So here's a little bombshell for y'all: over the past two months I was interviewing for a role on Bluesky's trust & safety team, whilst I didn't end up getting the role, I had a lot of people from the ActivityPub community encouraging me to apply to it.

I didn't say anything publicly at the time, and perhaps never would have β€” it didn't happen after all, and I couldn't afford for people to get mad and cancel their donations in support of my work on Trust & Safety in the Fediverse and especially Mastodon. I've already had some cancellations occur seemingly in direct reaction to me diversifying and doing more work with AT Protocol.

I applied because my work on the Fediverse has been fundamentally unsustainable for the entire year, and because it was a role I could learn & grow in. There's a lot that can be said for an opportunity to work on something larger than I've worked on previously.

This year I've barely scraped by, unable to afford things that would allow me to live a better life & be more productive. I've been struggling with health issues stemming from a likely MCAS diagnosis, where food randomly sends me into coughing fits so bad I vomit at times. It's also amplified by stress, and my goodness I've had a lot of that this year.

Even if I had gotten the job, I would've continued in my role as co-lead (and founder) of the ActivityPub Trust & Safety taskforce, which has been a thankless job, and one I'm constantly pushed for time on. I did find myself at one point asking @dariusDarius Kazemi
If I should step down, because I know my health can sometimes make things difficult (I can't always make meetings because some days I can barely leave my bed due to stomach cramps and nausea.

Next, let's have a look at current funding & some wins.

Donations pre-taxes this year amount to:
- €13.3k net (direct)
- €4265 net (ko-fi)

I've also been able to request payment from my NLNet grant for FediMod FIRES, which everyone, including Mastodon, have been asking for this year.

The goal of FediMod FIRES is to empower moderation teams to share trust & safety data, and it's now fully functional, and I'm just working on the final push to release version 1.0.0

FediMod FIRES looks beyond where sharing of moderation data currently is at on the Fediverse, and introduces several new ideas, but the core idea is that federation management should be more like firewall policies rather than just domain blocks and open-by-default to the horrors of the internet.

This year has been incredibly tough & thankless, but I've had some wins too, like getting Client ID Metadata Documents adopted by the OAuth Working Group.

The history of these goes back to my introduction to an early version of them that I encountered in the Solid ecosystem. After a call with Aaron Parecki in May last year to explore how we could improve Mastodon's OAuth (following a significant amount of work by myself on it), we realised that this fairly unknown part of the Solid OIDC specification needed to be lifted up to an official IETF standards document. That would allow decentralized social web to work much more smoothly.

Mastodon has showed interest in CIMDs, and whilst they wanted to fund the work to implement them, they weren't willing to fund the other extremely necessary OAuth work (expiring access tokens, refresh tokens, public clients, etc). So that work has languished because I can't afford to spend time on it.

Right now I'm trying to figure out what's next, because building for trust and safety in the fediverse hasn't been sustainable. It's almost like we care more about the appearance of valuing trust & safety more than the work it actually takes to achieve it.

I'm looking at a few other roles in the trust and safety space, and seeing if I can secure more funding through grants or freelance contracts to continue my work.

If you value trust & safety on the Fediverse and open social web, please please please consider supporting my work: support.thisismissem.social

0
0
0

If you have a fediverse account, you can quote this note from your own instance. Search https://hachyderm.io/users/thisismissem/statuses/115570683882695831 on your instance and quote it. (Note that quoting is not supported in Mastodon.)