The Pope on Defederation

Laurens Hof analyses the Pope's Magnifica Humanitas on “safeguarding the human person in the age of Artificial Intelligence”, as "Open protocols ... claim, to function as the global social layer for everyone" - a userbase which is largely religious, unlike the builders themselves.

Is there a conflict? "following deeply religious reasoning, the Catholic Church lands on fairly similar positions that are more common in the protocol community... reaches a fairly similar conclusion about the dangers of concentrated digital power... via Augustine and a few millennia of church doctrine."

In unpacking the Pope's position he provides real insights into the difference between the Fediverse and the Atmosphere, which "have managed to create networks of independent nodes, but are much less clear on how these independent nodes should actually relate to each other", as while they're underpinned by an understanding of "the threats of concentrated power... [they have] little to say about social obligations. Cyber-libertarian tradition can tell you why no one should rule the network, but it cannot really tell you why the individual pieces should be together once it does", something the Pope covers through the concept of subsidiarity, which in theory underpins the EU.

Subsidiarity, a church policy since 1931, was a response to concerns about over-powerful states: "Power should not pool at the top, not mainly because the people up there might abuse it ... but because pooling it strips everyone below of the responsibility they exist to exercise."

Today's Pope expands this concern to digital platforms, arguing for remedies which "matches up fairly well to a libertarian frame for decentralisation", but going further, pairing subsidiarity with solidarity:

“When subsidiarity is not linked to solidarity, it ends up becoming merely the protection of particular interests; when solidarity is not supported by subsidiarity, it degenerates into a form of welfare that does not foster responsibility.”

Viewing decentralised social media through this lens provides "almost a diagram of the two ways the project can fail:

• Subsidiarity without solidarity is fragmentation... [ie] the fediverse right now... a lot of servers, but the collaboration between instances ... virtually nonexistent...
• Solidarity without subsidiarity is the benevolent provider of infrastructure" - cf the Atmosphere, where Bluesky PBC provides 99% of the atmosphere plus much of the moderation other actors profit from; while it provides tools, hardly anyone uses them: "solidarity without subsidiarity in practice... people yelling perpetually at the mods with the mods being perpetually frustrated people don’t use the tools for agency ... provided for them"

There's more on data, placed by Leo in "the principle that the world’s resources are given for everyone’s use, not a few". While atprotocol provides data portability for subsidiarity, that's "only half the answer. Data is collectively produced, the network is a commons, and a commons needs a shared idea of how it is governed".

In conclusion: "Both the fediverse and the atmosphere have built effective exit doors, but not the mechanisms of solidarity and collective governance". It's not enough "to solve the problem of how to leave... the next step is working on how we can stay together."