If anyone has solid connections to institutional funding, this is the time to introduce them to Jaz at IFTAS. This is really not good.
https://about.iftas.org/2025/02/06/funding-challenges-and-the-future-of-our-work/
Before the dust-up starts in replies, yeah I know some of you think tooling to let fedi servers detect CSAM is fundamentally bad because internet freedoms must be pure, because you always tell me. That complicity is just unacceptable to me. Not to mention the legal exposure for server runners.
And yes! IFTAS maintains a (well documented) worst-of-worst blocklist that server teams can choose to use, because *mods asked for it*. You can also choose or make another list.
IFTAS asked what people needed to run servers and then did their best to make them. The things they made resonate very strongly with the needs Darius and I heard about in our fediverse governance research last year:
https://fediverse-governance.github.io/
There are a lot of new institutions springing up around this stuff, ans I hope they work out, but none have yet shown IFTAS’s level of interest and sensitivity to what fedi server teams actually want and need from their safety tooling, so this feels rough.