Emelia 👸🏻 @thisismissem@hachyderm.io
Public

So there's a tiny tiny percentage of people in my mentions right now that are accusing me of horrible things because they don't like Bluesky and I've taken money from them.

For these people, I'm not saying you have to like Bluesky's moderation practices or the decision they make for their own app, I would never say such.

These people fundamentally do not get standards, and especially web standards, and how they are made. So here's a small explanation for people.

In the standards community, there's practically a code that is we do not argue about our employers or financial supporters' corporate positions, we leave our companies at the door when we participate in writing open standards.

Sure, some of us my represent our given employers within the standards community (and there's a requirement to disclose affiliations), but there's also a bunch of us that operate entirely independently of any given company.

At the W3C, which is the home of the FedCM standard, they have what are known as Invited Experts, and the W3C enforces that they act independently and that they disclose any affiliation, especially financial.

I am an Invited Expert, that happened before Bluesky decided to fund my work. Bluesky, like them or not, are one of the few organizations that actually has the capital to fund standards work. Doing this work isn't cheap either! It's a tonne of work seeking consensus and reaching agreement to move things forwards.

Like, I'm current budgeting 30-50% of my productive time over the next year will be working on this standard.

When I first chatted with Bluesky, they were initially like "we want to do a three month freelance contract to implement FedCM for AT Protocol", and after some conversation, we settled on "no, this shouldn't be a contract but instead a grant, that allows you to be completely independent of bluesky and explicitly enables you to work across decentralized protocols, making FedCM better for everyone"

The grant is explicitly clear contractually that I am entirely independent from bluesky, like I could make a technical decision others at bluesky do not like (unlikely, but possible), and it would not affect the grant.

It explicitly requires me to work across protocols.

Emelia 👸🏻 @thisismissem@hachyderm.io
Public

Standards work is about coming together and working on reaching a shared consensus on a thing. We don't do corporate politics, or government politics, at standards meetings nor venues.

Sure, you can disagree on things outside of the standards world, but within, the only thing that matters is advancing the standards and building them right.

Like, when running the ActivityPub Trust and Safety taskforce, we had Meta employees show up to our meetings, and they were genuinely helpful (volunteering for instance to scribe the meeting, which is like one of the hardest jobs to fill at a standards meeting), and when they joined I had to repeat that golden rule of standards: we leave corporate politics and our company's at the door.

We did have one or two people mad that they were present, but luckily I didn't have to explicitly remind anyone of the W3C code of conduct which governs those meetings.

Standards work is truly a bit weird like that. It takes a lot of discipline to separate out those things severance style: an innie and an outie with regards to the standards work.

Finally, we live under capitalism, or at least the vast majority of us do (it's always interesting when someone from the CCP shows up at a standards meeting!), and living under capitalism means everything revolves around money.

W3C membership ain't cheap: membership dues start at like €2,000 and go up to like €60,000 or something.

As an Invited Expert, I'm allowed to participate without paying the W3C. However, I still need to be paid for my time, because time equals money under capitalism for 99% of us.

Bluesky stepping up to fund this work is a genuinely good thing, regardless of what you may think of bluesky as a company or social app.

There weren't really any other companies with an interest in decentralized social that could fund work at this scale. An NLNet grant probably wouldn't be workable for this, and operates at a much slower pace.

Anyway, hopefully that gives you a better idea of how standards are built and funded.

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