March 6th, 2026: Added mention to Coopcloud and Anubis support.
This is research that is just beginning, no conclusions yet reached, based on conversations we’ve been having and conversations we’ve been seeing happen elsewhere, trying to determine what our place is in them.
What’s happening now with capitalism is that we’re seeing companies competing for who can come up with the best model of artificial intelligence.
This involves the construction of data centers, based on colonial models like the genocide in Sudan for the control of coltan and other “rare earths”, colonial extractivism in Africa and Abya Yala, the persecution and assassination of land defenders, testing it in “the markets” of the social control of networks and perfecting it in other genocides, in particular the Palestinian genocide, such as Palantir, soon to be implemented in Argentina and Latin America.
The construction of data centers involves the destruction of water and land, as our comrades at Tu Nube Seca mi Rio closely follow. It works in very similar ways to other extractivist projects that have already been facing years of struggle and resistance.
We affirm that these struggles against mining, against monocultures, for land and life are intertwined and overlapping and we must stand in solidarity with each other. Even though no one understands how AIs work, we all know the effects of environmental destruction by capitalist corporations, foreign or local, the empty promise of job creation, polluted land and water, etc.
In this article, we will attempt to shine light on another facet, which has to do with the colonization of the Internet and cyberspace as a field of struggle, in particular with the surprising appearance of thousands of simultaneous visits to autonomous servers, which self-host services by and for small communities (compared to the billions of users of Instagram, X, Facebook and TikTok, at least). Visits that exhaust the few resources they have and force them to close projects or spend a lot of time trying to combat them and that are automatically generated by crawlers, programs that download entire sites, in this case to process them and train artificial intelligence models.
As a first working hypothesis or historical analogy we believe we are looking at a new process of original accumulation, like the one that allowed the establishment of capitalism by accumulating land ownership in the hands of few, while dispossessing peasants, turning them into urban proletariat. Not to mention the appropriation of knowledge turned into industrial processes, such as the recently re-enabled case of the Jamaican foundries that gave way to modern processing of iron, appropriating processes developed by slaves. These were and are violent processes of social re-accommodation and concentration of capital. Our criticism of liberal defense of “free culture” is that they actively avoid this history of struggle, using more washed up terms such as “enclosure” of knowledge to refer to the same historical process, separating us when we should recognize ourselves as part of the same movement.
We then ask ourselves what is the current process of dispossession that gives
continuity to this analogy in the concrete case of the race for AI. As providers of web hosting, and reading and listening to others in the field of autonomous infrastructures, self-hosting, algorithmic disobedience, and digital gardens, what we experience is a growing and worrying avalanche of visits to our servers, downloading all the information published on our sites.
This is something that has been happening forever, from search indexers like Google and others to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. None of these services could work without downloading our sites. For the sake of visibility and collective memory, we often allow it.
The escalation is that now our servers receive thousands of hits from many different addresses, which is made clear with a little bit of analysis are automated, but which are difficult to detect individually. Many of these crawlers do not identify themselves, nor do they respect limits like those of robots.txt. They just visit us again and again, wear us down and take us off the Internet.
Following our initial analogy, they force us to move from our own servers to larger providers such as Cloudflare, who have the ability to limit or block them, or even negotiate between companies. This accelerates the concentration of resources in these few providers, generating new web oligopolies.
We had this conversation in November 2025, 12 years after the suicide of Aaron Swartz, persecuted for hacking with the aim of freeing as much scientific research as he could, trapped in the capitalist circuit of scientific journals. Without going into whether this is the kind of knowledge that should be shared or not, the contradiction is that Meta, OpenAI and others have done the same, downloading terabytes and terabytes of books, papers, websites, movies (including porn) and anything else they can, “violating copyright”, without any of the consequences that Aaron and other pirates and hackers have suffered for years. They granted themselves a letter of marque; as always, it’s a question of power.
In parallel, we have been following other conversations about the environmental impact of the Internet itself. Some good practices for web developers like us have been proposed by Sustainable Web Design, in particular an algorithm that allows us to estimate CO2 emissions from the data transfer emissions involved in visiting a website. This model uses the energy consumed per byte transferred as a variable in order to estimate the CO2 emitted in producing it. The model takes into account the country of origin of the visit, the energy consumed by the visitor’s device, the network and the server, based on the geographic location of the server.
At Sutty we modified this model a bit to be able to separate the CO2 emitted by the visitor and the CO2 emitted by our infrastructure, based on the country of each.
Based on this, we are currently calculating the CO2 emissions of our live servers. The question that arises is what to do with this information. One thing we can do is use it to have a more concrete idea of our own environmental impact, making it visible to users and visitors.
We can look at other experiences that allow us to visualize this impact and compare it to hamburgers consumed, where two contradictions arise. One is that comparing web visits with hamburgers is a very very very very very very gringo unit of comparison --have you seen the meme that gringos need to have things explained to them in hamburgers? The other contradiction is that it puts the focus back on individual responsibility for environmental impact (“eat less hamburgers”) instead of where the real responsibility lies (the industrial, colonial, patriarchal, Western, capitalist mode of production), in the same way that a dripping faucet does not compare to the amount of water polluted by an open pit mine or, for that matter, a data center.
And in that sense, we believe we can keep a record of our supposed environmental impact, contextualized to a worker cooperative based in a colonial and colonized country, which relies on infrastructure and data centers in the United States. Which leads us to say that the problem lies elsewhere, without washing our hands of it.
Could we compare our environmental impact and say that we emit 0.0000000000001% of what a U.S. bomb dropped by Israel on Gaza does? Or the emissions per second of Vaca Muerta, or any extractivist, genocidal, terricidal project: can we know this information?
This relates to the hypothesis of original accumulation in that these CO2 emissions are unnecessary and produced by a capitalist race which we may not want participate in, or at least decide what part we want to play and from which stance we are going to resist.
If we host our own servers and all of this is highly time-consuming, the easiest thing to do would be to go to Cloudflare and let them take care of it. The problem, as we mentioned, is the concentration of web distribution services in a few providers, repeating the hegemonic “scale” model in technology development.
There are other options, such as Deflect.
These third parties can also implement the following strategies.
Another option is to block them completely, there being several ways to go about this. One is robots.txt, oriented to the crawlers that follow standards, informing them that we prefer that they do not visit us.
In Sutty we are evaluating the option of allowing users to activate a robots.txt file.
But the most problematic crawlers are those who neither identify themselves nor respect our requests, and go as far as to do everything they can to prevent us from identifying them. In this case there are comrades blocking by ASN number, because even though visits from a single crawler can come from many IP addresses, they all belong to the same group and owner, identified by ASN.
Sutty is also implementing this strategy, incorporating ASN identification in our visitor logs, which allows us to group the origin of the visit without having to register the IP address --which would allow us to individualize the address and potentially de-anonymize visitors. As these groupings have an owner and that record is public, it is possible to group many visits, maybe individual, maybe not, by their owner. With this we can analyze the logs and know which sets of visits are produced from a network that is not a “first mile” network, such as the Internet provider we pay for where we live, but rather a data center.
Doing this, we can block those that we consider malicious, or limit those that are in doubt, so that they do not use up too many resources and therefore unnecessarily increase our carbon footprint and the use of our resources to generate AI models.
“Testing humanity” is a resource where the server asks us to interact with them in a way that only humans could, either by demonstrating cognitive and/or motor skills, or by making our computer consume more power, demonstrating that it really wants to visit the server.
The first option is the most annoying one, as it outsources to all of us the cost of calculating who is human and who isn’t. It is also problematic because it assumes a model of humanity that has the same cognitive, motor, and even cultural and literacy capabilities, which is to say they are ultimately ableist and colonial models.
This is the model of “captcha”, whose most extractivist model is that of ReCaptcha, which takes advantage of this human energy in the training of recognition models for cars, stairs, staircases, traffic lights and so on.
The second, the one geared around using more energy, is automatic and involves doing nothing but waiting, calculating that making the device use more energy is a bit annoying for us, but very expensive for the data centers that are making millions of visits.
In this we can perhaps glimpse a short term strategy, like that of Anubis, for certain sites. We recently collaborated with Coopcloud in adding Anubis support to some of its recipes. This will allow projects like Escuela Común to better protect their servers.
The approach of the algorithmic sabotage research group (ASRG, no apparent relation to Las Ketchup) is more cataclysmic. Since we cannot avoid being visited by these crawlers, what we can do is to offensively “poison” the models they train by providing them with false or meaningless information. These traps or tarpits make it possible for us to trick crawlers by leading them to infinite visit patterns, where they will find more and more links to follow as well as meaningless articles. What would be moderately confusing, cumbersome or fun for a while for a human visitor, becomes infinite for a crawler who is not prepared for this labyrinth.
There are many explorations in this direction, ranging from strategies that require little energy on our side, such as providing them with a random selection of words, to strategies that are more involved but more difficult to detect, generating texts that are expected to be “meaningless” to humans, based on the actual content of our sites.
The accelerated collapse would be that poisoning these models causes the quality of their responses to decrease significantly, so much so that any human asking them questions will receive answers that clearly lack logic, meaning or veracity.
Our question is what a collapse would involve if we are seeing reports of psychotic breaks facilitated by conversations with ChatGPT, conversations that validate hallucinations and suicidal ideation, generation of fascist propaganda, coupled with an overall very low level of text comprehension facilitated by the extraction of attention.
And what happens when political decisions are automated and produce harmful long-term effects, regardless of the rationality of the model consulted?
What is the collapse of an AI trained to kill racialized people?
Rather, we think this acceleration assumes a global rationality based on Western academic thinking, though perhaps we are exaggerating in asking these questions. In any case, there is potential to be found in this in that it incites us to be on the offense, to return to them “the cost” of identifying what is true and what is not, to control the quality of their models–but which in turn will fall back on traumatized and exploited workers in the global south.
A zipbomb is an offensive form that could be temporarily disastrous for simple crawlers, but very easy to solve if its use becomes widespread. The idea is to apply as much compression as possible to a file full of repeated data, such as zeros, which generates a very small file that when opened uses all computationally available resources (storage, RAM, processor). For example, 4.5PB of zeros can be compressed into 42KB. If 4,500,500,000,000,000,000,000 bytes can be sent in 42,000 bytes, it is very “cheap” to send over the Internet, but impossible to decompress without exhausting any computational resources. However, in order to send one of these zipbombs we have to be very sure that we are detecting a malicious agent.
What is the role of autonomous infrastructures? How can they incorporate these strategies, while we decide among all user communities how we want to respond to AI model training? Perhaps the plurality of strategies and the diversity of implementations that we believe we have is what will defend us. Can we test all strategies, can we go unnoticed, can we surf the tsunami?
We believe that collectives and communities of users need to be involved in the conversation about how to respond to this, so that it does not remain in the technical and sullen work of the system administrator --the cisadmin–, fed up with crashing servers.
Between the capitalist model of digital monocultures and the individual model of the digital garden, we have to find the digital community garden, the cyberspace of mutual sustenance and aid.
If we block or poison the models, we become invisible, we escape “the algorithm”. But if what AIs say becomes the truth, wouldn’t it be strategically in our best interest to be as visible as we can? Like the meme where Grok corrects the veracity of Musk’s statements, or discussions between alternative and community media and free communication platforms populated only be the convinced, what we don’t allow AIs to see will cease to be part of a corpus of possible answers, of the universe of possibilities we will encounter as long as we are collectively dependent on Big Tech. If what AIs answer is going to be the undisputed truth, how and from where are we going to dispute those truths?
Shouldn’t we also fill the web with links between us, sharing and deepening discussions, allowing whoever finds us to also find other information that will be veiled or censored by search engines?
For example, in the ASRG search for this article, the site we knew was inaccessible and a Wayback Machine search told us that the site was never archived, so we could not reference that experience.
What we need is a selective invisibility, albeit one that does not
work collectively as a form of gatekeeping (curiously, this reference does not exist in Spanish).
If you are an NGO, non-profit, or an individual activist, this grant is designed to recover a website you have lost and fortify it with the power of the Distributed Web.
The deadline for submissions has been extended by one more week, so there’s still time to apply. If you think you or someone you know might benefit, don't hesitate to apply through the applications form.
Share this opportunity with others who might need it, and submit your application until January 20th!
We're offering a Resilience Grant for NGOs, non-profits, and individuals who protect human rights and empower people, especially those facing systemic inequity and prejudice. We'll recover your site and make it more resilient with the DWeb—100% free.
Apply now through this form! We'll be choosing two organizations to work with in early January 2025.
How will you recover my site?
We can restore your site if it meets certain technical conditions. Share your details in the registration form so we can evaluate whether we can help you.
How do you make my website more resilient?
At Distributed Press, we specialize in creating decentralized versions of websites using protocols like IPFS and Hypercore.
Having collaborative copies of your site hosted outside HTTP helps avoid fragility and link rot, reduces the risk of losing information, makes your data more resistant to censorship and deletion, and ensures it remains accessible even if/when hosting servers go down. As part of this grant, we’ll not only recover your site but also host it on the Distributed Web.
What are the conditions?
We will recover 1 site for 2 organizations or individuals during February 2025. Selection criteria include technical feasibility of the restoration and your consent to share the story as a case study afterward. Due to the tight timeline of this project, you’ll also need to agree to a response time of around 48 hours — so we can move forward together!
Learn more about the conditions and requirements for recovering and preserving a
]]>Here’s what happened:
Parth Narula wrote to us from India in early September, asking for permission to do an analysis of our platform, which we gave. And he found two vulnerabilities that we could improve. In both cases, they are not security or performance issues that harm our users due to our actions, but they are points in our system that a malicious actor could misuse to perform attacks such as flooding their mailboxes with emails, or inviting a user to download malware.
Because in the quest to offer resilient and secure software, we also have to anticipate all the different paths that malicious actors could create to cause damage and seek compensation. In our domain, a bit of paranoid thinking is more than useful ;)
So Parth’s analysis and recommendations led us to quickly review and resolve three points of our CMS dashboard to prevent them from being vulnerable to malicious attack.
We improved the protection against “brute force”, which prevents a type of attack where millions of passwords are tried on us, but at the same time allowing users to make a normal use of the login, make a mistake when typing it and retry.
We improved protection against sending email confirmations and password unlocks, preventing a type of attack that is done by asking for this process many, many times and flooding the mailbox with unsolicited email.
We limit the incorporation of links in an unnecessary space on our sites, which would allow a malicious hyperlink mailing attack to unsuspecting people, potentially turning us into a phishing platform.
Specifically, the Sutty CMS panel is our most sensitive piece of security because it is our only dynamic part. This means, in plain English, that it generates content on the go, depending on databases and server-side procedures: complex processes that can be exploited if they are not well protected.
Its security requires additional measures such as access controls, input validation and continuous monitoring. This is why all the websites we make are, instead, “static” or “solid”, as interactive and beautiful as any other but with a technical solution that simplifies how they are generated on the server and drastically reduces vulnerabilities to the most common Internet attacks, such as automated infection with malware, advertising, webshellz and even, as they use fewer resources, increasing the cost of doing denial of service (DOS) attacks.
Other actions that constitute our approach to cyber security include having multiple servers up and running, being very obsessive about not requesting or storing personal information, and making encrypted, remote backups of everything. What we do in our infrastructure is public here: https://0xacab.org/sutty/ansible and here https://gitea.nulo.in/Sutty/-/packages.
In addition, all changes that Sutty users make to their sites are registered in a way that can be undone. This means that if someone gains access to the manager and makes improper changes, we can help you undo it. Improper access can occur either by simple issues such as leaving open the session on a shared computer or more complex, such as an attack that exploits a vulnerability in the platform or uses social engineering techniques (that is, it is not a technical issue but a deception for a person to give the access keys believing that he/she is leaving them to another trusted person).
By going through these steps, you’ll be able to start publishing articles as individual posts visible from any Fediverse account, on clients such as Mastodon and Pixelfed. You’ll be able to choose which ones to publish at any time, and you can disable this option on a per-article basis.
As with any Fediverse account, it is necessary for any user from any Fediverse instance to follow the account you automatically create from your site. This user will receive notifications for each new post you make and this will be visible from the associated instance(s).
Here’s how to set up your site on the Fediverse.
Create your account on https://panel.sutty.nl/en
Create your site with a unique name
Go to your site settings to enable publishing to the Fediverse.
Create your first post… and as many as you want!
Click on “Publish all changes” to publish your site.
Your site and its posts are available as a site with its URL and as an account in the Fediverse!
Invite others to follow you so that your posts reach more users in different instances. You can write to us at @sutty@todon.nl and @compost@social.coop so we can start following you and you can also add yourself to our list of accounts available to follow via this form.
Start interacting! Remember that you can write article-posts in response to other posts.
This videodemo follows these steps.
If you already have a Sutty account, you can skip [to step 2 to create your site].
You can create your account from https://sutty.nl/en
You will need an email address, a secure password and to agree to the Sutty terms listed below. You don’t need to confirm your account right away: you can continue to the next step.
If you still want to confirm your account at this step, you can check your email for a message from noreply@sutty.nl with instructions.
The first screen will welcome you and allow you to create your first site by pressing the “Create site” button in the left column.
If you already have a website on the Sutty CMS, you’ll see your sites at https://panel.sutty.nl/sites
But if you need to create a new site, visit https://panel.sutty.nl/sites/new
Choose the name of your site, which will have the format “SITENAME.sutty.nl”. It needs to be unique and have no special characters.
You can then choose the same title or a different one such as “My Sutty site on the Fediverse”.
With the site description, describe your site’s purpose in a few lines or what your readers can expect. What you fill in here will be used as a description in search engines (such as Google and DuckDuckGo). For example: “Sutty account in the Fediverse to share articles automatically”. You can always edit this later in the site’s configuration panel.
Next, you will need to choose any layout for your site. In this case, we choose Minima.
Finally, you’ll need to choose a license for all the content you publish on your site. Sutty offers three possible licenses but you can also use your own custom license. Remember that when there’s no license, all rights are reserved, in other words, it will be copyrighted.
You’ll find a brief description of each one here, but you can also click the “read more” button, which will direct you to more information about each type of license.
When you’re ready, press the Create site button at the bottom. Hold tight – It sometimes takes a couple minutes.
Yay! Your site’s ready. You’ll now be redirected to your site panel, where you’ll have the list of available posts in the center. Don’t worry if you find three articles there already! These are the ones that Sutty adds by default and will appear in the footer; they contain information about the site’s Privacy Policy, Code of Conduct and Licensing Agreements. You can leave them as they are, edit them or even delete them.
In the left panel, you’ll find a pink box with purple letters indicating that your site is available, inviting you to click to get the address. You might have to refresh or reload the page for it to appear.
In the next window, you’ll have a list of addresses. The first one is the address of your site, yay! The next ones, for now, tell you which Sutty servers it is available on. You don’t need to do anything, but if you click on the first link, the one containing the address you chose for your site, you will be able to access the first version, which does not yet contain articles.
So now you have your site – But the interesting bit is still missing: publishing to the Fediverse!
To do this, you must go to the Configuration option, on the left side of your panel, inside your site with the Minima design. Remember to scroll down the list until you find the option to Publish to the Fediverse and then, at the bottom, to Save changes.
After pressing Save, you will be redirected to your site’s panel. A pink box with purple letters will now appear at the top, reminding you to publish the changes for the new configuration to take effect. On the left side you will find, again, the button to Publish all changes – click that.
Make sure to reload the page again to see that the changes have taken affect, when the pink box says “Your site is available!”
Before moving on to the next step, you may have noticed that there are other settings that might be of interest to you. One of them is publishing to the Distributed Web. You can visit this Distributed Press link for more information.
Customizing your identity as a Fediverse account is done from your articles panel, by adding the “About” content type, in the left side panel. It’s the first in the list.
You can add several articles to have editing options but only one will be displayed on your Fediverse profile at a time.
At the same time, the “About” page is used to configure other data on your site. That’s why there are some fields that are not visible from or related to your Fediverse profile.
So let’s fill out our profile.
We add a new article of the type “About”.
We place a title, which will be the same as the name of our site.
We place a short description, which will look like the description of the account in the Fediverse.
Although the author’s name is optional, it will be useful for them to see it from a preview in case it is shared by other networks.
The description is required but will not be displayed in the profile. It is important for search engines and other networks.
We upload an image for the logo or avatar. It can be a PNG, GIF, or JPG and be up to 2MB in size. It will be scaled to 400x400.
We add a description for the logo or avatar image, which will allow it to be read by screen readers.
We add an image for social networks or header. It can be a PNG, GIF, or JPG and be up to 2MB in size. It will be scaled to 1500x1500.
We add a description for the social media image or header, which will allow it to be readable by screen readers.
We can optionally add an email and the link to other social networks.
It is not necessary to complete the following fields, from “Facebook app ID” and all the others that begin with “Webmaster”.
Make sure to save this by clicking the Save button in the footer or at the top of the page.
It will show you a confirmation of all your changes. To get back to your page click on the site title on the top fo the page. To see the changes reflected, you again need to hit publish all the changes.
In the Fediverse, each account is associated with an instance, which is a sort of community, house or common server that brings together accounts, generally with a certain affinity. For accounts created from Sutty sites, while Sutty would function as the instance in this case, technically we can say that each account is simultaneously its own unique instance.
To quickly find your username, you can check:
On the left side, when your site is published and ready, click on the pink box with purple letters with the text “Your site is available! Click here to find all the different ways to visit it” to access a list of places where a copy of your site is available. Look for the one that says Fediverse and there you will find your username.
In the footer of your site, where it will be added between the Feed and the default articles.
In the confirmation email of the publication.
Once your site’s been created, you’ll be redirected to your site’s section in the panel. There you will find that in the center is the list of articles you have. So far, if you chose to keep them, you will have the license, code of conduct and privacy policies we mentioned earlier.
In order to create your first article, you can find the list of content types that you can add in the left panel. You must press the Add button for the content type Post. You will be redirected to the screen to create your post.
There, you will need to choose a title, which will be displayed on the main page in a list alongside the other titles of your other articles. In addition, it is important that you complete the description of your article to tell what it is about and to attract readers. Optionally, you can add one or more authors and one or more images with a corresponding description.
To enter the content of your article, you can use our text editor. There, you will have the option to highlight text as titles, subtitles, or third level headings, highlight with bold, use italics, add links and embed audio-visual content, among others. For this tutorial, we will enter a short text.
Sutty allows you to choose which articles to publish in the Fediverse. That is, you can choose not to publish all of them but instead only some in particular, isn’t that great? Just turn the toggler at the bottom of the text editor on or off.
In addition, you have the option to make a post in response to a post in the Fediverse. You do this by entering the URL (address you find in the navigation bar) of the post you want to reply to in the “In reply to” section.
There are two more options that we won’t cover in this tutorial: saving a draft of the text and editing the publication date.
When you are ready, go to the bottom and press the Save button. You will be automatically redirected to the article view and its metadata (i.e. the data of your data). If you are not satisfied, you can press the Edit button and you will return to the screen to modify your article. Otherwise, you can return to the main panel of your site via the breadcrumbs at the top of the screen. Be sure to tap on the name of your site to return to that step.
Once in your panel, for the changes to take effect, you must publish all changes by clicking the button. In effect, you will see a pink box with purple letters with the text “There are unpublished changes. Click the button below and wait a moment to find them on your site”.
(Mai: Repeat / emphasize above for good measure? >> yup I agree)
After pressing the Publish all changes button, the caption will change to “Your site is building,
refresh this page in 2 minutes”. Another way to know if the process is finished is to wait for the confirmation email indicating that all your changes took effect. You can then refresh the page from the browser or by pressing F5 on your keyboard.
Each time you publish one or more articles, you will need to publish all the changes from the button in the left column. The site is built all at once over a period of a few minutes, so we recommend that you wait until you have finished making changes before publishing. Once the site has been built, you will receive a confirmation email.
Once the changes are published, you will be able to access your site from there and see how it looks!
Once you’ve created your site, you should see that in the footer of your site – it will be another address that looks something like @minima@minima.sutty.nl. This is the address of your Fediverse account! Yippee! If you look up this address from your Fediverse account, you should see your site profile there just like any other Fediverse account. As you follow the account and as you make posts, they will appear as separate posts on your “timeline”.
For those who want to access your Fediverse account, they will need to enter your Fediverse account or the full name of the site (the URL) (e.g. @minima@minima.sutty.nl or https://minima.sutty.nl) into their instance’s search engine and start following you.
This means that they must have their own Fediverse account. Remember that the more accounts that follow you, the more your posts will be circulated, as they are displayed in the federated timeline of each instance. That is to say, each account belongs to an instance, each instance shows its own posts and those of the instances that are followed by its users. In this case, your site is both instance and account.
To get started, you can mention @sutty@todon.nl and @compost@social.coop so that we start following you!
Optionally, you can add the name of your Fediverse user or site to our list of accounts available to follow from this form.
When you start receiving replies to your posts, remember that you can reply to them in turn by creating a new article on your site and copying the URL into the “In reply to” field under the “Post to the Fediverse” button.
Likewise, if you want to reply to a post and start interacting with a new account, you can use the same option.
We’ll be building out features in the months to come – including allowing you site’s Fedi account to follow others.
That’s it. Thanks for watching!
Thanks to our joint work with Distributed Press, Hypha and with the support of Filecoin Foundation for the Distributed Web, Sutty makes it possible to combine the security of your static website with the fast distribution of content that the free and descentralized social networks that make up the Fediverse allow for.
This was made possible via the development and integration of two components, worked on in a joint and collaborative fashion:
Social Inbox, developed primarily by Distributed Press. It supplies the ability to recieve articles, reply to and mention other Fediverse accounts.
Jekyll Activity Pub Plugin, developed primarily by Sutty. It makes it possible to integrate Social Inbox into every Jekyll-generated static website, allowing for the automatic publishing of site content to the Fediverse.
Sutty integrates the complete functionality into its CMS for static Jekyll websites, making it possible to administrate it from an interface which is continuously improving in usability.
If you still aren’t familiar with these names and concepts, we invite you to learn more below, in the section named “For the techno-curious”.
If you create your website via Sutty, you now have new opportunities to disseminate your content and interact on digital networks.
Your articles can now be published onto Fediverse social media.
Your website will have a profile or user, customizable from the panel, on a Sutty instance unique to your website.
Fediverse users will be able to follow your posts.
Fediverse users that follow you will be able to read your posts, mention you and reply to you.
You will be able to interact with Fediverse users via replies or mentions.
Activating Fediverse publishing for any Sutty website.
Activating (or not) publishing to the Fediverse for any individual article you want.
Replying to comments with articles on your Sutty website.
Customizing the account that Sutty automatically creates for your site on the Fediverse.
Reporting or informing about abusive users or instances using our contact form.
Improvements in integrating replies as in-website comments.
Incoporation of mentions from the Sutty panel.
Improvements in the general interface of the panel.
New features to improve moderation.
Better compatibility with other Fediverse networks (Mastodon+Glitch, Pleroma, Ktistec).
Differentiation of content to be published onto the Fediverse and onto the Sutty website.
The possibility to export your account to another Fediverse intance via the Sutty panel.
The possibility for Sutty to announce your content and/or Fedi user automatically to attract followers. (Right now, you can do it through this form).
Access to your follower and following list via the panel.
Follow, unfollow, block users and/or Fediverse instances from the panel.
You are invited to try it out using our tutorial.
Websites and social media may seem like different species inside the universe of the Internet. At the same time, corporate and concentrated social media such as Instagram, Facebook, X (ex-Twitter), among others, have proven to be hostile with certain groups and communities in particular (censoring content, persecuting nipples, hiding posts due to skin color, hair color, etc.) and with its users in general (massive commercialization of data, violating privacy agreements, choosing interface use and design that generates anxiety and addiction, etc.). Despite this, their use is still practically compulsory in order to advertise a person’s work or spread urgent news.
The Fediverse is a federated, decentralized, and distributed network of free and open source social media, each with its own characteristics, preferences, and user groups. They are designed to allow dialogue between all of them. This means the content is visible can be replied to from many different platforms, strengthening a culture of participation and diversity of voices, based on the standards of free (libre) development that seek to be ethical moreso than make endless revenue.
Websites are still a format for media that, because of their characterstics, favor the dissemination of content such as multimedia articles. They allow us to customize a style or visual identity, maintain sections and diverse institutional content, for example.
Social media favors immediacy, allowing a flow of dialogue in real time that contemplates a different span of attention and navigation characteristics which make it shorter, faster, and sometimes ephimeral. Communication media tends to use them to call attention on content published on their websites, betting on rapid exposure and the discussions that can be had amongst users.
The feature we have developed here at Sutty contemplates use cases in which one wants to share content to more people, in less time, and with the possibililty of opening dialogue. The particularities of our websites and of free and open source social media generate favorable conditions for free speech, which we prefer to call the Right to Communication, evading the diverse and continously more sophisticated forms of censorship of traditional corporate platforms. For content to be reproduced in several places at once favors its dissemination and is ideal for those counterhegemonic voices and dicourses to exist on the web and survive the passage of time, preserving the memory of the community.
The Fediverse attempts to function as interconnected online communities which are self-governed in a way which strives for collective care. Each instance could be something like a town which houses different accounts or users under norms which have been negotiated/agreed upon by its users and that may be up for discussion if necessary. This way, it is possible to regulate the circulation of fascism and hate speech which may damage not only the participation of certain users but also their health.
In order to do this, each instance chooses how it practices moderation and may exclude other instances with previous reports of content which is antidemocratic, hateful or contrary to the values and care of its inhabitants.
At Sutty in particular, we are interested in strategies and mechanisms for collective care, which is why we are continuously designing models that allow us to uphold them in our technologies. You can read our Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, and Code of Conduct for more information.
If you are part of a social organization, activism group, or social collective which you think would benefit from these characteristics, we invite you to contact us. We are looking for ways to improve the use of technology for you and value your experiences.
If you are interested in incorporating this feature for other static website managers, don’t hesitate to contact us. You can also keep up with the latest developments at https://dweb.sutty.nl and our blog https://sutty.nl/blog.
MeetUp presentation: https://hackmd.io/3xsFFy-RSwWJnPjFKUco1w?view#/1
Our blog in which we collect info on the distributed web and share in Spanish: https://dweb.sutty.nl
Our general blog: https://sutty.nl
Jekyll Activity Pub Plugin blog: https://jekyll-activity-pub.sutty.nl/
Mauve’s blog and article on Social Inbox: https://blog.mauve.moe/posts/distributed-press-social-inbox
We're getting reports of old MAGA programs being taken down. Apparently there was a problem on the YouTube channel... Files were lost, there was a "MAGAleaks" and things got lost... Lost, lost like tears in the rain. Perhaps some of the files are now only available on VHS at a fan's house."
Tomás Rebord, on his radio program 1
It is not uncommon; we get used to the fact that with some frequency, every few days a year, someone on the Internet loses their content or access to their website or their social networks...
Sometimes they take it with humor (or resignation?) and start over again. Other times, the impact of having the archives of a personal, communal or group project wiped out is so overwhelming that it's very difficult to find a resilient way to cope with it.
The term "information takedown" generally refers to the operation of deletion, destruction, definitive elimination of certain content, generally by a corporate platform. Unless you have a backup copy. At the heart of this repeated misstep is a problem of technology usage that - yes, yes, yes! - we can work around.
If you only have a few seconds left, stick with this: take care of your content memory, make backups, publish using distributed networks. The logic of torrents, of peer-to-peer file sharing is more relevant than ever. VHS are deleted. Youtube is censoring. Community networks take care of us.
If you have a spare minute, remember these 3 (three) maxims as mantras: Your place of diffusion cannot be your place of storage. My broadcasting platform cannot be my sole storage platform. Youtube can't work, doesn't work, as a project archive.
And if you have a few more minutes, here are 6 new things that programmers and activists are questioning and changing.
Internet is fantastic and not to blame ;) But the capitalist spirit that invades everything led the global network architecture to become ultra-centralized. In Latin American geopolitics, for instance, the bottlenecks to the rest of the world go almost exclusively through the US. A lot, radically a lot of our information is stored by just a couple of service providers, or servers, in data centers that resemble monoculture computer farms. We send our information there and thus hand over control of our personal lives, our online presence or our income to FIVE oligopolies. If any of the big techs goes down for a few hours, we realize that we have temporarily lost access to "our stuff", to media, to transactions... This is a perfect formula for information control and censorship maneuvers, not to mention the MONEY they make by mining our personal data! Is there an alternative space? Yes, it is called distributed, federated or decentralized web.
A few years ago, some of us activists began to imagine a fairer Internet. Instead of an Internet based on servers (computers) owned by one person or a couple of big corporations, we were interested in thinking about something that many people could govern together. That something could look like blockchains and spawned a lot of web3 projects and tools. But this wave of cryptocurrencies, NFTs and metaverses did not come with an interesting ethical horizon, one of improving the commons for humanity.
As a counter-proposal, the distributed web or dweb bets on respecting a series of principles: distributed benefits, environmental responsibility, favoring the use of free software, minimizing surveillance and algorithmic manipulation of human behaviors. Any distributed technical tools should serve as a means to achieve these ends. If your virtual wallet monitors me and sells my information, it doesn't change the game, it doesn't build a better society. You can read all the Distributed Web Principles here
In proprietary and centralized social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Threads, we have the additional problem that what people read is ordered, managed and censored by algorithms2 with mysterious formulas that FILTER the content, the people and the topics, so we will work more and more on organizing the data that segment us and make us advertisable.
Free networks are based on federation agreements and do not have prioritization algorithms, so that users are reached directly. Additionally, their source code is shared, which allows us to understand their algorithms.
Users are also given more freedom in choosing how they want to access the content they follow, and can use a multitude of applications, as long as they are compatible with a certain common protocol. For example, Mastodon, PeerTube, BookWyrm are free networks that use ActivityPub, a protocol that we at Sutty like very much and that allows an exchange of "status update" type messages between servers. We have a social profile on Mastodon, here:
When we think beyond a particular file, video or content and look at websites, we also find numerous problems due to centralization. For example: the average lifespan of web pages is 100 days, according to our source.
Links break, a domain changes, an organized attack or a late update brings down the site. If our site relies on a single server, we have a huge point of failure: if the server goes offline (and it happens), so does our site.
Distributed publishing, on the other hand, helps make sites more accessible, resilient, and resistant to censorship. The followers of the site can create copies of it that others can use and re-share, spreading the hosting load. In this way, sharing becomes a gesture of mutual support. At Sutty, our free website manager, we have released the "Publish on the distributed Web" option for all sites from May 2023. When activated, it makes each site available through the following P2P (peer-to-peer) protocols: InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and Holepunch, in addition to the traditional HTTP, the most known and used web protocol until now. This initiative is called Distributed.Press and is a joint work with Hypha and Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web (FFDW).
"Maybe having our own servers would help us own our networks, just as some of us collectively share ownership of land." - Sacred Stacks. What a beautiful dream for projects in the global South!
It seems almost utopian, but it is not. We are right on time to reclaim the collective ownership of our inter-network dimension. It is about another possible Internet, democratic, collective, guaranteeing the human Right to Communication.
In case you feel like reading even more about these topics:
be sure to check out COMPOST, whose third issue is out, where we had the pleasure of working on its development.
discover Sacred Stacks: a collaborative publication between Iraqi journalists, black and queer communities in the USA, environmental leadership organizations in Brazil and a network of survivors of abuse and discrimination in Chicago. This swarm of amazing activists produced a beautiful text called "Sacred Stacks, the art of the cyborg community". Available here
Note that it is hosted on IPFS, a distributed network.
read our blog article to learn more about publishing on the dweb:
be sure to check out this tutorial to start publishing on the dweb now
Happy hacking!
What made the internet incredible in its early days were not the videos of kittens throwing things off a table. All of the content that entertains, scares, or angers us today, arises from technological advancements that made possible something unthinkable before the 20th Century: that people could link directly with others to send or receive files, unbounded by space and time.
From that turning point in 1969 that connected the first four university nodes to this day, some important things were lost. The architecture of this huge global network has bottlenecks: most of its infrastructures have become centralized. We send our information through these centralized channels,and thus hand over our data to powerful companies and governments, enabling them to control and surveil our online presence, interactions, and transactions.
If you are an activist, journalist, or artist, you are probably accustomed to constantly looking for innovation and transformation zones. A mixture of curiosity and necessity to find out where really new and relevant spaces are being created in the social fabric.
The distributed web is one such movement. It aims to re-create the peer-to-peer (P2P) practices that made the internet a true socio-technical revolution. To return to a collective distribution of information, out of the commercial highways that capture us.
Have you lost your online presence because of broken links or lost domains?
The distributed web seeks to solve that by making content available through a variety of means.
Do you have material designed for zones of very low connectivity?
The distributed web can improve your accessibility for even those in offline communities where they have no access to the internet.
Looking to use innovative technologies that are designed with the human right to communicate and resilience in mind?
The distributed web strives for this very goal.
The Sutty CMS is integrating with Distributed.Press to make it easy to publish to the distributed web thanks to the generous support of Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web (FFDW). With the new DWeb toggle, you can make a site that can be browsed in https: but also through P2P protocols, InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and Holepunch. You can use it now to create content that is more resilient and available offline. Find out more about the Distributed.Press toggle
Sign-up today and participate in the creation of a new web, which builds its power through cooperation. Start here: sutty.nl
When turning the “Publish to Distributed Web” toggle on, you will make your site's contents available through the following peer-to-peer protocols: InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and Holepunch (formerly known as Hypercore). These are just two of many distributed web (DWeb) protocols that exist today. By publishing through Sutty, you are also making your web page available on the World Wide Web (WWW) using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the web protocol that is most widely known and used.
Each of these protocols have their benefits and drawbacks, but we believe that using multiple means to publish and access content on the web is crucial, in order to make websites more accessible, resilient, and censorship-resistant.
We want to make sure you fully understand what it means to publish on the DWeb…!
*** Please do not publish sensitive materials that may pose a threat to yourself or others. Only use this option if you would like your data to be publicly available permanently. ***
If you decide to undo this selection, an empty version of the site will be shared in its place. However, it is possible that nodes on the distributed storage network may continue retaining copies of the data you originally shared indefinitely.
This is not so different from the traditional web. There, people can also take screenshots or archive your site. It is nearly impossible to know if someone may have a copy or photo of sites, even if it has been taken down from its host server. However, the censorship-resistance of DWeb protocols depends on multiple copies of your data being made across the network, and so it is harder to remove this data once it is distributed.
Please read the Frequently Asked Questions below for a more detailed explanation.
This toggle feature in the Sutty web page editor is still in Beta – that means this is a new feature we are releasing into the world for people to try out, and it likely has bugs or useability issues. As we continue to polish this feature, we value hearing from you about how this tool is working or not working as you hope or expect.
*** Please send us feedback by filing a bug on our Github issue tracker. ***
Thank you so much for helping us make DWeb publishing better for everyone!
This is a free and open source project led by two non-for-profit worker co-operatives, Sutty and Hypha Worker Co-operative. If you’re a fan of this mission and would like to see Distributed Press continue to be maintained and expanded, please support us in the following ways.
Donate to Distributed Press through Open collective
Donate crypto to Distributed Press
What does it mean to publish to the distributed Web (DWeb)?
If you decide to turn the “Publish to Distributed Web” toggle on, your site will become available through the following peer-to-peer protocols: InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and Holepunch (formerly known as Hypercore) – these are just two of many distributed (DWeb) protocols that exist today. By publishing through Sutty, you are also making your web page available on the World Wide Web (WWW) using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the web protocol that is most widely known and used:
For example, if your site is https://ilovecapybaras.com on the World Wide Web, your site will also be available at
ipns://ilovecapybaras.com/
hyper://ilovecapybaras.com
or served via our dedicated gateways on
https://ilovecapybaras-com.hyper.hypha.coop
https://ilovecapybaras-com.ipns.ipfs.hypha.coop
Depending on the protocol, your website will be published, stored, and accessible through different technical means.
How can someone access my site through the DWeb?
You can use the following browsers to access content on the DWeb:
Agregore – IPFS, Holepunch
Brave – IPFS
Opera – IPFS
What are the benefits of publishing my content to the DWeb?
Creating multiple ways for people to publish and access content on the web helps make websites more accessible, resilient, and censorship-resistant. It means that your content is not dependent on a single web server. It allows readers to access your text from machines closer and faster to them. It lets supporters of your site create copies of the site that others can use, sharing the burden of hosting and making distribution an act of mutual support. Each protocol has its benefits and challenges. These DWeb protocols are younger and less well-adopted than the traditional web, but they have great potential as tools to make digital knowledge less dependent on centralized services. Part of the goal of Distributed Press is to have more people publish to the DWeb to expand the realm of possibility and be able to compare and contrast best use cases for each protocol.
By publishing your web content on the DWeb, you will be on the bleeding edge of digital publishing. This means the risks and benefits are subtly different from the web you may be used to.Roughly speaking, data can be harder to delete on the DWeb, and while it can protect the privacy of publishers better, it can make readers more visible to third parties. While the pros and cons are complex and may require additional thought for your project. publishing to the decentralized web means you get to shape the future of a web that we believe could be more equitable and empowering.
By using this tool and giving us your valuable feedback, you can help us make distributed publishing better for everyone. We can’t do it without you!
What is the story behind this and what are the motivations behind this feature?
This feature reflects the mutual cooperation between Sutty and Hypha Worker Co-operative, by integrating tools developed by their respective projects, Distributed Press and the Sutty CMS. It is a free and open source implementation that enables people to publish digital works (blogs, magazines, resource guides, and more) to the distributed Web (DWeb) without having to navigate deep layers of protocols and infrastructure.
Sutty is a platform created in 2017 for publishing static web sites built for and with activists and social organizations, working for the democratization of a set of tools that, in the context of a technical resiliency and human rights strategy, results in a platform to make our voices heard.
Distributed Press originally emerged out of discussions between Mai Ishikawa Sutton, Benedict Lau, and Udit Vira, of Hypha Worker Co-operative in 2019 following DWeb Camp. They wanted to develop a suite of tools that would enable people to publish web content to the DWeb, because they saw how problematic centralized publishing had become.
This tool aims to protect people’s publications from the whims of big gatekeepers. Mainstream corporate platforms centralize web content both technologically and organizationally, enabling them to censor websites, control how people use their services, and undermine their ability to receive fair compensation for their creative labor.
When both projects met in 2021, we found our goals and perspectives aligned, so we partnered to bring this feature to reality.
What are your goals?
Our shared goals are to improve content discoverability and archiving, fight political censorship and misinformation, while supporting offline distribution, new monetization channels, and fair compensation for those who publish their works to the web. We aim to do this by building publishing tools that put control over the means of publication in the hands of organizers, artists, journalists, and those in offline communities.
Ultimately, this project exists to ensure the power of humanity’s most important information is never compromised, abused, or ruled by any single entity. We believe that a more interoperable, distributed web is only possible if it’s built through cooperation and collaboration among those who are building the tools and those who have the most to gain from more democratic and inclusive digital networks.
Will I be able to turn this option OFF once my site is published? In other words, can I delete my site from the DWeb if I change my mind later?
For the most part, yes. If you turn off the “Publish to DWeb” toggle in the Sutty CMS, we will push cleared (empty) versions of the site for the DWeb protocols. Most clients (aka browsers) will respect that delete, unless someone explicitly made a copy and they are viewing the site locally, from their own computer or a local server.
Please note that even on the World Wide Web, people can also take screenshots or archive your site. So even with HTTP versions of web pages (the primary means of publishing and accessing websites), it is nearly impossible to know if someone may have a copy or photo of sites, even if it has been taken down from its host server.
The best way to think about it is that even though the toggle is ON/OFF, it is more like a sliding scale of availability. By publishing to the DWeb, you are making your website even more available to people than if it is only published on the World Wide Web. When you turn it off, it will no longer be served to people who visit your site through IPFS and Holepunch, but that does not mean it is deleted from the entire web.
If I turn this option off, is there a way to know if there are already copies of my web page and its contents on the DWeb?
It is technically possible to see how many “peers” there are for your site before you delete it (this is a feature we are hoping to develop in the future). However, it will not tell you how many devices have downloaded it in the past and whether their clients will attempt to load the “cleared” version of your site when they come online. It is most likely that any peers that have actively loaded your site will be following changes and will load the cleared version, but it is not an absolute guarantee.
What are the differences between IPFS, Holepunch, and BitTorrent?
The main difference between DWeb and World Wide Web is how and where someone publishes and stores web content, and how someone else retrieves and views that content.
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) – This protocol is what most websites use today. It works by having a central server which clients will request data from based on a hyperlink. The server can also accept new data and update its private copy. In general, a server can serve _anything_ for a given link to any particular user and a user has no guarantee that they aren’t getting content that’s different from what others are seeing. Part of the reason it is this way is that a link can contain any arbitrary text:it’s up to the HTTP server to make sense of what data that relates to.
InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) – IPFS is a peer-to-peer protocol that uses a method called “Content Addressing” where the link for referencing some data is based on the content of the data itself. Specifically, the link is a Content ID (CID) which is the result of passing the data through a hash function. This makes it possible to fetch data from any source and verify that it has not been tampered with. This is how IPFS can be used with peer-to-peer protocols to load parts of a website from anyone that has a copy instead of a single server. IPFS finds peers not just for the website, but for individual files within a website, so if several sites depend on the same video for example, they will share peers to help load the file to newcomers. Learn more: Official IPFS Documentation.
Holepunch (formerly Hypercore) – Holepunch uses content addressing under the hood for data integrity, but on top of that it builds efficient “append-only logs” – data structures which makes it fast to exchange several chunks of data at once. It also links to data based on a “public key” which enables verification of data that changes over time. Holepunch has built-in versioning so older versions of a site can be persisted and accessed at a later time. Learn more: Official Holepunch Documentation.
BitTorrent (coming soon) – BitTorrent is one of the early success stories of peer-to-peer file transfer protocols. Like IPFS it uses content addressing, however, instead of using content addressing on individual files, it generates a single “infohash” which is used to track the dataset as a whole and does not attempt to reuse peers between sites. The main advantage of BitTorrent is that there are already many clients out there for it and it is a stable and proven technology. Learn more: Official BitTorrent Help Center.
Is Distributed Press considered a “Web3” project?
We share some aspects of Web3 projects – we're decentralized and are building our tools to have no single points of failure. But we are not Web3 given that we do not utilize blockchain technologies or a consensus mechanism, and people do not need to participate financially to publish or access works through Distributed Press!
Who is behind this project?
Members and contributors to Hypha Worker Co-operative, based in Toronto, Canada, and Sutty, based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, are building and maintaining this project.
Distributed Press is made possible through generous support from Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web, Grant for the Web, and our supporters on Open Collective.
We believe that building free and open network technologies through shared principles must be grounded in a culture and practice of solidarity, cooperation, and trust. As worker-owned cooperatives, we work closely together and with our partners across international borders to build publishing tools that people want and need.
Can I know more about the Sutty CMS and why it decided to make its sites available on the DWeb?
Sutty started in 2018 to build a CMS for resilient sites based on Jekyll technologies, along with new features we developed and contributed to that community.
We wanted to make website development very accessible for activists in our South American context (namely social activists, independent journalists, trans and LGBTQIA+ communities, among others). The project aimed to not only build a platform for creating “better websites”, but also to develop a set of tools to increase the self-defense of marginalized and targeted groups against persecution and censorship. We do this to support the right to free expression (Derecho a la Comunicación) as a Human Right.
That is why we also believe in a sustainable, resilient internet made with a plurality of voices and protocols! We tried to participate and make contact with several communities working on DWeb tools. That is how we fortunately found Hypha Worker Co-operative, COMPOST, and Distributed Press – they were already working on decentralized publishing. We are excited and honored to work with them on this project!
]]>