A-Infos (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #3-26 - Digital Resistance. The Experience of the Bida Collective (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

I've already written an article on these pages (see "Jurassic Network" 
in "Umanità Nova" no. 23, September 9, 2018) presenting a recently 
launched initiative that struck me as interesting even without knowing 
the Bida Collective comrades who had launched it. In the years that 
followed, I managed to meet some of them in person at a few 
"Hackmeetings." I also attended one of the first assemblies held in 
Bologna shortly before the pandemic, and numerous computer meetings that 
brought the Collective together, in various ways, with the users of 
their instance at mastodon.bida.im.

Almost eight years have passed, and that useful and courageous 
initiative is still active online and offline.

The following is a short interview, written to save space, intended to 
introduce readers of "Umanità Nova" to what is currently one of the most 
interesting projects in the non-commercial digital communications 
landscape, a project based on principles very similar to our own.

I thank the Bida Collective for answering my questions, but above all 
for their voluntary work, which enables the functioning of tools that 
are essential to escaping the widespread control that characterizes 
commercial digital platforms. A trap into which many comrades have 
fallen and from which they seem unable to escape.

Q: Would you like to introduce yourselves?

Bida: Bida is a collective of social hackers with a political vision 
oriented towards autonomy, solidarity, and digital freedoms. For over 
twelve years, it has been working in the field of free technologies, 
conceiving digital infrastructure as a space for conflict, cooperation, 
and political experimentation, and not as a simple neutral tool.

Q: How did the collective come into being?

Bida: The collective was born from the meeting of activists from the 
Camillo Berneri anarchist circle and the experience of the XM24 social 
center within the hacklabbo, starting from the concrete need to manage 
and technically support the creation of the Rebal.info meta-OPAC. Rebal 
began as a project to network anarchist and libertarian libraries and 
archives, with the aim of facilitating access to knowledge, promoting 
self-learning practices, and building an active community around the 
movements' memory and cultural production.

From that initial experience, Bida developed increasingly structured 
technical and political skills over time, orienting itself towards the 
construction and management of self-managed digital infrastructures 
based on free software and decentralized models. In 2018, the collective 
launched a major generalist initiative, Mastodon, which over the years 
has grown to over 20,000 members and is still active today, representing 
one of the leading Italian examples of a federated, non-commercial 
social network governed by shared community rules.

Q: What other initiatives do you pursue?

Bida: At the same time, Bida has continued to support and assist other 
collectives, informal groups, and similar political entities, offering 
digital services, technical consulting, and infrastructure support. The 
collective's work has always focused on building digital spaces free 
from surveillance, proprietary algorithms, and dependence on large 
technology platforms, promoting practices of mutualism, cooperation, and 
technological self-determination.

Bida doesn't simply "provide services," but works to build networks, 
communities, and alternative imaginaries, experimenting with horizontal 
and collective forms of organization. Its approach is part of a broader 
perspective of critique of digital capitalism and the daily practice of 
another way of inhabiting, sharing, and building the digital world.

Q: The mastodon.bida.im instance, given how it spends time online, is 
almost history. Do you plan to write something longer than a press 
release to recount and summarize this experience?

Bida: It's an idea we've been mulling over for some time, even if we 
haven't yet implemented it. On the other hand, the experiment isn't 
over: today we're opening a new chapter with the launch of 
NoBigTech.social, through which we're offering free Mastodon instances 
to continue promoting decentralization. This phase will also be part of 
the story and a broader summary of the experience.

Q: Technical issues aside, what was the biggest problem you faced with 
the instance? Have you solved it?

Bida: Beyond the technical aspects, the biggest challenge we faced was 
content moderation. It was both the difficulty of managing differing 
opinions within the group and, above all, how to communicate these 
decisions to users. In the debate between comrades, there are highly 
polarizing topics that, if not addressed with the appropriate tools and 
attention, can easily degenerate into conflicts that can be very 
difficult to manage, especially when the ability to recognize and 
respect the other person is lacking.

Over time, we've realized that the most polarizing topics tend to recur 
over and over again: Israel/Palestine, Russia/Ukraine, 
vaccines/anti-vaxxers. Unfortunately, behind a keyboard, it's 
particularly difficult to address these issues constructively.

What we've learned is that real encounters greatly aid mutual 
understanding and discussion. It's no coincidence that we experienced 
the most serious problems during periods when relationships were 
exclusively online: forced isolation during the pandemic, in this sense, 
was a major factor.

Q: Based on your experience and given the times we live in, how 
politically homogeneous must a collective that intends to manage an 
issue similar to yours be?

Bida: More than politically homogeneous, we believe it's essential that 
there be strong mutual respect within a collective. In our case, for 
example, we're not all anarchists. However, constant discussion, 
meeting, and sharing ideas and practices allow us to build a solid trust 
that, even in the face of disagreements, makes it possible to address 
and resolve problems. This, for us, is the truly fundamental element.

Q: Without necessarily going into specifics, have you ever had to 
deal-directly-with state agencies responsible for repression for issues 
related to the issue?

Bida: Fortunately, not at the moment. We've learned of the existence of 
some proceedings in which we've been the subject of scrutiny or 
investigations, but nothing has ever materialized in the form of formal 
documents or official communications. That's a good thing.

Q: Is the goal of "removing" comrades from commercial social media still 
valid? Or do you think it's better to spend your available energy 
building alternatives to those social media?

Bida: The goal of "removing" comrades from commercial social media is 
still fully valid; alternatives already exist. It's no coincidence that 
with the NoBigTech.social project, we propose the free creation of 
Mastodon instances: a service that, at the moment, isn't offered by any 
radical server (see, for example, the list on riseup.net). Similarly, we 
promote

the installation of Matrix servers as a concrete attempt to curb the use 
of Telegram; we also propose PeerTube, an alternative to YouTube.

At the same time, in recent years, we've chosen to focus part of our 
energy on other fronts, such as strengthening the entire Rebal network 
and restructuring and improving existing services.

Q: How can "Umanità Nova" readers support your work?

Bida: Contributing to the community: using Bida services like Mastodon, 
Matrix, PeerTube, and others (https://bida.im/services/) and telling 
your friends about them.

You can also support our work with a donation by visiting 
https://bida.im/dona, or even better, by meeting us in person!

We usually have a stand during Hackmeetings, or at other satellite 
events that are constantly updated at https://hackmeeting.org.

Alternatively, you can meet and chat in person at the Circolo Berneri in 
Bologna on Wednesday evenings.

Pepsy

https://umanitanova.org/resistenza-digitale-lesperienza-del-collettivo-bida/
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