pistolero

2026-04-17 19:50:38

Lotta fluoride moving through the glowieverse. Welcome to Friday Hell. Hold onto your while I poke the global surveillance bear.

TL;DR: INDEPENDENT FEDERATED TRUST AND SAFETY (but first I talk about mirroring for a couple of paragraphs)

A lot of the URLs can be mirrored to your instance locally and read/replied to/reposted on your instance without making you look at the glowie servers. Paste the URLs into the search bar, they'll show up on your instance. This should probably be easier in most FEs.⁰

You know what's better than archive.today links? Mirroring the shit onto a few dozen fedi instances. You put, e.g., wedistribute.org/2025/02/iftas… into the search bar, it is mirrored to your instance. If you reply to it or repost it (or you are on Pleroma and you smash dat like), it is mirrored to instances where someone follows you.

IFTAS is making another push for centralizing fedi. IFTAS is a surveillance/steering organization that has enough overlap with Newsmast, the Social Web Foundation, Oliphant, FediMod, indieweb.social, hachyderm.io, that they are effectively the same organization. (Sockpuppets are bad when you're LITERALLY HARASSING JOURNALISTS but it is fine to use orgs as sockpuppets. These people spin up 501(c)(3)s faster than most of us spin up domains. The orgs are, not coincidentally, all based in .us/.de/.uk/.ca.) Here's who they are: about.iftas.org/advisory/ .

The organizations get government/corporate funding through organizations like nlnet or the Social Web Foudnation ( socialwebfoundation.org/2025/0… ) or the Ford Foundation through the DIIF. They use this sort of thing as a mechanism to pay themselves, so Newsmast "buys" indieweb.social from Tim Chambers ( timothychambers.net/2025/03/27… ), who was a member of IFTAS ( about.iftas.org/2024/07/12/tim… , "Tim has been at the forefront of pioneering strategies that leverage technology to promote social good and a healthier social web. [⋯] Tim’s deep understanding of the disinformation landscape further strengthens his value to the IFTAS Advisory Board." ). The Executive Director of IFTAS is employed by Newsmast and it should probably be really fuckin' easy to call this a conflict of interest. I don't know how much money they move like this: my concern is not with hustlers using tax dollars and "charitable" contributions to get paid for forcing their politics, you know, I don't like it but my main concern right now is that they are trying to kill fedi.

IFTAS has recently been hand-wringing about the ratio of jannies to humans going and pushing the coop model. They've also been very interested in regulation, trotting out the "Oh, it's not the 'wild west' any more! You can't just write whatever you want on the *internet*!" See attached, and see the IFTAS founder's push: jaz.co.uk/2026/03/13/there-are… . Jaz-Michael King, head of IFTAS, incidentally, lists Newsmast as his employer. They are creating a fake problem to force their solution. This is part of the (also attached) broader strategy from the .us/.de/.uk/.ca governments to stamp out "misinformation" on fedi: the .de government refers to fedi as "The Hydra on the Web" and expresses frustration that they can't use NetzDG as a pretext to take down random Peertube instances. (They did indeed say the quiet part out loud and it's in the PDF.)

IFTAS's "CSAM detector" (attachment scanner) "ran out of funding" right when the USAID faucet ran dry. ( wedistribute.org/2025/02/iftas… ) Before they did, they grabbed about 1.86M files from fedi: about.iftas.org/2025/03/27/con… . (In addition to things like requiring access to a server admin account for "CARIAD", cariad.fedicheck.iftas.org/ , a closed-source tool to show you something that fba.ryona.agency / fed.dembased.xyz will already show you, for free, with source, and without requiring you to give them access to read an admin account. Anyone wanna spend a minute spinning up a new instance and checking to see what requests they make exactly?) It's one thing for them to say "Oh, you're unsafe, you said a hate speech" but it's another *entirely* for them to say "You don't use the CSAM protection!" (I don't know about other admins, but speaking of USAID, very few pedos have been visible from here since that dried up. Either they finally, with extremely coincidental timing, realized that I put heads on pikes, or maybe there was not a coincidence.) This is gonna be the wedge. It's easy to say "I don't stop people from discussing their opinions, even if you don't like their opinions", but nobody on the network actually wants to host anyone's CP bin.

Oliphant's blocklist is dead now. "Note: As of April 15, 2026, the Oliphant Unified Tier 0 Blocklist has been retired. There are numerous instructions on this page to create your own, but we're moving to a more FIRES-centric model, and I want to support that going forward. Rather than combining various blocklists here, I'd prefer to forward FIRES datasets as a better alternative to sharing moderation advisories, as it is a living protocol." writer.oliphant.social/oliphan… . FIRES is a spinoff of the new Fedimod shit out of *Germany* because YSHL. It is done by IFTAS member Emilia Smith ( hachyderm.io/@thisismissem , github.com/thisismissem ), or at least she's running the Github org. It is worth noting who was on the Oliphant blocklist at "tier 0" from the beginning. (Say what you want about Seirdy but he's at least transparent about his notes.) FSE is always top of all of these goddamn lists, before they got arround to adding Pieville or Gab or whatever explicitly angry racist instances: why is that? (Well, why the fuck do you *think*?)

So IFTAS builds these things, then conducts these polls: "Which do you want, this, this, or this?" All of the options are, of course, things they want to push; for example, "What if you had automated threat-sharing? What if you had an automated blocklist?" They give you four choices and all of the options are things they want to push, in some cases things they have already developed. When their 2026 needs assessment survey comes around, I suggest you take it. (There's probably some funding requirement that demands that they do a survey, so they do one to show that it's super important that they get funding; in either case, it's also a classic "manufacturing consent" maneuver, it is old as shit.)

You may be familiar with Newsmast ( newsmastfoundation.org/about/ ). I had never heard of them until I wrote an MRF that automatically added #ukraine #russia #elonmusk #trump #uspol #putin #economy #antifa to every post on FSE; IDIFTL. ( git.freespeechextremist.com/gi… ) To my surprise, a series of bots started reposting everything on FSE. Even shit like @whereverbot and @lainbot. I also started getting scraped by backend.newsmast.org, which is looking for not just posts but tracking follower/following relationships. (Larger write-up fsebugoutzone.org/objects/377a… , media.freespeechextremist.com/… ). I wouldn't be surprised if the fedi "OSINT" scraper tool (remember the one that was like, "IT EXPOSES WHO TALKS TO WHO" and people just used it for fun instead of being terrified?) from a couple of years back was a prototype for this.

There are a lot of instances that are socks used by the IFTAS crowd. For example, the eleven instances¹ that were part of the Fediverse Governance paper ( github.com/fediverse-governanc… ) or instances where they don't even bother to change the links so their "About" page just links to Newsmast's "About" page: fsebugoutzone.org/objects/e67f… .

So I mention, like, "They aren't really against centralization. I took the survey they gave last year and the questions ranged from 'completely irrelevant' to 'insulting'; the main problem was that they were looking for a conclusion and the survey assumed the conclusion. That is, the survey existed to validate the thing they wanted to push. It was stuff like 'Do you suffer mental health problems because of unmoderated content?' and 'Would an automated blocking system help you block better?'" fsebugoutzone.org/notice/B33Gl… .

Dots connected this week: the 2023 "Fediverse Governance" paper, IFTAS (Independent Federated Trust and Safety), Newsmast (the organization that is responsible for scraping fedi and also people's following/follower lists to build a social map of fedi), . I can't be the only one to have noticed these people are all the same group, but I have never heard anyone mention it: fsebugoutzone.org/notice/B5Ke0… . Jon Pincus, outspoken IFTAS tendril and member of the "Disinformation Defense League" (which wants a tax on targeted ad revenue to be earmarked for journos, I SHIT YOU NOT), has been bending cwebber's ear; cwebber's now on social.coop (which pulled in $20,000 per month last time I checked), one of the original eleven¹ instances that were part of the original fediverse governance paper (coauthored by Kissane ahead of the founding of IFTAS). A lot of these things that came out of nowhere, they were astroturfed by these people.

Here's an example: why all the press about the "CSAM problem" on fedi, where did that come from? These people built a detector, they want to create demand for the detector, so they reach a few tendrils out.

hachyderm.io is another great example of the astroturfing. They show up out of nowhere, have a bunch of tech celebrities on there, then the admin starts making these impassioned declarations about how fedi "needs to do $x" or "won't survive without $y".

:glowingthedark: cosocial.ca was the topic of this thread where phnt (I should tag people that were involved but I also think, like, maybe they will get spammed) posted this:

fluffytail.org/objects/caa22ad…

> The sleezy kind of freedom haters. They are too afraid of backlash that play these dumb masquerading games to look like "the good guys trying to save this network". Their goal is to just turn this place into another corporate Twatter place nobody asked for.

This is accurate. If you have noticed that these people get hostile and instance-block you if you ever question their premise (as happened in that thread when phnt asked some pretty obviously good-faith questions), this is because they are pushing an agenda. People interact with them and exclaim, "How annoying! He refused to explain what he meant, he instance-blocked me for asking why or questioning the approach!" They are trying to present "Choose the color of the bikeshed!" as a choice before you've agreed to let them build a house. The style of interaction is driven by the motives: you think you're talking to a person, but you are talking to an agenda.

They are trying to push an agenda. The agenda is to kill fedi by turning it into a centrally controlled system, these are the mechanics.

There, that's it, that's my tinfoil screed. No action item. Please see my recent posts/reposts over the last four days for more information.

⁰ FediBBS, you type a comma, like you just do `, $url`, but very few things are "easy" on FediBBS. I think, like, this should probably be done in a similar way to the thing I suggested to feld where it's just an object lookup and the frontend. Several of the repos mentioned here are mirrored to git.freespeechextremist.com/ now and I think revolver should probably include some kind of "import/mirror git repo" feature in v2, or anyway I have "git support" in there somewhere, so, like, while FediBBS can just do tarball upload, a server that can absorb git repos and let you clone from any node, that'd be cool; I did this with IPFS but IPFS is, as I have mentioned and you may have noticed, slow and terrible and shitty and unreliable and painful.

¹ The Individual Eleven:

cosocial.ca/ | fedilist.com/instance/cosocial…
hcommons.social/ | fedilist.com/instance/hcommons…
hachyderm.io/ | fedilist.com/instance/hachyder…
masto.donte.com.br/ | fedilist.com/instance/masto.do…
mspsocial.net/ | fedilist.com/instance/mspsocia…
piaille.fr/ | fedilist.com/instance/piaille.…
sfba.social/ | fedilist.com/instance/sfba.soc…
social.coop/ | fedilist.com/instance/social.c…
tooting.ch/ | fedilist.com/instance/tooting.…
wandering.shop/ | fedilist.com/instance/wanderin…
woof.group/ | fedilist.com/instance/woof.gro…
the_hydra_on_the_web--challenges_associated_with_extremist_use_of_the_fediverse.pdf
Mapping-Fediverse-Communities-1.pdf
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