AI4Communities on the Fediverse

This is a subfile of the primary AI4Communities post, and won't make any sense unless you read its parent first. It explores how the AI4communities idea would look within the ActivityPub-powered Fediverse.

(Notes: This is an early draft. As explained in this newsletter edition, I am publishing these early versions as I develop my thoughts in the hope that constructive comments will help me finish the post. More version control in the footer.)

My manifesto posts of 1/1/23 reflected some knowledge of the Fediverse, which I'd been tracking for a few years. My early versions of the AI4Communities post, from which the following was extracted, reflected that bias.

In fact, I'm not sure I would have come up with these ideas if ActivityPub hadn't shown that decentralised social media was at least possible. Moreover, the whole cozyweb idea reflects the Fediverse architecture - it's very easy to map "cozyweb community" <-> "Fediverse instance".

Business models

In AI4Communities on the Fediverse, therefore:

• it's the community of users on a Fediverse instance that visits their “Friendly Neighborhood Algorithm Store” to choose some AI algorithms to support their community.
• those algorithms must access the instance's content, of course, but as the community owns the AI there are no data issues.
• the AIs are trained both by content and explicitly by its users

The store will provide an array of products and pricing schemes, including lower-cost subscription plans where the village's data, suitably anonymised, is used to affray the costs. Other villages may select higher-cost plans where the village does not share its data. Some may charge some or all members, and/or display ads.

The diversity of both funding schemes and AI plans means that one village may form a data union, while another sets up a for-profit instance and a third lets users choose between paying a subscription fee or seeing ads.

(caption) Different Fediverse communities offering users different experiences, including AI services sourced from multiple AI marketplaces and individual suppliers.

Known Unknowns

What I don't know yet:

• how effective will some of the AI services explored in AI4Communities post be on the Fediverse? After all, a content discovery algorithm cannot discover content from an instance which isn't connected in some way to its home village
• how much protocol development would be required?
• is AI4communities a good cultural fit for the Fediverse?

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Revision Notes

This is one of this wiki's pages managed with the permanent versions pattern described in  Two wiki authors and a blogger walk into a bar…

• changes in this version:
  • this is version 1, extracted from AI4Communities post and lightly edited
• version control
  • this is version: 1
  • this is the current version: AI4Communities on the Fediverse
  • here is the previous version: n/a