{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "description": "On coordination in a decentralised network, and the European Social Stack declaration.",
  "path": "/reports/fr167-change/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-06-17T15:30:45+00:00",
  "site": "at://did:plc:mdjhvva6vlrswsj26cftjttd/site.standard.publication/3mguonzavqk2z",
  "tags": [
    "nlnet"
  ],
  "textContent": "In the attention economy, the most powerful ability to have is the capacity to hold and direct attention. Elon Musk is the absolute best at this, and it made him a trillionaire this week. It also explains partially why the UK government retreated from their sovereign monopoly on the authorisation of violence, as I wrote about last week. Musk holds control over one of the most impactful parts of the digital ecosystem with X, and the UK has decided that they cannot contest this digital anymore. This is what lead them to let Musk's actions go uncontested. Instead, since governments have realised they do not have control over this digital sphere itself anymore, they go for the only lever they still control: access to the digital sphere. Thats why we see age verification laws pop up everywhere, under the guise of 'save the children'. But these laws can be better understood as sovereign nations desperately finding any way of control over a digital sphere that they've realised is more powerful than them, and meaningfully threatens their sovereignty. But for this week's newsletter I don't want to talk too much about politics, but about the actual open social web again. I'm leading with the part above because it sets up the contrast. The fundamental core of the problem with Big Tech Platforms is that ownership and control over the dominant online social places is extraordinary powerful, and that its somewhat suboptimal for societies if these owners are fascist killers. There are basically two options for dealing with this problem. Either you get better leadership over the dominant online social spaces, or you set up systems that structurally don't have ownership over the online spaces at all. This is a simplification of course, but it gets at the double-edged sword that the open social web has. Open social networking protocols set up social networks that do not have an owner. The good news is that doing so prevents the Musk and Zuckerberg problems. The bad news is that network ownership also provides coordination authority, and that is a valuable ability. Musk showed last week in Belfast that the having the authority to coordinate is extraordinarily powerful and that this power can be used for great harm. (Side note: Lee Hurley wrote a good article at The Handbasket this week on the situation on the ground on Belfast, titled 'Elon Musk alone isn’t responsible for Belfast's racist pogrom', which I think is important to mention here. Musk is a big problem of course, but I do want to make sure I'm not flattening the situation in Belfast into a simple 'Musk Bad'.) If you take a social network and remove the owner, which is the entire point of open protocols, you don't actually remove the all things the owner was doing. The owner of a dominant social space does a lot of work beyond just keeping the app running. They also decide who counts as trustworthy, and set the terms of visibility. They also provide a more abstract good, they can set and influence coordination. Musk showed last week in Belfast what it looks like when the coordinating part of that job gets used for other purposes. The open social web's answer is to get rid of the owner. But coordination and trust don't stop being necessary just because nobody owns the place anymore. They have to be rebuilt some other way, detached from ownership and handed to someone else. And that is why I want to talk about the European Social Stack Declaration, as well as Eurosky this week. The first of these is coordination. At the Public Spaces conference, a group of organisations working in the social web announced and published the European Social Stack (first already announced last month in Hamburg, see here). It features eight common principles around digital autonomy, a European tech stack, and decentralised networks, plus an explicit framing of the fediverse, the atmosphere and private messaging (using protocols like Matrix) as complementary rather than competing. Furthermore, they also commit to concrete joint developments, such as Eurobridge, a European-operated bridge between the fediverse and the atmosphere built on Bridgy Fed, a shared distributed identity, shared DSA/DMA-compliant moderation infrastructure, and joint funding. The signatory list from the founding organisations contains most of the European organisations working on the social web: Mastodon, Newsmast, Framasoftand the Social Web Foundation from the ActivityPub world, next to Eurosky and Modal from the atproto side, and the Matrix Foundation, as well as the main civil society organisations that are active in the space, with New_Public, Save Social, Public Spaces and Waag Futurelab. This group of organisations covers most of the European side of the open social web, with other notable names also signing on, like Lemmy, IFTAS, Tangled and masto.host. If you feel I'm dumping names here, I am, because the point I want to make is that this does cover the large majority of European organisations working on open socials. Now, mechanically, a declaration is a weak instrument. It has no enforcement and no authority over anyone who signs it; it cannot make Mastodon do a single thing. What it produces instead is common knowledge, shared visibility and shared understanding. Because everyone knows that everyone knows that they are publicly committing to these ideas, the cost of acting together is meaningfully lowered. It's a Schelling point a bunch of independent actors can align on precisely because none of them owns it and there is no authority. That's the owner's coordination function from centralised platforms, recreated in a network without an owner. And getting there is the achievement, and the most important part of the declaration, more than the principles or any individual commitment. The fediverse's culture was formed in reaction against centralisation, which makes it allergic to exactly this kind of alignment. I've watched IFTAS Connect close for lack of engagement, SocialHub struggle to find anyone to run it, and a \"please be nice to each other\" open letter get lost in procedural bikeshedding, combined with relations between some parts of the fediverse and the atmosphere that might euphemistically be called frosty. So the actual job the declaration does is redefine those camps as complementary rather than rivalrous, because building a coalition is hard in the best of times, and even harder when they feel they are in a zero-sum competition. How this will develop further and what will come out of these commitments remain to be seen, but I think the main work of the declaration has already been done, by creating a shared understanding and providing a shared context for coordination. The second layer is trust, and that's mu. On the 11th Eurosky launched it as their first user-facing app, an atproto microblogging app thats a fork of the Bluesky-social app, that they say they built in about a month and are pitching as \"the first of a thousand apps.\" The european.social declaration says they want to build \"an ecosystem built on shared infrastructure and protocols empowers small builders to create social apps in no time and users to freely move between them\", and this is what that looks like. It ships with a customisable feed from credible news sources, post editing, a roadmap promising a licensable shared moderation service, and their own verification system. mu lets any credible organisation become a trusted verifier and vouch for its own accounts and members based on direct knowledge. So rather than one owner deciding who gets a checkmark, you get many institutions vouching for their own people. The single most famous abuse of an ownership-held authority function in this whole space is Musk turning verification into something you buy: the blue check went from \"the platform confirms this person\" to \"this person paid eight dollars,\" which is the one thing that the EC actually fined X over. Now, mu's verification is not actually new: this is simply them also using the Trusted Verifier system that Bluesky implemented last year. Bluesky also delegates the ability to verify accounts to other institutions, on exactly the same pitch. But there are two different things going on here that are easy to conflate: there is the question of who verifies any given account, which Bluesky hands off (the NYT verifies its own journalists), and the question of who gets to be a verifier whose badge people actually see, which Bluesky keeps for itself by controlling who becomes a Trusted Verifier in its app. And while that system works in theory, in practice it simply moves the authority up a layer: Bluesky does not control each individual account verification, but because it control who is a Trusted Verifier in their app that distinction is kind of moot. So what mu is actually adding here competition on the layer that determines which organisations become Trusted Verifiers. As long as there is only one meaningful supplier of Trusted Verifiers, the system is just doesn't really matter much. For it to actually work, there needs to be multiple sources of authority that can give out Trusted Verifier status. And that authority can only come from having meaningful competition in the app layer, since that's where users actually see the checkmark. So both launches show that taking apart unaccountable ownership over social networks is only part of the work,. It also needs to give out the roles that this ownership used to do again. With the European Social Stack declaration coordination is moved to a coalition (notably one that explicitly does not have global/ubiquitous assumptions). Trust is moved to a plurality of institutions, but more importantly, multiple sources that actually can give this to institutions. Finally, since the point of this week's article is that the real value of the European Social Stack declaration is in it's ability to create common knowledge, I figured that the best course of action for me was to do the signing publicly, right here in this newsletter. Because fundamentally, I write Connected Places because I believe strongly that social networks should be governed according to democratic principles.",
  "title": "FR#167 - Change",
  "updatedAt": "2026-06-17T15:33:00+00:00"
}