My Vision for FFF - Gregory "Dave" Stucky

This is a summary of my deep passion, a hill I want to die on until I or someone else gets it done.

The spiritual aspect

Western thinking makes the grave error of dualistically sanctifying spiritual from physical things, as if living in truth can exist apart from making changes, or as if faith can exist apart from works. And yet, history tells us a different story:

The New Testament only exists because of the politics in Rome after the Maccabean Revolt.
The Protestant Reformation only existed because of printing press technology that served Europe’s growing middle class.
John’s Revelation speaks of things that haven’t happened yet, and some of those prophecies are undeniably the attempt of a first-century observer trying to explain technologies we may actually have names for now.

In the case of how a Christian should live, there are only three large-scale commands Jesus gives within the Bible:

Preach the Gospel message to everyone on the planet.
Make disciples everywhere.
Wait and live righteously.

And, therefore, I consider this endeavor to have tremendous spiritual consequence, even while I’m focusing on building a very practical thing:

The Christian Gospel depends on the free transmission of information.
Making disciples requires consistent, steady communication between mentor and mentee.
While websites can be a detriment to quiet time with God, they do serve individual righteousness in the domain of educating people.

If Jesus had been born in the last 40 years, the “Epistle of Paul to Timothy” would be “Paul’s Email to Timothy” and the “Gospel According to Matthew” would be originally sent as a PDF attachment.

A new press

The movable type printing press, non-negotiably, revolutionized how we convey information. This turned society upside down, and we wouldn’t have the Reformation, Age of Reason, or American Revolution without it.

The World Wide Web is our present-day printing press. Many people bemoan the impact of social media, but most people will agree it has done more good than harm.

The Internet as a whole has utterly transformed the way we interact. It has now replaced the marketplace, the public square, the rest stop at the road juncture, and the local watering hole. Nothing has abstractly changed, but new tools require us to change our mindset.

New freedoms

Prior to 1776, you couldn’t speak the following things without likely losing everything over it:

Disparaging remarks about the current king.
Contradicting religious remarks against the State’s currently accepted religion.
Things you understood to be true but society generally agreed was false.
Facts you could prove that presented political threats to the current order.

The only reason revolutions arose is because people were both willing and able. I can’t directly speak to their willingness, but I definitely want to empower their ability.

I am convinced that most people take this current state of affairs for granted. Jefferson famously said the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

The Internet has empowered anyone to speak freely about anything, with zero or trivial cost. However, the new currency is now in giving up our privacy.

New risks

The 2019 COVID pandemonium has demonstrated that the government can reach farther than we have ever seen before. As it stands, free speech can and will always persist as long as enough people repel hyper-collectivist tyranny, but it only persists as long as the willing minority have freedom to do it.

Part of the reason the COVID-19 lockdown didn’t persist in the USA was because there was simply no way to stop all the gun owners: police don’t kick down doors and drag away people for violating curfew when they can shoot back.

The Second Amendment protects the right to property, but the individuals in the USA are now strong enough to resist the government getting gun-grabby. We need something on that level for the First Amendment.

Here’s a thought experiment. Right now, imagine a sweeping government edict to completely remove one word from all public discussion. Stating that word in text, or any of its variants or synonyms, is the criminally justified equivalent of both libel and treason.

My assertion is that right now, the censorship would be utterly complete with minimal resistance if about 50 companies complied. Every email sent about that subject on a Google or Microsoft server, every PDF stored on Dropbox or OneDrive, every text message or phone call associated with Verizon or AT&T would all cease to exist.

We are, in effect, a few legal maneuvers away from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four.

The present infrastructure

Large social companies have always paved the way forward for the relatively new things everyone uses:

Since the 1950s when computers used vacuum tubes and punch cards, they have always been large-scale company projects (e.g., IBM and the Seven Dwarfs).
The personal computer in the 1980s (or “microcomputer”) brought computing into the home, but was still the product of vastly wealthy corporations making a little magic logic machine.
Right now, machine learning (the so-called “AI”) requires enormous computing capacity to generate the statistical inference necessary to build what we see today.

In no uncertain terms, the Internet’s backbone is the website right now, and anyone with $150 and about 5-40 hours of focused work can make one, even when they don’t understand computers very well.

However, while static websites have been with us, the most critical infrastructure of today is “social media”, which is essentially a highly specialized database system. Each user gets a database of content from a custom list of “friends/following”, and then the administrator keeps track of everyone’s activities.

However, large social media companies have added new antisocial layers to their algorithms over the past few decades:

Rules that profile users and distribute content catered to their preferences, with the implicit goal of making them addicts.
Their monetization model largely involves anonymizing those profiles and selling them to marketing firms at about $20 per user on an open marketplace.
Their secondary monetization model comes through freely selling the data to government agencies.

This monolithic structure, however, must change soon. As long as a few large entities hold most of the Internet’s information, free speech is only protected through governments acting in good faith. Some billionaires have taken a stand against censorship, but that won’t stop a sufficiently motivated institution.

Our attempts to turn to monolithic service providers will not work, since it’s not within human nature to diminish one’s power when one holds all the power. Most Big Tech technologies that address decentralization are half-hearted at best and secretly self-destructive at worst (e.g., Web3).

Therefore, we continue to advance to a Brave New World as we persist in waiting for someone else to do something.

What I’m planning

I’m not here to pursue the “latest and greatest”. I’m more concerned about giving normal people the freedom to host what they want without a massive institution constantly looking over their shoulder. I’m generally familiar with computers, but I’m not familiar with the precise model I’m envisioning for this to happen.

In fact, the technology I’m proposing probably fully exists in different pieces:

The hosting computers need to copy each other, either fully or partially. The users should be able to provide old cell phones and mid-2000s Dell PCs for the job if they wanted.
The hosting seeker must be able to connect with the hosting provider. This includes setting individual terms of service and making payment arrangements.
The system should let the hosting seeker add or remove hosting computers at will.
This should all be non-developer usable. The host seekers and host providers should be able to do all of this with a website and some downloaded apps, and the result should allow a standard web browser to access it via a URL.

Johannes Gutenberg combined existing technologies (the screw press and movable type) with mechanized paper production to create the codex book format we’re familiar with today. He didn’t make anything “new”, but slammed together what was already there into a new combination.

I intend to build a Fully Federated Fediverse (FFF, or triple-F), and my goal combines existing things:

Blockchain-style hosting, and I have a half dozen to choose from right now.
Fediverse hosting instances, which will likely be ActivityPub but I’m too early in the project right now to commit yet.
A two-sided marketplace business model, similar to what Uber pioneered.

I intend to release the software and idea as open-source, starting with this webpage.

Ultimately, I don’t care about the money, but it will only propagate widely if it makes people money.
Since I’m advancing a cause, I actively want others to steal and imitate what works with it. If enough people get this to market before me, I’ll happily do something else.
I’m not trying to replace anything, but add to it. If you’re an executive and don’t like this, then do a better job at federation than me. Go on, I dare you.
And, in the interests of a good faith arrangement, please let me know if you’re thinking of using this idea. I won’t dissuade whatever you’re trying to do, and may even inform you of something you couldn’t have known.

The implementation

While the vision is clear, I have no precise idea how to do it. However, I have a rough outline that defines the objectives I want to see. This last section was updated 2026-07-28.

The idea, to the average person, will be relatively simple:

Someone wants to publish a website, but they don’t want to trust a massive data center in any capacity, and are willing to pay for hosting.
Someone else has extra computer space and wants to use it for hosting.
They both can access a website service provider that connects them:
- The hosting provider will publish their computer’s general specifications, content constraints, preferred causes (e.g., religious, political, controversial), and recommended price on a public marketplace.
- The hosting seeker will see the provider’s information, as well as a reputation from their prior service.
- The two will make a service agreement, with a small commission to the service provider (maybe a flat 3%) that frames their relationship going forward.
- This arrangement certainly won’t disqualify large-scale hosts if they want to participate.
The hosting seeker enters an interface where they select all the computers they will be using for their host.
- Each computer would represent its specifications in this interface (e.g., available memory, available RAM, available CPU, geographical location), and they could quickly allocate resources as needed.
- These computers will redundantly mirror the information, though I expect this could later include blockchain-based partial content hosting for larger-scale needs.
- Once configured, the domain would point automatically to the ideal server.
- Once online, the hosting seeker could add any computer with the same software to the existing cohort.
When the hosting provider is ready, they’ll deploy everything as if it were a single data center computer.
- This will include the ability to host a fediverse social media instance, similarly to how present hosting is essentially click-and-go.

Behind the scenes, this will require some elaborate design:

The hosting arrangement itself would essentially be a weird CMS, but with a smaller-scale version of the techniques used by massive corporations like Amazon and Microsoft.
My goal would be to incorporate blockchain technology into it for the purpose of allowing various computers to respond the same way.
On the back end, each of the servers would have the same CMS algorithm with instructions about how to find the other computers on the internet that used a shared hash. If a server had insufficient information, it would point to another server, with the client’s cookies keeping track of any double-redirects about specific information for quicker access.
The CMS computer selection algorithm, in particular, will produce an up-to-date ping record of all other computers interchangeably on the cohort, though will incorporate graph theory at larger scales past 10 computers to cut down on record-keeping. The CMS will end up tracking the relative location of each new client, then pointing that client first to the nearest computer, or to the fastest one if the pings are within 0.1 seconds of each other.
When consulting DNS, a client computer would access the nearest local computer. However, the DNS records would actually be pointing to a separate server (probably mine, but could be anyone) that used a querying system that redirected to the nearest available server (basically the CMS computer selection algorithm). The trustless arrangement, however, would mean that every server would be the gateway, and an outage would create a 301 code to a different server.
All the computers would infrequently ping the others. If any computer went offline for whatever reason, the other computers would send a blockchain-style collective notification (i.e., >50% vote) back to the host computer(s), plus whatever configurations locally provided for that condition (e.g., emailing the user). This notification system would also be present for partially missing information.
The marketplace would be a standard store interface similar to Amazon or eBay, with a searchable and sortable database for listings.

And, this means this massive project will frame itself into multiple phases:

Building the Distributed Hosting: I have no idea what I’m doing, so I need to get my hands into some data engineering. This will take the longest time to do it, and I intend to go back to college for it.
Building the Hosting Interface: Not quite as fancy or elaborate, but I’ll have to make something as functional as cPanel. The GUI is necessary because terminals scare normal people, but keeping it boring lets it run on a potato.
Building the Federated Hosting: The hardest part, by far. This has probably already been made, but I have to understand what I’m even looking at, and I honestly have no idea at this point. Not that I can’t figure it out, but that’s the meat of the project here.
Documenting Everything: This is technically ongoing throughout, but I intend to publish it in a way that lets normal people read it and follow instructions.
Building the Storefront: Less exciting, not my wheelhouse, but necessary to give the power to the people.
Advertising and Making It Happen: Honestly, I don’t want to do this as much, but it’s necessary to get that “money” everyone’s raving about.

And yet, the desire for monolithic datacenters has created a secondary consequence demonstrating itself by the Great Resetters.

Free speech is the answer to this, and it comes through our willingness to speak freely. Beyond the above risks, we have already witnessed a socially-engineered environment where the individuals with the most valuable things to say have felt compelled to move away from publicly expressing their views due to anticipatory unease about cancellation. In that vacuum, the lowest-ranking members of society have had the free license to spout the vitriolic effluvium that becomes the regurgitation of the news cycle and public discourse.

Altogether, we are in a society that isn’t asking “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” because we have been trained to observe the oligopoly and hope our elected officials will listen to us, the individual voters, more than the lobbyists.

Therefore, the answer to this mechanism is to advance a new set of standards via federation. Reducing the monoliths’ size with a semi-porous relationship with competitors solves many problems at once:

Instead of dozens of platforms, governments would have to regulate hundreds or even thousands of these actors, thereby confining their focus to a limited and important scope. We see this already with encryption, where the government can crack any computer, but they reserve that skill set for terrorists and serial pedophiles.
By hosting through users’ consent, the market of free ideas will be more articulately matched with actual users’ opinions, not through technocrats’ ideological preferences.
When many platforms vie for attention with many others, each platform maintainer is required to provide a superior product. Whatever quality they provide, users are exposed to a more diverse range of ideas, thereby preventing the myopic ideological tunnels within our current walled gardens.

What

I intend to build a Fully Federated Fediverse (FFF). As of me writing this in 2026-07, I have no precise idea how to do it.

In practice, I am imagining it as the following:

A user could monolithic-host their website (e.g., self-host, AWS) or could use distributed hosting acquired on a marketplace.
Other computers could be assigned to the user’s “role”, effectively through virtualization. These assignments would be arranged on a separate website that functioned as a type of marketplace for buying and selling among each other. The profit model would be through a commission on sales (I’m imagining a flat 3%). This marketplace would also provide “cause-based” searches as well (e.g., religious, political, controversial).
To the front-end admin, the computers would all be presented in a multi-computer interface, which would show a panel of all computers registered to that user. Each computer would have its “Computer Name” ID from the OS with basic specifications for the user (e.g., available memory, available RAM, available CPU, geographical location). The user could attribute amounts for each value toward their purpose.
Once the user configured those other computers, they would specify what they would host across all of them, and the domain would point to whatever the CMS algorithm pointed them to.
From that point onward, the user could use any computer with the setup system to maintain communication with the servers. All they’d need would be the hash associated with their system.

The cumulative mechanism, as I see it, is as follows:

The marketplace would be a standard classified ads interface, nothing fancy. Basically eBay for computer hosting needs but with more granular search options.
A hosting arrangement that uses the redundancies presented through blockchain technology (i.e., duplicates of portions of the collective across the entire cohort of servers).
Hosting will be a synchronized semi-complete CMS. It would include redundant data across multiple servers, but not entirely, similar to blockchain. However, unlike blockchain, authenticated accounts would update the information in real-time.
During initial setup, the VM would simply be allocated for space purposes. Once the user was ready to deploy, each of the computers would have the same CMS algorithm with instructions about how to find the other computers on the Internet (i.e., not IP, but probably through a specific hash). If a server had insufficient information, it would point to another server, with the client’s cookies keeping track of any double-redirects about specific information for quicker access.
The CMS computer selection algorithm, in particular, will produce an up-to-date ping record of all other computers interchangeably on the cohort, though will incorporate graph theory at larger scales past 10 computers to cut down on recordkeeping. The CMS will end up tracking the relative location of each new client, then pointing that client first to the nearest computer, or to the fastest one if the pings are within 0.1 seconds of each other.
The CMS redirection algorithm will engage when information is missing on a particular node. It will use the ping data to instruct the next-nearest computer to host a specific piece of missing information. If that computer doesn’t have it, the algorithm will seek further outward from there, with a fallback for seeking all of them sequentially in a randomized list.
When consulting DNS, a client computer would access the nearest local computer. However, the DNS records would actually be pointing to a separate server (probably mine, but could be anyone) that used a querying system that redirected to the nearest available server (basically the CMS computer selection algorithm).
All the computers would infrequently ping the others. If any computer went offline for whatever reason, the other computers would send a blockchain-style collective notification (i.e., >50% vote) back to the host computer(s), plus whatever configurations locally provided for that condition (e.g., emailing the user). This notification system would also be present for partially missing information.

I intend to release the software as open-source. I don’t care about money, but intend to build a business model to make it at least somewhat profitable. Since this is my cause to die on, I want others to steal and imitate what works.

Ideally, I’d prefer this to be stolen, since I believe this will preserve free speech. In the interests of good faith, please let me know if you’re thinking of using this idea.

The big picture

Finally, to summarize the idea, I’ve added a few management-style statements about what this whole thing looks like.

Mission statement:

Giving moderately tech-savvy individuals the power to deploy grassroots, small-scale websites and social media, ultimately allowing anyone with a weekend to either spin up an entirely federated hosting solution or sell their computer hosting for side money.

Vision statement:

Combining the physical architecture of blockchain-style hosting, the software architecture of fediverse instance hosting, and the business model of a two-sided marketplace.

Values:

Keep it simple – In particular, the end user should be able to easily understand what’s going on and what they need to do to fix it.
Protocols over platforms – This system should be reproducible to everyone. It’s about making a change, not making money.
Choose boring technology – Reinventing the wheel is hard. While often fun, it doesn’t get things out the door.

Motto:

“Making federation normal”