| Maintainer | @thisismissem |
| Website | https://www.fedimod.org/ |
| GitHub | https://github.com/FediMod |
First meeting for the ActivityPub Trust & Safety Taskforce is on Tuesday 12th November at 5pm CET / 11am EST / 8am PST
There'll be a calendar entry shortly for this meeting. You should have an account with the W3C, but member status is not required to attend (i.e., anyone can attend)
This will mostly be a process, planning and scope meeting, and the subsequent meetings will get into the triaging of current issues.
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swicg/2024Nov/0031.html
Okay, so a lot of people have asked me what @fedimod FIRES is about.
Thanks to the @nlnet grant I've received for FIRES I've started the work of taking the proposal written last year and converting/rewriting parts of it into a documentation website: https://fires.fedimod.org/
It's still a heavy WIP though, so bare with me.
FediMod FIRES is both a protocol for distributing moderation advisories and recommendations and a reference server implementation.
There was a big decision at the SWICG meeting today to start a Moderation, Trust & Safety Task Force that aims to write a report to improve those aspects of the protocol.
I've volunteered to lead that task force.
There is a paper written proposing FIRES, which was written with the financial support of @nivenly. I'd reached out and received extensive peer review from various active members of the fediverse who specialise either in technical, trust & safety, or social areas.
Following their peer-review, I decided that I needed to rework the proposal to outline things clearer, which is why I've not yet published it.
FIRES stands for Fediverse Intelligence Recommendations and Replication Endpoint Server; The name is a bit of a pun, in that moderation is usually about dealing with little fires continuously.
The model I've used is that we'd have data providers and software to help manage moderation recommendations and advisories, and software to integrate those into existing Fediverse software.
The API is designed to allow easy periodic synchronisation of data, specifically handling retractions.
Okay, so, remember how I had some big news? Well, I didn't get to announce it yesterday as I was unwell (I've been unwell most of the month and could really do with extra financial support right now!)
The big news is that my FIRES project has been granted funding by NLNet (@NGIZero) Entrust fund.
What is FIRES? It's a project I've been slowly working since September last year, and provides a server for maintaining and distributing moderation advisories and recommendations.
Given that Taylor Swift was just targeted with AI generated non-consensual sexual imagery, here's your reminder to submit media you're targeted in to https://stopncii.org to get it hashed & taken down from all participating sites.
Compare and contrast: Fediseer, FIRES, and The Bad Space
https://privacy.thenexus.today/fediseer-fires-and-the-bad-space/
The Bad Space is only one of the projects exploring different ways of moving beyond the fediverse's current reliance on instance-level blocking and blocklists. It's especially interesting to compare and contrast The Bad Space with two somewhat-similar projects:
- Fediseer is another instance catalog, including endorsements as well as negative judgments about instances.
- FIRES (an acronym for Fediverse Intelligence Recommendations & Replication Endpoint Server) is infrastructure for moderation advisories and recommendations.
Many thanks to @thisismissem and @Db0 for feedback on earlier versions of this post!
(Part 4 of "Golden opportunities for the fediverse – and whatever comes next")
This was a good read by @thenexusofprivacy on “Blocklists in the Fediverse” — https://privacy.thenexus.today/blocklists-in-the-fediverse/
As noted in that article, FIRES is attempting to shift away from blocklists in favour of moderation recommendations and advisories. It also introduces finer-grain controls than just “defederate or silence”.
FIRES will support not just domains but also the ability to provide moderation advisories and recommendations on other entities, e.g., hashtags, actors, links, media, etc.
Emelia 👸🏻
The Nexus of Privacy
