Mastodawn

Ripple/XRP (a cryptocurrency company) just granted 200k USD to Social Web Foundation, "...to research sustainable revenue and operating models for digital publishers and community-run platforms":

https://interledger.org/news/interledger-foundation-awards-200000-social-web-foundation-support-decentralized-social-media (archived)

This means they will be able to influence the development of the ActivityPub specification at W3C.

For those who don't know: Interledger, WebMonetization and OpenPayments are basically the same thing, these projects were created by Ripple ~10 years ago in order to insert their cryptocurrency and related payment services into web standards. These projects are sometimes presented as independent, but this is a lie, they are not (not in 2019, not in 2025).

Needless to say, Ripple itself is a borderline scam: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2019/03/01/is-ripple-a-scam/. It's not even a cryptocurrency really, their infrastructure is completely centralized and no one in cryptocurrency space takes them seriously. But they have a lot of money to bribe people, so I am sure that we will hear more about their adventures soon.

RE: https://socialwebfoundation.org/?p=99982

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shopkeeper

@silverpill yah, hopefully ppl know ripple is a scam.

but what does a grant do in this case. does giving a grant to a foundation forces the foundation to skew their decision the bad way? can the foundation simply say, "thanks for your money, but we do whatever we wanna do. so stop bossing us around."?

can they not do that?

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silverpill Feb 5

@potatomeow They can, but I don't think they will. Given that foundation is a member of Social Web working group (together with Meta), they can adopt a simple business model: money in exchange for favors. And, knowing the people involved, I believe this is exactly what is going on here.

Fediverse Report – #149 – On Protocol Governance

On the complexities of protocol governance.

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