower. There's only a certain amount of data that you can put through that. We've had to come up with sophisticated ways of, like, mitigating spam.

Robert Gehl

Yes.

Jarrad Hope

We used to rely on proof of work. We're now looking at rate limiting, nullify using zero knowledge proofs. So you can, like, have slashing conditions if you start sending too many messages into the network. Yeah. Okay. And.

Robert Gehl

This is all I should say. So similar to all the debates in the early days of,

Jarrad Hope

Right.

Robert Gehl

Dark web technologies. You know, you have freenet's, you have Free Haven, which was started by the people who would go on to, to create Tor. You

Jarrad Hope

For.

Robert Gehl

Have the invisible or it was initially the invisible IRC project and the Invisible internet project, all having these debates about real time ness versus you know, being able to mix the traffic in such a way that you can obfuscate the connections between people and the cost of the network. These are really, really hard problems to solve. And,

Jarrad Hope

Yeah.

Robert Gehl

You know, if we take that those perspectives and use them as lenses to look at the metaverse, so it falls short in many ways, there's currently no end to end encryption. There's you're absolutely right to say that the admin has a great deal of power in theory and admin. This doesn't happen in practice, although it could happen in admin, can go in and look at direct messages and look through databases. So we have a structure there that's like to go back to Nathan Schneider's critique. That's that's what he would call implicit feudalism,

Jarrad Hope

Yang.

Robert Gehl

These little fiefdoms where the admins have a lot of power. So how do you. None, you know, build a non-centralized structure that mitigates against the power of the admin. And but do it in a way that satisfies people's desire for like real time ness or quick connections or connections that prevent others from snooping. Like, these are super hard problems.

Jarrad Hope

Well, I guess like, you know, so we've kind of talked about, you know, this sort of earlier days in trying to create these anonymizing networks. We've talked you know, about Mastodon and 30 verse. Are there any sort of other approaches to alternative social media that you've that you find appealing or people should check out that differ in their approaches somehow?

Robert Gehl

There's one that I really liked but is pretty much defunct. I think you could still install it. Run in. It was called twister. I don't know if you ever saw that.

Jarrad Hope

You know.

Jarrad Hope

I can't recall it.

Robert Gehl

It, like its name implies, it was meant to be Twitter alternative, but it was fully peer to peer using.

Jarrad Hope

Yeah.

Robert Gehl

I do believe it used blockchain and BitTorrent distributed hash tables. And, you know,

Jarrad Hope

Vision.

Robert Gehl

You're talking to an English major, right? There are going to be limits to my ability to explain these

Jarrad Hope

Sure.

Robert Gehl

Technical things.

Jarrad Hope

Yeah, yeah.

Robert Gehl

But it was really fascinating because this was a system that, you know, ran I didn't run it on my phone or ran it locally on a desktop, but it functioned like Twitter, and I had followers and followed relationships. And it was a little on the slower side, but it it was pretty effective. And the person who designed it, a person by the name of Miguel Freitas was inspired by protests in Brazil. And he realized that protesters were using Twitter, and he basically saw the writing on the wall that the Brazilian state could come in and just knock on Twitter's door and say, give us data on the activists, much as you're saying,

Jarrad Hope

You.

Robert Gehl

You know. Activists using these networks are de facto mapping their activist networks. Right. And that's really dangerous. So Miguel Freitas made this system that used peer to peer protocols. So the data, you know, lived on your end device. It wasn't accessible to any central authority, including him. So

Jarrad Hope

He.

Robert Gehl

I thought that was really fascinating. But I think one of the downsides to a project like that is that I probably I don't know why he stopped, but he maybe he burned out, you know, like this is a major issue too, is a lot of times these it's another point of centralization. A lot of times these things fall on. One or a few people to develop. And if they. Life happens or what have you. It can fall apart. So. What I'm interested in in part in my current work is underlying protocols. So I've been studying Activitypub, which is the major fediverse

Jarrad Hope

If it.

Robert Gehl

Protocol. But there's other ones. Noster. There's at protocol, which is made by blue Sky. So there's a lot of different approaches to try and address that problem to build in the infrastructural level, and then people build on top of it.

Jarrad Hope

Yeah.

Robert Gehl

And that seems to be the longest term. The, the thing that's most viable long term, at least in my view, is something that is open. But go

Jarrad Hope

Yeah.

Robert Gehl

Ahead.

Jarrad Hope

I mean, like, bootstrapping, like, these networks are incredibly difficult, right? Like they are effectively you know, at least a two sided market.

Robert Gehl

It.

Jarrad Hope

And, you know, you have a, the chicken and egg problem, you need to have the, you know, both the supply

Robert Gehl

And.

Jarrad Hope

And the demand.

Robert Gehl

Yeah.

Jarrad Hope

And, you know, Master Bun has been around for a while and,

Robert Gehl

It's.

Jarrad Hope

You know, thanks to black Swan events like Elon Musk buying Twitter, it's seen influxes. But I don't know if you've had much thought on, like, how these social networks can bootstrap themselves or where, where does it all start? You know in building a community.

Robert Gehl

Yeah, in the case of Marsden specifically, I have a chapter on this. It's it's you use the the the black swan idea. It's it's really accidental and contingent. Right. And so as purposeful as people can be, historical accidents end up mattering a great deal. So in the case of Mastodon, that project started in 2016, and it ran on a protocol called AU status, which in many ways is the predecessor to the current protocol. Activitypub.

Jarrad Hope

And.

Robert Gehl

Au status was the protocol that new Social, which was a federated. It's still in existence, I should say federated microblogging system. Used AU status. A few other projects use of status as well. The Mastodon is using status, but one of the issues that they ran into is that you don't get a lot of privacy, you know, status. The AU is open. And I talked to one of the key figures there, a person by the name of Evan Prodromou, and he said, yeah, like when I was helping develop AU status, I was caught up in the web 2.0. Like just be totally open and transparent on the internet. That's the way to go. Approach. So not thinking about privacy. Marsden's using this AU status. The AU becomes an issue because if you're trying to send a more private message to a few followers, the only way you can really do it would be to flag that message as private. And then it flows across the network. And you can imagine we mentioned the admin problem. You know, if you see you're an admin and you're running an instance, you see something flagged private, you know, you can just open it up. In fact, people didn't shared.

Jarrad Hope

Yeah.

Robert Gehl

Messages from people, and that was very difficult for folks. So at the same time, the World Wide Web Consortium is making activitypub. And they are thinking about addressing and how to route messages to particular people. The interesting thing, and this is something I write about in the book, is that when the W3C was making these federated social media protocols. No big company wanted to get involved. They reached out to Facebook. They reached out to Twitter. They reached out to a few other major players, and

Jarrad Hope

I.

Robert Gehl

All of them were just like, oh, go ahead, we don't care. They basically benign neglect. And so the people making these protocols had a free hand, and they designed a protocol the way they liked. And because

Jarrad Hope

It.

Robert Gehl

None of these big companies were involved when Mastodon showed up, Mastodon had like, you know, maybe 500,000 people using it. So not small, but not big, but they were the biggest ones to adopt Activitypub and that the, you know, speaking of legitimacy, legitimated Activitypub. Here's this third party implementing it. So because of that, Activitypub survives. Mastodon survives. It's a real historical accident. Just a meeting of these two different projects. How do you

Jarrad Hope

They're

Robert Gehl

Plan for that? Right. You

Jarrad Hope

Right.

Robert Gehl

Know,

Jarrad Hope

It's very organic,

Robert Gehl

It's

Jarrad Hope

You know,

Robert Gehl

It's.

Jarrad Hope

And

Robert Gehl

Yeah,

Jarrad Hope

Multivariate. Yeah.

Robert Gehl

Yeah. And so, you know why? I mean, this is one of my major fields of studies is science and technology studies. And you really get into contingency, like the classic example, the Betamax versus VHS, like Betamax was technically superior, but VHS wins. It's not

Jarrad Hope

Right.

Robert Gehl

Because of technical things. It's because of social practices and accidents and all these other factors that you really you can't control for. So you the only thing you can do is build and try and think about enrolling social groups and social actors to to build

Jarrad Hope

Really.

Robert Gehl

That legitimacy, legitimacy and build out your network. And it's really hard. It's really hard work.

Jarrad Hope

Yeah, absolutely.

Robert Gehl

But.

Jarrad Hope

I'm kind of curious. Speaking of legitimacy, like how? Like where does the legitimacy fit into all of this? And, like, how do you think about it?

Robert Gehl

Yeah. I was poking around the dark web, and I came across a counterfeit money forum. I think somebody's selling

Jarrad Hope

Okay.

Robert Gehl

Counterfeit $20 US bills, and. And somebody was talking about how they would rub, like, graphite on it from a pencil and then rub it against the edge of a table to make it legit. Make these 20s legit

Jarrad Hope

Movie.

Robert Gehl

So he could pass it off here. They pass it off at a store, and I just just struck by that idea that like, no, this is not legitimate. You

Jarrad Hope

This.

Robert Gehl

Know, there's no state in the world is going to like the states defend the ability to coin money, right? Like, you know, it's not legitimate to the store owners accepting this $20 bill, but it's legit in the sense of like creativity and art artistry,

Robert Gehl

However

Jarrad Hope

Okay.

Robert Gehl

We feel about the passing

Jarrad Hope

Right.

Robert Gehl

Of counterfeit dollars. So that moment kind of triggered like, well, what does it mean for something to be legit? And I dove into the literature and found that there's these different it's a very complicated term, and it becomes this kind of three trifocal lens that I could look at objects with. And so if you go to Max Weber's theory of the state, a

Jarrad Hope

If

Robert Gehl

State

Jarrad Hope

It.

Robert Gehl

Is an entity that makes a legitimate claim or legitimated claim to the monopoly on violence. And so

Jarrad Hope

Let.

Robert Gehl

A state is an entity that says, we have a military and we have a police, and we can end your life legitimately.

Jarrad Hope

Because it.

Robert Gehl

And there's a claim aspect there that's important, right? Your states continually have to make that claim. And of course, the counter to that is disputing that claim, pushing back against that claim. So the ability to to speak and critique a state is a dangerous act, but it's a necessary act if we don't want to have states that just have carte blanche on our lives. So there's that aspect of legitimacy, the legitimacy of the state or the the claims of legitimacy states make in our ability as citizens to dispute those claims. And then there's legitimate business. And here I was thinking about the discourse about the Silk Road drug market, and I found that there were in the business press, you can see people saying, wow, this thing is making lots and lots of money. There's almost this jealousy that it's not a legitimate business that we can get into. Like, and, you know, fast forward to now with you know, legalization of marijuana or de facto decriminalization of marijuana, and we see businesses popping up like it's a massive growth sector. So this idea

Jarrad Hope

When?

Robert Gehl

Of legitimate business. And then there's the that first legitimacy that I mentioned, which is the more creative or

Jarrad Hope

It's

Robert Gehl

Real.

Jarrad Hope

Legit, bro. Yeah,

Robert Gehl

Yeah. Relational aspect. Like

Jarrad Hope

Yeah.

Robert Gehl

To be a legit hacker is you have to traffic in certain things and you have to be. You can't and you can't make a claim to I can't say I'm legit. You have to tell me I'm legit. Right? It's very relational.

Jarrad Hope

What

Robert Gehl

It's like saying, you know,

Jarrad Hope

Does

Robert Gehl

I'm

Jarrad Hope

That

Robert Gehl

Cool.

Jarrad Hope

Tie in to, like reputation

Robert Gehl

Yeah. Exactly.

Jarrad Hope

Then?

Robert Gehl

That's

Jarrad Hope

Yeah.

Robert Gehl

Right. Yeah. And so

Jarrad Hope

That.

Robert Gehl

If you look at any of these projects, they have to really think about all three levels. You know, the the creators of these anonymous networks have to make claims about we are protecting your capacity to critique the state. In

Jarrad Hope

Right.

Robert Gehl

Order to do that, you need to have and they would use the figure of the dissident as as the

Jarrad Hope

Yeah.

Robert Gehl

I think you reach for that figure to like we

Jarrad Hope

Yes.

Robert Gehl

Need the dissident to be capable of using our network because the stakes are extremely high. The dissident will be killed.

Jarrad Hope

But yeah, I mean, The dissident is the one that's making a dispute against that claim,

Robert Gehl

Exactly.

Jarrad Hope

Of legitimacy.

Robert Gehl

Yeah.

Jarrad Hope

Right?

Robert Gehl

And then you have these organizations making their software. They have to have legitimate organizational structure. So they're

Jarrad Hope

Making.

Robert Gehl

Free and open source software projects. They need to attract volunteers. They need to attract donations. So they have to calculate at that level. And that's where you get into interesting things, like the ambiguous relationship between the Tor Project and the US government. Right.

Jarrad Hope

Right.

Robert Gehl

On one hand, they get funding. On the other hand, you know, their NSA's trying to break their encryption and so on. Right? It's

Jarrad Hope

Yet

Robert Gehl

It's

Jarrad Hope

A single signal is in the same bucket, right?

Robert Gehl

Exactly.

Jarrad Hope

Like you know. So.

Robert Gehl

Yeah, partially. It's, you know, when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, she talked about the internet freedom agenda. And that was, you know, we need to spread these encryption technologies to protect the dissidents as long as they're, you know, out there.

Jarrad Hope

Right? Not internal.

Robert Gehl

And

Jarrad Hope

Yeah.

Robert Gehl

Then, you know, you have the level of, you know, the Tor Project versus I.t.p versus Freenet and who's legit, who's who's the real hackers, who's the real, like, who's really making good software. And so you have all these layers and like it gets pretty complicated. And so I talk about like ways to exchange legitimacy across these different layers.

Jarrad Hope

Late.

Robert Gehl

But most of us have to operate in those same ways. I mean, I can point to academics doing the same sort of thing, like thinking about the relationship to states or relationship to an organization or relationships to networks of reputation.

Jarrad Hope

All right. Yeah. I mean, I certainly started this journey with in being influenced by, you know, free Haven tours,

Robert Gehl

Coming.

Jarrad Hope

You know, I.t.p new net zero net and so on. And, but particularly like i.t.p and and tours in y

Robert Gehl

You can bet.

Jarrad Hope

Like privacy

Robert Gehl

But

Jarrad Hope

Mattered

Robert Gehl

Yeah.

Jarrad Hope

Right from, from making these kinds of claims against, you know,

Robert Gehl

Not.

Jarrad Hope

State legitimacy. So

Robert Gehl

In.

Jarrad Hope

For me, like, privacy is like a non-negotiable. It's necessary for, like, the right to associate and freedom of expression. Right. Then like,

Robert Gehl

You

Jarrad Hope

From

Robert Gehl

Take?

Jarrad Hope

My side, like, I'm very interested in trying to realize the unrealized dream, a latent dream of the cypherpunks to create, like, a cyber state or virtual state. As you know, like Barlow and Peter Ludlow and Gerry Everett have been

Robert Gehl

Sir.

Jarrad Hope

Talking about,

Robert Gehl

Okay.

Jarrad Hope

And so this legitimacy through propriety like basically building

Robert Gehl

The.

Jarrad Hope

Institutions on top of public blockchains,

Robert Gehl

The.

Jarrad Hope

That are effectively agnostic to, to their use. They can potentially be corruption and censorship free. Of course they are not. Like a set of values are encoded into those contracts. But that's aside from the point. But the fact that they gain their legitimacy through usage through voluntary usage

Robert Gehl

Meaning.

Jarrad Hope

Is really fascinating to me.

Robert Gehl

On.

Jarrad Hope

But one thing that had kind of come to me recently was this notion of like popular sovereignty. You know, I think in your book you talk about how i.t.p

Robert Gehl

But.

Jarrad Hope

You know, points at illegal activity happening in their network as proof that,

Robert Gehl

Yep.

Jarrad Hope

You know, your rights are quote unquote, secured. And I find like that, that really, really fascinating,

Robert Gehl

Yeah.

Jarrad Hope

Because it is basically demarking like a territory or jurisdiction in cyberspace

Robert Gehl

No.

Jarrad Hope

And upholding it. But that is upheld

Robert Gehl

Yeah.

Jarrad Hope

By effectively consent of the governed, like the people participating in that network are wanting to be, to have the rights that that network bestows upon them. And the the governance structures then imposed on them.

Robert Gehl

Yeah.

Jarrad Hope

And I find that really, really fascinating. I don't know if you've considered that at all or

Robert Gehl

Oh,

Jarrad Hope

You've thought

Robert Gehl

Yeah.

Jarrad Hope

About that. Yeah.

Robert Gehl

Yeah. It comes up to in the penultimate chapter where I talk about the development of Https certificates on Tor onions, which it still makes me laugh because like the your connection to a Tor onion site is encrypted and it's

Jarrad Hope

Beginning.

Robert Gehl

Verified cryptographically, so you don't need a certificate. But but their Facebook actually got involved at the IETF to, to create these extended validation certificates because Facebook wanted to set up a Tor hidden service, but they didn't want what would inevitably happen, which is a bunch of clones of Facebook appearing,

Jarrad Hope

Yeah.

Robert Gehl

And essentially what Facebook and the Tor Project did was they used the Silk Road as justification. They said, you know, we are important. Look at the Silk Road.

Jarrad Hope

A.

Robert Gehl

We're capable of protecting this drug market. It's very popular. It has a lot of users. Therefore, we're an important project and we should have be able to get our EV requests for comments through the standards process. I found that to be a really fascinating moment. And again thinking about the relationship to the state. We reach for the dissident as the figure to hold up. But in practice, what we end up holding up when we talk about these these networks is criminal actors. You

Jarrad Hope

Right.

Robert Gehl

Know, if somebody can break the law by by, you know, definition, a dissident is probably a lawbreaker, criminal as well, in the eyes of particular state. But

Jarrad Hope

Right.

Robert Gehl

But people don't reach for the criminal as the figure to say we're effective. Unless you push and then push come to shove. The networks will say, well, look, criminals are using our network, and it's distasteful, as you find that it is a sign that we are effective at protecting people from the eyes of the state. Well.

Jarrad Hope

Right? Yeah. I mean, that sort of protection of, like, illicit activity. Do you think that's synonymous with with the dark web? And it should be characterized that way, or like, how do you think like, like or is it broader than that?

Robert Gehl

I do think I've seen so many different uses for dark web technologies. I mentioned at the outset that the reason I got interested in it was because of social networking sites on the dark web. And so just kind of to give you the the story there, when I saw that, I, I was like, oh, that's pretty interesting. But it's probably full of trolls and

Jarrad Hope

And.

Robert Gehl

Noxious people. And it went there and found that, you know, people were debating politics in a relatively civil manner and on the dark web.

Jarrad Hope

Each.

Robert Gehl

And I thought, well, that's pretty fascinating. And I dug a little deeper and found that there was a group dedicated to feminist politics like that's I did not expect that. It shattered a lot of expectations I had about a network full of trolls or drug dealers or what have you. Right. And so as I dug through, I found all these different uses, like people building search engines, people playing chess, like normal internet activities. But alongside that, of course, you know, the most notorious sites are going to be ones like the drug markets and the. And

Jarrad Hope

In.

Robert Gehl

Now I think the markets for stolen personal information because, you know, you don't even need to put that in the mail. You can just send the stolen information to people. Journalists being journalists, of course, love having good stories. And so they're going to highlight those uses of the dark web over other uses. And I at the same time, you also see if you go to Secure Drops website, you'll see tons of news outlets that operate secure drop for anonymous whistleblowing. And you can go to an onion site. And here in Canada, I can provide data to the CBC over the over the Tor network to anonymously blow the whistle on somebody. But the coverage has been it's full of, you know black hat hackers, and it's full of drug dealers, it's full of child exploiters and so on. And the unfortunate, unfortunate side effect of that is that, you know, that's what people think it's for. And I think that that social construction of the dark web, as for

Jarrad Hope

And.

Robert Gehl

These activities, is a very powerful force.

Jarrad Hope

Right.

Robert Gehl

And that leads to people saying, well, we should stop developing these technologies because they're being used by criminals. And I think that would be a mistake because I think, like you, anonymous or private communication is really essential to our capacity to have political discourse. Having that backstop, even if, even if we don't use it. Having that backstop in place and

Jarrad Hope

Safeguards

Robert Gehl

I.

Jarrad Hope

Against tyranny. In

Robert Gehl

Exactly.

Jarrad Hope

A way.

Robert Gehl

Yeah. And I use signal. I get my family and my friends on signal, because I believe that that's going to be better for us than even WhatsApp.

Jarrad Hope

Yeah.

Robert Gehl

I wouldn't trust WhatsApp.

Jarrad Hope

No.

Robert Gehl

And then that's precisely because, like, I'm just talking about stuff with my family, but that's private and that's our place

Jarrad Hope

Right.

Robert Gehl

To be who we are. And I don't really want that subject to any prying eyes. And we need that sort of system. But I kind of get a little ambivalent in the conclusion of my book. You know, I basically argue, if we believe that this is a network for criminals, it will be a network for criminals. And,

Jarrad Hope

Then.

Robert Gehl

We will more we be more likely to support calls to have it shut down or criminal, you know backdoors in encryption put in and all that stuff. And I think that's a very dangerous and also eliminates a viable channel for political communication.

Jarrad Hope

How do you think we can change that perception or

Robert Gehl

In.

Jarrad Hope

Like change that sort of narrative around these technologies?

Robert Gehl

Well you know, making it. Increasingly making it a day to day practice is is a good way to go. And so as much as, you know, we might critique some of the big tech companies when they put in an end to end encryption, if they do it the right way and not with some sort of backdoor celebrate that and use it. And, you know, make that a part of just an expectation that we have, you know I don't believe that people still adhere to that. I have nothing to hide attitude that I think was prevalent

Jarrad Hope

Doing.

Robert Gehl

About a decade ago. I think people do know, like I talk to my students at university and they, they know, like there's all sorts of ways they're monitored. There's all sorts of ways they're surveilled and they, they don't particularly care for and they look for ways around it. So there's, I think a big undercurrent of people who would support these technologies and use them. But as you, as I'm sure you know, you know, it's we're competing with people who make them user friendly or you make,

Jarrad Hope

Convenience.

Jarrad Hope

Yeah.

Robert Gehl

Yeah, yeah. And you know, you fight an uphill battle about design and user interfaces and ease of use in real time ness and the expectation of seemingly infinite storage. That's

Jarrad Hope

Yeah.

Robert Gehl

That's an uphill battle.

Jarrad Hope

Absolutely, absolutely. Okay. Well, I think we've

Robert Gehl

And.

Jarrad Hope

Pretty much covered, like, the main topics that I wanted to chat to you about.

Robert Gehl

He.

Jarrad Hope

Oh, I mean, we talked a little bit about identity and, like, your participation

Robert Gehl

Oh, yeah.

Jarrad Hope

In these communities.

Robert Gehl

One.

Jarrad Hope

I'm kind of curious, like, if you

Robert Gehl

If.

Jarrad Hope

Had any reflections on that at all.

Robert Gehl

I did, I interviewed somebody for my book who basically said, using the fediverse has transformed me as a person. And

Jarrad Hope

Oh, wow.

Robert Gehl

That really resonated with me, that This is something that people consistently say about online interaction. There's, you know, kind of a we can have a we can be dismissive of it and say, it's not real. It's very real to people. The ability to connect to each other over digital networks and become different people through those interactions. And I'm looking back, I kind of want to work through this. It's in the back of my mind. I want to compare how I concluded my first book, which came out in 2014, to how I'm conceptualizing this book now, and think about all the differences, all the the changes that I've gone through because I've interacted with people in anonymized environments and on the metaverse. And you know, I didn't give much thought to something like a code of conduct is a document that can condition the ethics of connections. And now I do. And yeah, I think using digital networks has changed me and hopefully for the better. But I do need to, to reflect on that a little bit more. It's, it's, you know, having time to sit down and reflect sometimes is

Jarrad Hope

Absolutely.

Robert Gehl

A luxury. I

Jarrad Hope

Yeah,

Robert Gehl

Get it.

Jarrad Hope

I hear that. And is there any other topics that you would like to to discuss or bring up that might be relevant to, to your book coming out?

Robert Gehl

There is. You mentioned the power law.

Jarrad Hope

Eddie.

Robert Gehl

The metaverse is now going to be like very much in that kind of structure because,

Jarrad Hope

Nuclear.

Robert Gehl

Meta has adopted Activitypub. Activitypub.

Jarrad Hope

Right.

Robert Gehl

So for threads, which is their Twitter alternative. And that's been a major point of debate on the metaverse. And so I do have a chapter focusing on the debate over whether or not to federate with threads and the argument against. I think you'll hear this very well. You know, this is not a good actor. You know, meta has Some terrible content moderation practices. It's. I just read this morning. It's being sued by my local school board because it's addictive to kids. They're putting profits over people's growth. Even aiding and abetting genocides around the world. This is not a good actor. We should not federate with them. And

Robert Gehl

Then there's a there's a counter-argument that this is an open network anyone can join. And it's up to individuals to make the choice of whether or not to connect to people on threats. I come down on the first side because of my history critiquing meta Facebook over the years. I don't think they're particularly responsible actor. And moreover, it denies the my interest in lots of little communities branching out and making those purposeful decisions to connect to one another. And instead we have a network of 100 million people arriving. But that could be the death knell for the metaverse in many ways. You know, if threads becomes this dominant entity, it can become de facto centralized network all over

Robert Gehl

Again.

Jarrad Hope

Possibly. It reminds me of jabber or Xmpp.

Robert Gehl

Yeah.

Jarrad Hope

I think it's called and, you know, Google

Robert Gehl

Yes.

Jarrad Hope

Adopting it, right. And,

Robert Gehl

You.

Jarrad Hope

Once Google basically decided to drop support for the protocol, it effectively killed the protocol.

Robert Gehl

Yeah,

Robert Gehl

That's a big concern. And that's what a lot of people that's the exact example people reach for to

Jarrad Hope

Yeah,

Robert Gehl

Say how dangerous this can be.

Jarrad Hope

That

Jarrad Hope

Would be my concern. Yeah.

Robert Gehl

Another concern that I have is that the activity per protocol actually is two parts. One governs the server to server connections and the other governs client to server connections. The only one that really gets implemented those two is the server to server connection. Most people don't implement client to server because Marsden had an API for that prior to their adopting Activitypub. So basically people either adopt the Mastodon API if they're building clients or they adopt variations on that. Mastodon is no longer the big player. It's going to be meta. And so they could dominate the client to server aspect of the API, and that could be very dangerous as well.

Jarrad Hope

Linka Lang. Well, I guess on that happy note,

Robert Gehl

Ha!

Jarrad Hope

You know,

Robert Gehl

Richard.

Jarrad Hope

We were out of time at the moment. But there's

Robert Gehl

He.

Jarrad Hope

Plenty of other things that I'd love to discuss with you. Like I wasn't aware that you were involved in governance

Robert Gehl

If.

Jarrad Hope

And, like there's also the archive that I'd like to discuss with you

Robert Gehl

No no

Jarrad Hope

At

Robert Gehl

No.

Jarrad Hope

Some point. Maybe we can have a chat later in the future.

Robert Gehl

Yeah.

Jarrad Hope

But really appreciated your, your perspective on both anonymizing networks

Robert Gehl

Hot.

Jarrad Hope

And, you know, alternate social media. And I'm really looking forward to your new book. Move slowly and build Bridges.

Robert Gehl

In.

Jarrad Hope

Come out. And I guess on that, on that note,

Robert Gehl

Thank.

Jarrad Hope

And given the discussions we've had not to put you on the spot, but is there any other recommended readings that come to mind that we should probably check out or include in the material

Robert Gehl

In

Jarrad Hope

When the, when this podcast goes out?

Robert Gehl

O of mine.

Jarrad Hope

Of yours or anything that you might

Robert Gehl

But.

Jarrad Hope

Find interesting

Robert Gehl

But.

Jarrad Hope

Or relevant.

Robert Gehl

Well,

Robert Gehl

I mentioned Nathan Schneider's work.

Jarrad Hope

Yeah.

Robert Gehl

His book it is governable spaces. Governable spaces. Yeah. I'm going to have to leave it at that, because I don't

Jarrad Hope

That's

Robert Gehl

Want to. I

Jarrad Hope

Fine.

Robert Gehl

Know

Jarrad Hope

Yeah.

Robert Gehl

I'm

Jarrad Hope

Yeah,

Robert Gehl

Staring at my library, looking things

Jarrad Hope

Yeah.

Robert Gehl

Up. But

Jarrad Hope

Cool.

Robert Gehl

That's a book that's I think going to be important for me to to wrestle with for the reasons we mentioned, about the power of admins. And, like, basically the thing I'm wrestling with now is like, what is the atomic unit here? Are we talking individuals or we're talking small collectives or we're talking networks? And if we have those different perspectives, changes how we think about the ethical connections between each other. There's different ethical theories that go with each. And maybe there's a a pluralist approach, but it's very, very hard to implement a pluralist approach when we're looking at these different perspectives.

Jarrad Hope

Yeah. I mean the notion of the individual,

Robert Gehl

You.

Jarrad Hope

I am not as assured in, in that concept as I used to be.

Robert Gehl

Yeah.

Jarrad Hope

You know,

Robert Gehl

Same.

Robert Gehl

Same here. Yeah.

Jarrad Hope

Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I guess I don't. I'm very conscious of the time that we I don't want to take up too much of your time. But definitely appreciate spending time with you and definitely learn a lot. Thank

Robert Gehl

Now.

Jarrad Hope

You.

Robert Gehl

Thank you. Jared.