Meet NLnet, the foundation supporting many fediverse projects

NLnet is not a name you might be intimately familiar with if you’re on the fediverse, or might not have heard from at all. But the Dutch non-profit foundation has a significant impact on the fediverse, its growth, and how it is today, as they financially support pretty much all projects that you know of: NLnet has funded grants for Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed, Lemmy, PeerTube and more. I visited their office in Amsterdam, and got to know the team.

NLnet supports many projects that contribute to an open internet, and fediverse projects are only a small part of what they do. But from the fediverse’s perspective they are influential, financially supporting so many different fediverse projects. One of the large funds they work with is NGI, Next Generation Internet, an initiative from the European Commission that ‘aims to shape the development and evolution of the Internet into an Internet of Trust.’ NLnet works together with NGI to select and fund the projects. Over the years, NLnet has worked with many fediverse projects; the five biggest software projects in the fediverse all have received money via NLnet, as well as both projects in the threadiverse, Lemmy and Kbin. I wanted to know who they are, how they work, and what their vision for the fediverse actually is.

Who's NLnet?

Understanding a foundation that provides grants is about knowing where the money is coming from. For NLnet, that started with their own money. NLnet is a Dutch non-profit, with a long history of contributing to the open internet, dating back to the 80’s. In the mid 1990’s, the foundation started a commercial venture to spread internet throughout The Netherlands, and the NLnet LLC became the first internet service provider in The Netherlands. A few years later, the LLC got sold to what is now UUnet, now a part of Verizon. This acquisition of the commercial venture provided the NLnet foundation with an endowment, which they used to transform themselves into a grant-making organisation. Ever since, NLnet regularly holds open calls for proposals for projects that further the vision of an open internet, and the privacy and security of internet users.

Nowadays, NLnet holds multiple rounds of open calls per year. They have formed a consortium, NGI Zero, with partners that provide services like security audits and licensing advice. Money for NGI Zero comes from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet program. Projects are awarded micro grants, between 5.000 and 50.000 euro. The main themes are trustworthiness and data sovereignty (NGI Zero Entrust) and evolving the internet towards digital commons and trustworthy technological building blocks (NGI Zero Core).

Filtering the applications

NLnet gets hundreds of applications every year, with the latest 4 month open call for projects leading to almost 300 applications. This means a significant selection procedure to select projects that are feasible, high quality, and fit with the vision of the fund. Within the fediverse, NLnet aims for a broad approach, funding a wide variety of projects, and try not to just pick the winners. To understand how this all works and how decisions get made I spoke with Gerben, who works for NLnet.

There are three steps in the selection process. In the first step of the assessment, projects as judged on their eligibility. Projects are judged on a variety of criteria here, which the website describes broadly as feasibility, impact and cost effectiveness. Talking with NLnet makes it clear that their values of working towards an open internet are deeply embedded in the organisation. The people from NLnet talk about how they look for more standard things, such as quality of the project and proposal, and whether it is actual Research and Development, and not only supporting Operations. The entire project needs to be open source and open access. Internet ecosystem health is taken into consideration, with questions like ‘does this proposal contribute to the ecosystem, or fragment it’? Or are there other projects that are similar, and is this a case of Not Invented Here Syndrome?

The second step is that of critical review, where applicants are asked questions for comparisons with other projects, how to make the project sustainable after the grant is completed, or clarifications. As a third step, an independent review committee also checks the proposals.

Open source operating systems is one of the things that NLnet cares deeply about, and they would strongly prefer to support systems that do not depend on Windows, MacOS, iOS or not even Android. Gerben excitedly shows me projects for open source mobile operating systems they have supported such as postmarketOS. It shows how NLnet thinks about the projects they support, and they ways they think about proposals fitting into their broader goals of a better internet. It is clear that Gerben and NLnet are truly believe in an open internet, and think about the entire ecosystem. Turning the conversation to standards and protocols, Gerben remarks that it is too uncommon to add updates and features to existing standards and protocols, Gerben remarks. It's not flashy, but sometimes "it's okay to be boring", he says. Maintaining and implementing existing standards is highly valuable work.

Link in the web

Beyond the role of selecting applications, NLnet also has the crucial role of linking people and projects together. Especially for smaller projects that have not been given a lot of publicity, it can be hard for other people to know what work already has been done, and risk doing the same thing. NLnet helps by connecting people who are working on similar projects. This is also why they ask projects they fund to provide regular public updates.

Gerben describes four major themes that are important to them for projects. Is it interoperable, it is either decentralised itself, or built on top of decentralised infrastructure, does it improve people’s autonomy, and does it increase resilience. Looking at these themes, it is no surprise that so many of the projects on the fediverse are supported by NLnet.

These themes also resonate within the Dutch government itself. NLnet and the Dutch government will launch a new fund together, the e-Commons fund, in September 2023. The fund promotes "the creation, development, operation, maintenance and popularisation of technologies that belong to the digital commons." The Dutch government has been talking explicitly about Digital Commons, most notably in the letter to the Dutch Parliament where both the e-Commons fund and the Dutch government's Mastodon server were announced. NLnet's role in promoting and supporting an open internet, both in the fediverse and beyond, has clearly already been impactful, and their work is far from over.