User:Rita Graca/specialissue8

Infrastructour

Infrastructour page

Editing with Lídia Pereira

13/02/2019

more in: https://pad.xpub.nl/p/special_issue_19_02_13

Artemis && Simon

— Is the federated network orientated towards answering a common goal? How is it initiated?

— How is the common goal of the network shaped: is it formed in order to answer an internal need of the group?

— Is being a part of the network as important as being a custodian of it?

— Who maintains the network, what is its lifespan, and how can it be sustained with economic, ecological and time-efficient means? Is scale important in determining the mutual benefit to all members of the network?

— Who are the caretakers of the network? How can their differences support the network, and by extension, each other?

— What are the connections and relationships to those outside of the network, and what channels of communication and resources are available to help include them?

— Is coexistence possible with non-federated networks? What attitudes/approaches will be useful in achieving this? Are they conceived as threats?

— Who owns the data produced/shared within the network? What type of measures are taken to ensure the protection of member's privacy?

Biyi && Bo

— How can we show outsiders to show that the alternatives are valuable than the mainstream? (ex. Facebook or Mastodon - network effect.) What contents this alternative will provide that will radically make everyone feel different? (anciety) (Geert Lovink's text.)

— Is there a critical point of the amount of nodes(users) that network has gathered to determine if it’s mainstream network? This critical point is defined by what? Would it be a market percentage? Or by public's preference? Whati is the consequences? in terms of economy etc..

— Do the alternative federated networks want to preserve itself always as an alternative to mainstream, or do they aim to overthrow the mainstream overall? what are the assumption? Can alternative have this ambition? Should alternative have this ambition?

Sustainability and finalicality of the platform:

— Should the alternative establishes a code of conduct (set rules) to control of its own behaviour to distinguish itself from the mainstream? (Ex. Facebook is gathering the information to sell data, pitching it advertisement… )

— If you don’t do this mainstream, how can alternatives sustain themselves?

Tancredi && Rita

— How can control and freedom co-exist inside a federated network that should allow different levels of moderation of content, choosing between using your identity or anonymity, content advisory …


— Is it possible to have a self-sustainable network? How can the federated systems address common goals of well-being, economic security, …?

— In a future where decentralized and federated networks became the common practice, is there future for centralized and closed networks? Are there any benefits in a co-existence of both? Is convergence possible?

Paloma && Pedro

Economics:

— What will you need to be start a network. What are the resources (money, people, infrastructures) for this network? And to maintain it?

— What does the funding model represent? Who is behind it? Why are they funding this project? (eg. Telegram (APP that is private. Telegram messages are heavily encrypted and can self-destruct. Cloud-Based.), founders are owners of VK, Russian social platform)

— How is my network going to support an expansion? How is it going to grow? How will you deal with a network effect?

Politics:

— Is there any hierarchy? What are the rules? And limits? And who is the one that creates them?

— How to control the decentralisation of Networks and its content?

— What is the governance model of this project? Who establishes the rules, are there any?

Privacy:

— How can you maintain privacy while keeping it possible for you to connect to other people. What is the code that I need to find a user? There is no network if you are not connected to anyone.

— What are your kind of agreements? (In facebook you are either in or out.) How to prevent this? How to give some power to the user, will this mean you will have to create limits to their access?

— How am I going to be linked to other people, categories, in FB you are either a friend or not.

— What kind of relations are you going to allow, and what are you going to label them?

07/03/2019

More in https://pad.xpub.nl/p/2019-03-27-rwrm

Personal introduction to the Infrastructour

Before going to everyone’s house, we had to make sure we had access to our router, with a username and password. In most cases, the service companies seemed to leave everything as it came (a very username:admin, password:1234 approach). However, that wasn’t my case. The building where I live is managed by one company, and somehow me having access to any credentials would compromise the safety of other residents. I cannot explain this argument very well, not only because I lack the IT knowledge, but also because when I contacted the company that maintains the routers they didn’t know what “host your own server” meant. It seems that being self-hosted is not an aspiration shared by most individuals.

This way, I had to rely on another person’s router (and goodwill) to host my own server. The first option was Tancredi’s place, but the lack of available network sockets was a constraint. I then became dependent on Artemis' house. Biyi usually calls the people who rely on other people’s servers “the parasites”, which is quite a good analogy if we think how we are literally sucking resources from our host. Slowly we started to build our interdependencies inside the network.

Creating a network between ourselves, being nodes and sharing links with each other, seemed fascinating, but I wasn’t really sure what that actually meant, nor was I acquainted with the specific jargon. Exploring our routers was the first step to becoming autonomous by hosting ourselves and starting to build digital evidence of our network, but that wasn’t a linear process. All the difficulties and hardship grew on me and I started wondering if there was a future for decentralized, self-hosted networks. If we, as students of the subject, found it hard to manage all the specifications of setting up a server, how could this ever become a comfortable norm? In this way, I also speculated on some inconveniences, such as what would happen if someone moved house, changed routers, became a dead node in the network, etc. The sustainability of our digital bond was the trigger point for my personal research. I started to look at other networks, physical or digital, online and offline. I was searching for common paths they followed, how they dealt with some problems that we were also encountering and for how long these networks survived. Alongside this, I was prototyping some tools, small experiments to scrape links, images, sources, anything that could prove that our network had existed at some point in space and time. The documentation and anecdotes of other communities helped me understand better the focal point of my doubts: a digital network can indeed be fragile and ephemeral, but the cooperation aspect is important and I believe it can outlive the web version of a network.

Florian Cramer workshop

Session one https://pad.xpub.nl/p/14_02_19_Florian_seminar_01
Session two https://pad.xpub.nl/p/07_03_19_Florian_seminar_02