Continued from part 2: 16 years later, the indie no-budget web & Activity Pub

Most recently we’ve seen Meta AIs trying to convince children they’re qualified therapists with fake registration IDs, while also selling to advertisers the moment when teenage girls delete selfies, as they’re more likely to be emotionally vulnerable and susceptible to marketing. The web wasn’t meant to be like this, users should be able to chose alternatives without losing their friends: you don’t lose your phone number when you go from iOS to Android, or Vodaphone to Three and the only reason the web isn’t the same is it wasn’t built that way from the start, and now there’s some powerful monopolies who have neither incentive or fiduciary duty to change it (and are lobbying hard to prevent any shifts that would force them to allow competition).

But not all governments are susceptible to this lobbying, and the third, big reason this seems a good time to talk came with the European Commission announcing last month that they will be funding a project very similar to part of our 2022 project – using the same underlying technology ISCC, which since we used it has become ISO certified and is now the first fee-free, user-generatable media identifier, unlike other ISO identifiers like ISBN, ISAN and DOI. 

CommonsDB will be a database of public domain works to try to prevent unlawful take-down, and help creators find works to build on, and is a collaboration between Open Europe’s Paul Kellar and Liccium’s Sebastian Posth – two of the few individuals in the world to have demo’d our tool MOVA – alongside former Pirate Party MEP Felix Reda. The European Union’s backing of them isn’t just an endorsement of our designs and goals with MOVA, or my suggestion to Keller he work with the ISCC, but means we’re freed from ‘first mover curse’ – someone else, backed by the EU, is first to normalise mass free, open media fingerprinting with all the risks and possibilities surrounding that. It’s time to share what we built and learned, and – as their system so far appears to be closed source – maybe it’s time to publish our code. 

So that’s my goal for Act 2 of this year of issues – to present finally our proposal for independent creators to operate independently of monopolies online (or, more precisely, with the same freedom that lets a micro-brewery or artisan chocolate bar sell its products to both tiny shops and supermarket chains). But to avoid too much tech talk we will keep a balance of more traditional Netribution stuff.

On that note – in this issue I profile two of the most interesting filmmakers who are pioneering in their use of ActivityPub to distribute and market their work, and build their community: Elena Rossini and Dilman Della. Tom has a story from Paros with his dogs (who were popular in the last issue on the ‘#dogs’ hashtag), and there’s a Stephen Applebaum archive interviews from the archive with Rachel Weisz, Lexi Alexander and Nobel-winner Imre Kertesz. Next time there’s a great interview lined up…

“The first act is usually used for exposition, to establish the main characters, their relationships, and the world they live in. Later, a dynamic, on-screen incident occurs that confronts the main character… and leads to the first plot point.”

Wikipedia

Netribution’s Publishing ‘Act 1’ and its end

The original Netribution site (1999-2002) was funded through some odd side-projects: one was writing a £695 book for Informa Media on Digital Asset Management, thru my co-author on the film & TV rights book that had inspired Netribution in the first place, Adam Thomas. That helped us get a book deal with Focal Press to turn the site’s funding listings (above) — which had been meticulously developed by Stephen Salter, from a starting list I’d taken from Chris Chandler’s BFI Lowdown Film Funding Guide pamphlet — into print. It was a standard low £1200 advance against 10% of sales and the First Film Foundation wisely advised us to self-publish, and keep everything.

After Netribution 1 ended in early 2002 – our capacity for working hand-to-mouth on a weekly magazine exhausted – I raised the book with Jess and Cath at Shooting People who I was negotiating joining as their first hire after they’d borrowed some money to go from free email list to subscription service. Jess proposed we publish it together: their funding and audience, our writing, a 50-50 collaboration. David Hancock, then editor of Screen Digest (now, also of Informa) suggested his sister Caroline as co-author, who had just finished her first feature as film producer. The ‘banana book’ was hard to finish, but sold out it’s 2,000 first print run in half a year.

But I didn’t publish the follow-up 2005-06 book with Shooting People for a selfish reason – I wanted the freedom to also put the funding info on Netribution as a subscription service to try to revive the site. Jess and Cath understandably wanted it to be part of Shooting People, which we’d then built up to 40,000 members, 25% paying. We parted ways, as my contract allowed, and I headed to Glasgow with a list of damaged relationships, debts and regrets. Perhaps reflecting how I felt, the cover took a photo of a pig cookie jar I’d found on the street in Glasgow as cover.

After several therapists, a new flat, circle of friends, day job (which included setting up the first Scottish Theatre company YouTube account for an interview with Ewen MacGregor I’d blagged) – Netribution 2.0 launched – and in it’s first six months was getting lots of traffic, attention and good original contributions. I was persuaded to do a third bigger, better book, this time expanding beyond the UK to the world, with 50 countries and 40 legal experts as co-authors, alongside Leslie Lowe’s chapter on microbudget techniques (an incongruous add-on motivated by my wish to pay him something). I picked a strawberry as cover as it looked tasty, and bookshops responded mostly by putting it cover-out on shelves. The launch in Cannes was my first trip to the festival and began with getting off the train to overhear a couple talking about the book. It was surreal: I was still battling depression and imposter syndrome, but spent a morning signing copies in the Cannes English Bookshop and managed to hide it. The following spring – with a second print-run underway and an improving sense of self– I decided to make a ‘big trip’ to India.

It was my first adult experience of a majority world country and I’d never seen poverty like my first taxi drive from the airport. I found myself blogging more politically on Netribution – about the US presidential election, food speculation, inequality and police corruption in Goa. The corruption piece got republished as an editorial in the Goa Herald without me knowing, and concerningly, as the police descended on the town I was writing from, hassling tourists. It lead one filmmaker and ex-interviewee to comment ‘maybe just write about films again?’ but I struggled to, after that trip.

‘Westerner returning from India wanting to change their life’ is a cliché, but the tipping point was a preview of Wall*E at the Edinburgh Film Festival a few months later. Perhaps India laid the groundwork for that screening that left me sitting in a car park stunned afterwards and deciding I had to return to filmmaking. I’d had enough of the web and publishing life – and wanted to try making something both popular and meaningful. I also that day decided to add something on carbon-neutral filmmaking to the reprint of the funding book I was in the middle of organising.

However when I got home from the screening there were two letters waiting saying Netribution had won two funding applications: from the UK Film Council (now BFI) to turn the funding book into an online subscription service, and from the Technology Strategy Board (now Innovate UK) for a practical R&D project investigating possible futures for alternative cinema, somewhat inspired by AV events funded by Publicis & Hewlett Packard five years before I’d done in a short-lived collective called 0.1 (which survives as a Wikipedia citation).

I had been fighting so long to get any public funding for Netribution I was lost. Time Out had first tipped the UK Film Council were about to fund us in 2004 – who we’d harassed with 100 letters from readers when we first closed in 2002. I’d parted company with Shooting People for this goal of one day running an online funding guide, but the moment it became possible, after that moment in an Edinburgh car-park, I caught a glimpse of a lifetime of data entry and admin to help other people make films through public grants and tax breaks, and the appeal evaporated. The TSB funding however was for a light-touch project investigating the future of cinema outside of cinemas – popup spaces, and mixed-media, immersive screenings with funding to build a test studio in Glasgow and run some free test events in Newcastle and South London. Our vision was something between Secret Cinema, the live AV of NinjaTune’s Hexstatic and the Outernet of huge wraparound visuals you see in central London.

The long UKFC funding contract also said I could be forced to pay back the funding if I failed to meet one of the many deliverables I’d promised; TSB only asked for a report at the end. There was no capacity to do both, and – most significantly – the only collaborator I had to work with was on the Living Cinema project, as we called it – was visual artist and editor Francis Morgan Giles, who I’d collaborated with since university (including 0.1).

So I picked Living Cinema (left), leaving a space for Olffi to replace us as Marché sponsors and build a film funding web service, ending Netribution’s Act as a publisher, and beginning our 16 years of R&D. The banking crash began a week or so later.

16 years later and the indie no-budget web of Netribution 1 & 2 has gone…

My shock and sadness at Stephen Applebaum‘s death, within a year of Leslie Lowes and Jess Search passing, was a big motivation for this year of issues to reconnect with others from that time. While some of my emails have fallen into a ghosting-or-spam filter pit, others have paid off many times over; e.g. with old friend Eric Dubois that brings Netribution our first new book in 15 years (left) and a wonderful tour around one of Paris’s best kept secrets when we met in April.

It’s a strange time to be trying to build a standalone publication tho – just as most of the planet is focussed on funnelling their audience onto monopolistic platforms whose algorithms filter content like a dealer cutting attention-crack. If Tom and I were starting out today we’d probably be forced to use Substack, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or LinkedIn – even if we had our own Podcast (one of the few decentralised parts of the old web that’s not yet been monopolised, despite Spotify’s best efforts). 

But I’m a parent now – I don’t need to be popular, I can stick to my principles and hope the world changes, as the arrival of [New Tech Concept Incoming] ActivityPub offers for the first time since Web 2.0 exploded in 2006 a path for that. That’s why I moved from Netribution’s 18-years old (!) Joomla to a brand-new, still being finished WordPress: not because I’ve got too much time, but because WordPress recently added ActivityPub. This web-changing technology was also central in Netribution’s final 2022 R&D project: Monetizing Open Video and is something we’ve been dreaming of in Netribution at least since 2007, when I wrote this:

“With social networks evolving into operating systems for how you stay in touch with your friends and family – as  well as share and consume media – the advantages of an open system (like the web itself) over a closed system, controlled by one company (like Microsoft) are pretty clear… Sooner or later a user-owned and run system will evolve, and we can finally talk about web 3.0. If only someone, like a public agency, would invest in creating an open source / open standards social network…” August 2007

ActivityPub?

The name refers to ‘publishing’ but pubs make a nice analogy for the problem with giant social media – it’s like a pub with 100 million drinking in it. You have to shout to get heard, and if the Nazis don’t get kicked out, then you’ve ended up in a Nazi bar, but one that’s really hard to leave because your friends are spread all over the place in the middle of conversations.

ActivityPub is a protocol – like email, jpeg, MP3 and ‘http’ (behind every website) – that’s built for a world with millions of ‘pubs’ with 1000s or 100 or even just one or two people in them. But it’s not just a mini-social network builder – there’s the key extra ability to connect with anyone in any pub, and chat/subscribe/like/repost not-to-mention change venue, at any point. So I can be sat a the table in The Lion, and have a chat with a pal at The Plough, provided their landlord hasn’t barred me or my local pub. This is a completely new approach to the challenge of moderating social media: break it into smaller human-run ‘pubs’, and then let those pubs federate with those with similar values and moderation skills, and block those that are only bots selling crypto and conspiracy theories. So the technology itself isn’t where censorship happens – but between communities (just like many English towns have a bar known for Nazis it’s very easy to avoid).

A driving philosophy – in principle– is that small pubs are easier to manage than 100 million user mega-pubs, as you can have a human landlord (aka moderation team). I’m a believer because I witnessed this being how Shooting People worked as an open publishing email list of 40,000 users 25 years ago, without bringing the hate-filled rage that’s normal online today: community guidelines and paid, human moderators, keeping the calm in the Sony vs Canon DV camera wars.

I didn’t explain this in the first two issues, because most film people I know love technology when it helps make or watch films, but start to glaze over with web tech talk. Maybe it’s because, like most tech, it’s easy to sound authoritative and difficult –without investing lots of time– to know if the authoritative person is talking crap. At least if James Cameron used the ‘widgie-dongle with Pro X glide’ on his last movie, then it’s probably ok, but most web talk is normally about how the biggest platforms (and superstars like Musk or Zuckerberg) have got it wrong. It sounds like a classic geek-supremacist ‘I’m an expert and everyone else an idiot’, rather than someone explaining in the 50s what a seatbelt is.

So WordPress + ActivityPub is fascinating as it turns a tiny blog like this one into a node of a network of millions of users, 10,000s of communities and hundreds of new apps and platforms – all using ActivityPub, allowing users on any of them to like, subscribe, read, boost, comment and bookmark to all of the authors on the little blog. The goal is ‘create once, publish everywhere‘ and it’s growing: WordPress, like its competitor Ghost have adopted, and platforms from Flipboard and Medium to Threads and Tumblr are rebuilding things around ActivityPub. This takes us closer to the small, personal website publishing that Netribution was built on 25 years ago, but with the network effects that Web 2.0 brought.

What about BlueSky? Isn’t that ‘decentralised’? When Jack ‘Twitter’ Dorsey founded BlueSky, like many in tech, he figured he could do it better than those who’d come before (ie the many people working with the W3C to develop ActivityPub), so created his own: Authenticated Transfer Protocol (‘AT Proto’). It has some nice things ActivityPub doesn’t have, but also seems to have added making it impossibly expensive to run your own independent server, meaning for now there’s just BlueSky running it. With some 33 million BlueSky users it’s a bit of a VHS vs Betamax split – but it’s not too much of a problem as there is a good bridge to/from ActivityPub/Mastodon.

I find all of this vaguely hopeful as it’s the first viable architectural alternative to the web monopolies – all the previous attempts are versions of  ‘here’s a nice new social network who promise not to be evil – please help them rule the world’. 

When I first tried out the video tool built on ActivityPub in 2020 (PeerTube) I rewrote Netribution’s last funding project to work with it. This tech isn’t just a concept, it works really well, has millions of users, and it’s not owned by VCs or big monopolies, (even if Meta, with Threads, are on standby for ActivityPub ‘Fediverse’ to take off). It’s like the old web.

Our project – Monetising Open Video Architecture (openvideo.tech)– finished at the start of 2022 and looked at ActivityPub as a way to recreate the 20C indie media ecosystem of indie producer >indie distributors >art cinemas/video stores (ntm indie bands > indie labels > indie record stores / radio stations). These structures resisted monopolisation, and supported a world of music and film, and the careers of those who created them. We see in ActivityPub the potential to do the same online – but without the old media gatekeeping that the web broke down.

But we finished our work at the end of 2022 and I went quiet, and didn’t talk about why. A week after our project finished, Russia invaded the Ukraine, calling it a ‘special military operation’. The world was at war and ‘truth’ as always was its first victim: that’s not new, but the web facilitates this, and I could picture how one part of the tech we’d developed might facilitate easier, cheaper state censorship (it was open tech that already existed, but we gave it a nice, friendly interface) – and there were too many unknowns for me. There were other reasons to go quiet but this was the one that scared me.  Our history of championing new empowering media web tech before it goes mainstream, be it crowdfunding, the new craze YouTube, or a promising college-run alternative to Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace, ‘TheFacebook’ – has left me cautious-bordering-paranoid about championing new tech with too many known unknowns. In 2013 I went to meetups from a group of guys plotting to launch a competitor to Bitcoin called Ethereum – and after questioning their founder, Vitalik, ran a mile (they’re now valued at $300bn). So I spent a year quietly presenting MOVA’s three components (RevShare, Mova.claims, open.movie) alongside three events, and then went quiet.

Three things have changed that…

First the ActivityPub universe has gone from tech curiosity to something viable and used daily by millions. Second, mainstream monopoly tech – sacking moderating teams, trying to sway elections, and general indifference to the harms their huge power can cause – has accelerated the urgency to find alternatives: the planet need a media space not exclusively run by a few centi-billionaires trying to rule the world on their terms.

Most recently we’ve seen Meta AIs trying to convince children they’re qualified therapists with fake registration IDs, while also selling to advertisers the moment when teenage girls delete selfies, as they’re more likely to be emotionally vulnerable and susceptible to marketing. The web wasn’t meant to be like this, users should be able to chose alternatives without losing their friends: you don’t lose your phone number when you go from iOS to Android, or Vodaphone to Three and the only reason the web isn’t the same is it wasn’t built that way from the start, and now there’s some powerful monopolies who have neither incentive or fiduciary duty to change it (and are lobbying hard to prevent any shifts that would force them to allow competition).

But not all governments are susceptible to this lobbying, and the third, big reason this seems a good time to talk came with the European Commission announcing last month that they will be funding a project very similar to part of our 2022 project – using the same underlying technology ISCC, which since we used it has become ISO certified and is now the first fee-free, user-generatable media identifier, unlike other ISO identifiers like ISBN, ISAN and DOI. 

CommonsDB will be a database of public domain works to try to prevent unlawful take-down, and help creators find works to build on, and is a collaboration between Open Europe’s Paul Kellar and Liccium’s Sebastian Posth – two of the few individuals in the world to have demo’d our tool MOVA – alongside former Pirate Party MEP Felix Reda. The European Union’s backing of them isn’t just an endorsement of our designs and goals with MOVA, or my suggestion to Keller he work with the ISCC, but means we’re freed from ‘first mover curse’ – someone else, backed by the EU, is first to normalise mass free, open media fingerprinting with all the risks and possibilities surrounding that. It’s time to share what we built and learned, and – as their system so far appears to be closed source – maybe it’s time to publish our code. 

So that’s my goal for Act 2 of this year of issues – to present finally our proposal for independent creators to operate independently of monopolies online (or, more precisely, with the same freedom that lets a micro-brewery or artisan chocolate bar sell its products to both tiny shops and supermarket chains). But to avoid too much tech talk we will keep a balance of more traditional Netribution stuff.

On that note – in this issue I profile two of the most interesting filmmakers who are pioneering in their use of ActivityPub to distribute and market their work, and build their community: Elena Rossini and Dilman Della. Tom has a story from Paros with his dogs (who were popular in the last issue on the ‘#dogs’ hashtag), and there’s a Stephen Applebaum interviews from the archive with Rachel Weisz, Lexi Alexander and Imre Kertesz. Hopefully next time there’ll be some original interviews…