So you've heard about the fediverse; and you're a developer. You want to create a new ActivityPub based project. The specs are hard - I won't sugar coat it. Every developer has their own way of doing things and very few talk to (or more accurately listen to) other developers. So there are a hundred different dialects of ActivityPub and a dozen different ways of doing the simplest tasks. Heck there are at least a half dozen different ways to set a field name to a value - and you'll need to implement all of them. This is hard also. It will drive you to drink - if it hasn't already.
But before you go reading up on specs and before you even write a line of code, I want you to talk to women. I want you to talk to minorities. I want you to talk to people who have tried the fediverse and been pushed away and vowed never to return. Or that live in heavily armed fortresses with blocklists that total 500 pages or more.
And I want you to listen.
Many fediverse providers embody in their code what I'll call "rape culture" for lack of a better term. This mindset allows problems like spam and harassment and abuse to flourish. I'm not calling them rapists. I'm saying that rape culture is embodied in the code they write, and that mindset is devastating to online spaces. In that world view, every person has the divine right to invade anybody else's space and shove their beliefs and prejudices into that persons' face or body or social stream. Without consent. Complete strangers. You've never seen these people before and all of a sudden they're either beating you to a bloody pulp or selling you penis enlargement tablets. And your software allows this to happen. You reach for the block/mute button but it's far too late. The damage has already been done.
So talk to women and minorities and other victims - and find out what they need from you to provide an online space where they feel safe. Hint: it revolves around consent.
Then you can read the specs and start writing code.
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