Public Activity, ActivityPub!#

Welcome to Public Activity, ActivityPub.#

The infrastructure of Public Activity, ActivityPub! is not yet set up, so currently there’s no possibility to interact. Nonetheless, we already want to share a first draft.
We’re building something here, and all the pieces matter.

This is a campaign to ask public cultural institutions to publish their activity (events, calls, etc.) also through ActivityPub, the protocol behind the Fediverse and use the opportunity to rethink in their communication to the public. Concretely, we think that public institutions should put at least the same effort (and money) in ActivityPub as in the other platforms. We hope that this call became an opportunity for people, groups, collectives, projects, and institutions to re-think how they want to communicate and interact with the public because the actual system seems not coherent with our values. That’s why on this website we will also collect materials and resources that may help them with this transition. We would love to become a place where institutions meet to cooperate to think, discuss, and implement a transition to ActivityPub together.

We are an undefined group of people: some of us may work in/for/with public institutions, others don’t. Some of us may be active in the Fediverse; others may be thinking about moving there; others would rather not use digital social media at all, and still others may feel comfortable using the (a)social media platforms. Some may live in your same city, others far away. Really, just some random people you may have referred to at some moment as “your potential target audience” or using the vague term “digital community.” What we have in common is a “we need to talk” feeling about how you communicate digitally with the public. With all the possible perspectives, differences and discussions that have, we all care about the digital public space, and we think that you (human being, collective, group, project or institution, etc.) should care about it too. That’s the only thing we really share, and to respect the many opinions we have, we are experimenting with Many-festo, a statement and a process at the same time: a combination of a fixed text you can sign with the possibility to further develop it or add further reflections.

Here you have an overview on what we have been discussing: if you agree, you may sign the document; you can get in contact, and we will see how we can integrate your contribution. Signing is important because it can be used as an argument inside public institutions to move them. As an institution, you can also sign it, showing your support and indicating you will be interested in doing this transition, in your own rhythm, according to your resources and possibilities. Simply showing your support (without further action) is also essential because it may help us to understand which are the difficulties and maybe try to connect with people having the same problem (we call that commoning problems).

Here are some of our thoughts:

1. The technologies you use should be, as far as possible, coherent with your discourse(s).#

Public institutions have been working in their workflows to make them more sustainable, fair, and accessible; some of them even go further, raising questions about themselves or their role as institutions. We congratulate on this impulse, yet we think this coherence should apply to the technology too, which for some reason seems to be an aspect missed.

We understand that your resources and your options may be limited, but the »there’s no alternative« is really not a good starting point. If your institution is not accepting funding, e.g., from the weapon industry, you should also not work with technology involved in armed conflicts. And if sustainability means something to you, you really need to stop illustrating your articles with AI-generated images. At least, be conscious that there’s a contradiction between your actions and your discourse.

2. Communication of public institutions should be considered a public common, and be accessible to everyone, without having to log in.#

When we say public institutions we mean both institutions sustained by the state and institutions (or groups, projects collectives) contributing to the public. Currently, big corporations like Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Twitter, TikTok or Google (YouTube) own this public square and all the materials you put there. They may remove them without telling you if they like, or use it for their purposes because that’s what you agreed upon when you accepted their terms and conditions. If you are publicly funded, this is a huge problem called enclosure of commons or privatization of public goods: the contents you create as a public funded institution should be public, and it’s a contradiction to give exclusively to a corporation that will generate profit with that. This also applies if you are not publicly funded, but it’s actually not our money…

Imagine a painting funded with public goods that will be displayed in a square with a company that will take care of displaying it; it will not be fair that this company goes to another square and makes people pay money to see this painting, right? Well, that’s more or less what happens in a(social) media platforms: companies appropriate common goods to extract their value without giving something in return (users may not pay the ticket directly, but other companies are paying the tickets to stalk the users). You may think that they provide the infrastructure (that they created the public square in the metaphor): first, we think it should be the city creating the squares; we also think that they create this infrastructure for their profit, not for the common good. You can see that in the difficulties they pose to people not having a profile on their platforms, a condition to them to profile their interests and behaviour and then extracting profit displaying adds to them.

3. Public institutions should be responsible for their digital infrastructure and think about their role in the digital landscape.#

An infrastructure is a system made of different things that makes the things work. Often it remains invisible to the people, except when something is not working as expected. You generally don’t see the people cleaning or doing the maintenance of a building, yet they are doing a fundamental job without things would not work. With digital, it happens the same: you need a digital infrastructure (made among others of servers, software, and people working with it), that people normally don’t see. It is not always physically in the institution, but in datacentres far away, nonetheless it is part of the institution. Institutions take care of part of their digital infrastructure, e.g. mails, some file-sharing or the website. Yet, they are simply not taking care of the infrastructure to interact with others and delegate that to corporations like Google (YouTube), TikTok, Meta (Facebook, Instagram) or X/Twitter.

The infrastructure has an enormous influence on what is possible and what not, and controlling it is crucial. Companies are interested in having users logged in to profile them and be able to display profiled adds to them. Their interest is doing all the possibles to make it harder for not logged users to access this information, and they will do it, except if there’s some form of control. As these companies control the infrastructure and became bigger and bigger, public institution has no-saying in their infrastructure, which will affect our choice to log-in or not.

3.1 Public institutions should play an important role in the development and maintenance of the common.#

People working in institutions have the advantage of doing things in their work hours: in some collectives, this work is simply made in the leisure time, which is generally a scarce resource and cannot always being maintained in the long term. Furthermore, institutions have typically access to more resources than non-governmental projects, either through the institution, through the integration of the institutions in other groups (the state, or professional networks) or through third party funded projects. All these things (long-term maintenance and archiving, further development of things) may represent a real challenge for individuals, groups, or collectives with less resources. We think that it would be fantastic if public institutions really get involved in the creation, maintenance and further development of this digital public common, working together with groups or collectives.

The advantage of escaping (a)social media platforms is that the Fediverse facilitate the development of further tools and adaptations. This development is not always easy; it costs some resources and efforts and once tools are ready to be used, they need updates and maintenance. Here is where the »public money, public code« is crucial: Let’s assume we have a fancy institution that was able to develop a plug-in for something they missed in the Fediverse. As a fancy institution, they release the code with a free software licence, so other institutions, collectives, groups, projects, equally fancy but with less resources, may use this tool. The interesting part is, that as an institution, they are more stable and can assure the maintenance of the tool, something quite challenging in one-person projects.

3.2 Public institutions should rethink on their role as hosts or custodians#

Even if the platforms like to talk of in materiality and clouds, digital resources need a material carriage, a place to be stored, like a hard disk. You may not see that because it is in some datacentre, but nonetheless it exists. There are many ways to host websites for free or with cheap prizes, as long as they don’t need a lot of storage (which make hosting more expensive): searching affordable hosting for a website with less than 5 GB is clearly easier than searching a host for 50 GB, an amount that you may easily reach in less than one year if you record a video monthly. That is one of the reasons that services like YouTube became so popular because they solve this problem, asking in exchange to extract profit from the material and from profiling users.

Imagine in the context of a residency in our fancy institution, an artist, or a small collective recorded some videos. Presently, this video will be probably shared in YouTube because for the small collective it would be a challenge to maintain a server for video sharing or streaming, and non-fancy institutions are also using YouTube. Our fancy institution installed a Peer Tube (a Fediverse alternative to YouTube) to make accessible their videos: Would it not make sense, that they also »host« the video? This would be an advantage for both the fancy institution and the artists, and we, the potential public, could also enjoy the videos without being profiled because it that remains in public hands all the time. In the same sense that we normalized the concept of »residencies« we should also talk about “residencies for digital resources” a.k.a. hosting.

3.3 Public institutions should understand their key role in the public discussion#

Some people consider that the Fediverse may be a restricted niche of users, and that the conversations in the Fediverse are not so exciting as in other media platforms. This may have been true some time ago, but slowly the communities in the Fediverse are growing and other topics, discussions, and perspectives are slowly getting more present in the Fediverse. We think it still lacks on something that is vital to us: public institutions. It is actually you, public institution, which makes supportable the hell of (a)social media, so please, spare us this discomfort and contribute to the public square as you are doing in the proprietary platforms.

As a public institution, you may feel that you are a user like other users (maybe not »followed« as big influencers), but we think that’s not true. You are actually creating things, which means that you are creating content and discourse: there’s a lot of people gathering around you. Furthermore, part of the people »following you« are doing as part of their jobs: journalists, e.g. want to stay update to further inform; artists may be following you to get updated about your call for contributions, grants, and residencies. Only offering them the possibility of following you through (a)social Media means that they may be confronted with a thought decision:sign-up to private platforms that will profile theme, and extract benefits from their activity, or lose access to relevant public information. We think this may be a subtle but unacceptable form of coercion you should not support: That’s why we encourage you to publish at least this kind of relevant information also through the ActivityPub protocol.

4. Please, don’t simply jump to the Fediverse as it would be another channel; use the moment to rethink how you communicate#

Maybe after reading the other points, you think that we are asking you to open a Mastodon account and share your content through that. We will be glad if you do that, but it is not exactly what we are asking you to do (we would probably call this campaign with something like Mastitutionalized!). If that’s your goal, you should consider using a bridge or some plug-in for your CMS so that your content can get directly to the Fediverse.

That’s why we mention ActivityPub or the Fediverse, while Mastodon is just a part (a fantastic one) of the Fediverse. The Fediverse follows a different logic as (a)social media platform, and understanding it may be essential for your institution.

4.1 Understand what the Fediverse is, and then getting started#

Check the long [What is ActivityPub/the Fediverse], but to summarize, Mastodon is the Fediverse equivalent fort short messaging, like Twitter/X or Bluesky, but there are other programs that are part of the Fediverse: some of them work similarly as other platforms you may know (PixelFed for Instagram, Loops for TikTok, Peer Tube for YouTube), but other programs just work differently, like Mobilizon or Gancio, programs to create agendas or calendars collectively. The good thing about all this different software is that they communicate through the same protocol, ActivityPub, so they conform a system called the Fediverse.

We mentioned software because all these equivalents are software you can install in a server, and from it access other servers. This is called federation, and is the same principle behind emails: even if you have an institutional email hosted in the institution (e.g. something@institution1.com) and our email is in another institution (something@institution2.com), we can still communicate. The contrary of federation is centralization, which means that there’s a central server that controls everything: if this server would be controlled by someone, let’s suppose sympathetic to Nazism, this person could modify the behaviour of the hole (a)social media platform to accommodate their (maybe this person goes by “his”) needs. While this may still happen in a federated server, people still have the possibility to move to another server. While this is an important feature, it also means that there is not a »search bar« for the whole system, and nobody can have a complete overview of the network as in centralized systems. The logic operating behind the Fediverse is slightly different, and it’s indispensable to understand the differences while considering a meaningful transition.

4.2 It’s a good moment to rethink how you measure impact#

As a public institution, you probably are used to get reports from Social Media, telling how fantastic you are and how, which a few bucks more, you can become even more wonderful. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong in evaluating some data, but nobody seemed to worry about the fact that the companies providing this data may have interest in a particular display of this data, and the provenance of data remains untransparent. Even more, between the right of users not to be tracked and the interest of platforms to track people, the second imposed in asocial platforms, while the first is an important issue for the Fediverse. Furthermore, the data may be misleading: the indiscriminate use of bots, for example, may offer breathtaking numbers, yet you should ask if you are doing the communication for these bots or for real people.

This to say that your reports after moving to the Fediverse, looking through the eyes of (a)social Media platforms, may seem quite disappointing. Generally, the numbers of people you follow and are following you is smaller, and reboots and favourites are more exceptional in the Fediverse. On the other hand, these numbers may be more close to actual human interaction than in other platforms: This is not good or bad, simply is a different approach and perspective. As you are a public institution, and you are probably not trying to monetize that, this should not be an issue for you. We are collecting some experience and materials about that that may help you have a proper transition, so stay in touch!

4.3 Use this opportunity to think about your workflows#

Maybe it is a good moment for having a discussion of your workflow or the process of digital publishing altogether. There’s never time to open this box, and yet it is a discussion we would be interested in because it will determine how we will be able to interact with your institution. Do you have a way to properly receive feedback? Do you really need this AI-generated image to illustrate that publication? Can this process be coherent with the discourse of the institution? Are you integrating the publication in different platforms meaningful? Is the process of getting the different parts (posters, photos, etc.) part of how you do things, or does it mean extra work? Are you including everyone in your publications, i.e. are your contents really accessible? Are the people interacting with you non-digitally happy with your communication?

You should probably be asking these (and other) questions every now and them: maybe you are doing that internally, and it’s okay. Since we want to start this discussion with other institutions, groups, collectives and projects, we simply thought that it would be a good opportunity to listen and learn from you. On different levels we are confronting the question of communication, and we are eager to know how you do it (and it’s almost the whole Many-festo we are speaking about that, so we are truly interested).

4.4 The Fediverse is not a service, but something you are part of#

While the Fediverse is made of different communities, generally speaking, users in smaller servers are more conscious about the infrastructure and try really hard to maintain a non-toxic environment. Specially in small instances, users tend to be implicated and collaborate with moderators and in general, there is an openness toward discussing the issues, features, and desires. It is not always conflict-free, but the fact that few people share a server allows a quite local political discussion.

The relation between admins, moderators, and users tends to be quite different: it is not rare that users contribute economically to sustain the system and their maintenance, and admins and moderators may share doubts or imply users about what to do in unforeseen situations. Boosting (retweeting) seems is a common crucial practice, as through federation may make visible some messages from other instances. In opposition to (a)social network, admins and moderators are not part of a corporation trying to extract benefit for the data of users, and it is quite common that they dedicate their leisure time to maintain these systems.

→FAQ

What is Activity Pub and What is the Fediverse

Servers and instances