This is Fine: Optimism & Emergency in the P2P Network - A New Design Congress Essay
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Centralised power and decentralised communities are on the verge of outright conflict for the control of the digital public space. The resilience of centralised networks and the political organisation of their owners remains significantly underestimated by protocol activists. At the same time, the peer-to-peer community is dangerously unprepared for a crisis-fuelled future that has very suddenly arrived at their door.

The Fediverse – a network comprised of Mastodon, Pleroma and other adjacent projects – suffers from the same glaring contradiction. Similar to email nodes, servers (known as Instances within this network) are branded around common interests, political beliefs or sexualities. Users are encouraged to join the servers that resonate with them. Like Scuttlebutt, political and sexual expression is warmly encouraged; in just one example, after centralised media moved to close the accounts of sex workers to comply with new US anti-sex trafficking laws, a Mastodon Instance named Switter was created to offer space for these individuals to continue to operate safely. Switter is now one of the largest Instances in the network.