Mitra: A tool to rebuild online free expression

A Q&A with Mitra's developer Silverpill

Introduction

For quite some time, I’ve been on the hunt for effective technological solutions. One of the major game-changers online has been the rise of decentralized social media. The Fediverse is one such system for building and running decentralized social media. In my opinion, the Fediverse is one of the more under-utilized tools by those who want to protect free speech online. Instead of merely moving to greener pastures with a new tech giant, we can take advantage of the opportunity to transform the social landscape ourselves.

I run a few of my own Fediverse servers at the moment, such as Peertube, Mitra, and Misskey. But when it comes to censorship resistance features, Mitra is definitely a cut above the rest. And so I chose to ask Silverpill the developer of Mitra if he would join me for a Q&A.

Q&A

In your own words, what is Mitra?

Mitra is a social media server for the Fediverse.

Why that logo? How did you come up with it?

The outer shape is known as Rub el Hizb, it’s an Islamic symbol. There is no deep meaning, I just saw it somewhere and decided to use it as a starting point. I experimented with many different designs and selected one that seemed most interesting and pleasing to the eye. You can spot a bunch of “M"s inside.

Why should more people become familiar with and use federated social media?

You can have your own Twitter, Facebook or YouTube, connected to thousands of other small networks. Isn’t that great?

I think federation is the best architecture for a decentralized social network. The user experience is decent and the network can scale without compromising on decentralization, as was demonstrated by Email, XMPP and Matrix.

Why did you decide to build Mitra?

Before Mitra I was working with blockchain technology. At some point I realized that decentralized financial infrastructure needs a social layer, and that existing solutions are inadequate. After doing some research on decentralized social protocols I picked ActivityPub because it was mature, well-designed and had a strong developer community with values similar to mine. The missing pieces were decentralized payments and decentralized identity, so I started working on these problems.

What makes Mitra unique compared to other Fediverse servers?

So, one of my original goals was integrated payments. I tried several ideas and eventually settled on paid subscriptions. This feature provides a way to accept payments in Monero and publish premium content for paying subscribers.

The second goal was decentralized identity, or “nomadic identity”, as we call it in the Fediverse. This turned out to be a very difficult task, but I’ve made significant progress. Nomadic identity mechanism allows people to have an account that is not tied to any single server, but exists on many servers simultaneously. My implementation of this mechanism is not complete yet and currently can be used only by developers.

Mitra also can federate over Tor and I2P networks.

Besides that, it is very lightweight and easy to host, so it might be a good choice even for those who are not interested in subscriptions and nomadic identity.

What other Fediverse software would you recommend? (Servers, Clients, etc)

My favorite server is Pleroma. I borrowed many ideas from it when Mitra was in the early stages of development. Streams is also very interesting. It implements nomadic identity in the same way as Mitra, and has many other nice features.

Among web clients, my favorite was Soapbox, but its developer quit Fediverse (there is now a fork called Mangane). For Android devices, I recommend Husky.

In your opinion, what features are most important for censorship resistance?

In my work I prefer to focus on the positive side of censorship resistance: digital sovereignty. A server that runs on your own hardware and that doesn’t depend on any external services is practically unstoppable. This is already possible today with Tor and I2P, but requires specialized technical knowledge, and even if you have it, you can communicate only with a very small number of people.

So the most important features are those that make this experience more accessible. Ideally, everyone should be able to send messages to millions of followers from a personal social media server that runs on the phone with unstable internet connection.

What are the biggest threats to online free speech, and what do you believe has kept them at bay the best?

The biggest threat is centralization. It occurs on multiple levels, both technical and social, and every time there is a bottleneck, someone tries to use it to censor their opponents. What keeps it at bay are all those people who invest resources in building decentralized networks and circumvention tools, and those who make information about these tools accessible to the general public.

Are any of the alternative protocols (like nostr) meaningful competition from a censorship resistance perspective?

Nostr seems to be the only meaningful competition, although it is still not big enough to matter. Other networks are even smaller, or not really decentralized.

The current situation is really unfortunate because so much effort is wasted in technological dead ends. Fediverse is the biggest decentralized network and is perfectly capable of supporting decentralized identity, the purported lack of which is often used as an excuse to create a competing protocol.

How does a person, or even a small group directly oppose online censorship?

Use decentralized networks and open source software. Educate others. Ultimately, this a collective action problem, and only together we can make censorship prohibitively expensive and therefore ineffective.

What are your short, medium and long term goals for Mitra?

In the short term, I’ll be working on several basic features that are still missing, such as polls, audience controls and moderation tools. Medium term plans include finishing nomadic identity system, improving premium subscriptions and implementing groups. I’m also planning to release a Rust library for developing ActivityPub applications. In the long term, I want to build a powerful social media server that has everything you need, costs nothing and can run in your pocket.

What motivates you to continue building Mitra into the future?

I think a tool like Mitra is necessary, an no one else is working on that, so I have no choice but to build it myself.

Outside of just Mitra, how are you working to make the Fediverse even better?

I proposed a number of standards for the Fediverse, covering message signing, quote posts, federated payments, data portability and other things. I also help maintain a platform for publishing those proposals (Fediverse Enhancement Proposals, or FEPs).

Every Friday I publish a newsletter about the Fediverse: https://mitra.social/@weekinfediverse

What’s the best way to support your work?

Try Mitra. If you like what I’m doing, you can help by suggesting improvements, testing different clients, reporting bugs and spreading the word.

If you’re a developer, you can contribute to Mitra or implement my FEPs in your own project.

I also accept donations. My Monero address is 8Ahza5RM4JQgtdqvpcF1U628NN5Q87eryXQad3Fy581YWTZU8o3EMbtScuioQZSkyNNEEE1Lkj2cSbG4VnVYCW5L1N4os5p

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