Civic Promises and Perils for Federated Social Media
Funding Area: Community governance / Gobernanza comunitaria
Problem Statement: The “fediverse” (Mastodon, Calckey, and related decentralized social media platforms) has grown steeply with the decline of Twitter as an academic and journalistic resource, although it does not serve as a direct substitute. Some of Twitter’s most active, nonprofit communities were academics, journalists, BIPOC intellectuals, public interest activists, and artists. They are now finding and forging different kinds of communities. These localized, server-based groups (“instances”) hold promise as human-scale, virtual communities, with the inbuilt capacity to “federate” with other such communities. This new information ecology holds promise as a space of creativity, innovation, knowledge sharing and civil discourse. Among the threats to the fediverse’s future as a nonprofit, volunteer-led space of civil discourse are: Challenges of moderation at scale, economic sustainability in the absence of targeted marketing, potential reputational assaults by potential commercial competitors, and the strategic shortsightedness of techno-Romanticism that is so familiar from previous innovations’ early years. All these threats must be addressed collectively in an ecology whose ruling values are non-commercialism, decentralization, open source, and free association. At the same time, the early adopters of the fediverse are wary of traditional governance, especially in light of the highly politicized nature of debates over moderation at commercial competitors like Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok.
Proposed Activities: We propose an 18-month-long project to map out and convene key stakeholders on the problems of shared governance of the “fediverse,” the decentralized ecology of bounded but linkable social media sites, apps and services (e.g. Mastodon, CalcKey, Pixelfed) built on the foundations of the ActivityPub social web protocol. The Open Infrastructure Fund grant would provide valuable pilot funding, allowing us to support a longer-term effort to raise second-tier funding from a larger grant organization and ultimately convene key stakeholders across a range of institutions, sectors, and nations to develop a collective strategy ensuring the long-term viability and independence of the fediverse as a space of deliberation, scholarship, and public information-sharing. For this phase of the project, we aim to map the range of challenges to the viability and independence of the fediverse that occur with enough frequency to warrant a conversation addressing ways for key stakeholders in the fediverse ecosystem to problem-solve together. At the same time, we will collect historical examples of problem-sharing and shared problem-solving in other, analogous online and off-line arenas. Having accomplished this, we will share our results with the field, and seek further funding to convene several meetings with stakeholders and social actors, organizing those meetings around collective approaches to mitigating these familiar problems. The results of these conversations will dictate appropriate next steps toward shared governance strategies that can support the core mission of decentralized, federated conversation within and between communities of practice and place. The timeline will look something like this: Months 1-6: Scholarly analysis of historical antecedents; identification of key global stakeholders; initial interviews with sample stakeholders; application for second-tier funding Months 7-12: Extended interviews with key stakeholders; organization of convenings at home institutions and partner institutions. Months 13-18: Convenings at home institutions and partner institutions; analysis and write-up of convenings; drafting of action plans for key stakeholders; work towards ratification of action plans. Our team possesses the required expertise to fulfill the needs of this project, as scholars, engineers, and governance researchers with strong ties to tech, policy, public interest, and academic communities.
Openness: The fediverse is an inherently open set of systems, rooted in the open source ActivityPub protocol. Furthermore, the protocol itself, implemented with services such as Mastodon, CalcKey, and PixelFed, is built to facilitate open dialogue and information exchange, both through the construction of public online spaces for discourse and through the establishment of free-to-use, easy-to-implement tools for any individual or institution to create a server that interconnects with the thousands of other extant servers in the fediverse. Unlike commercial social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok, there is no single corporate entity controlling the platform, nor an inbuilt targeted marketing system integrated into the social network. And unlike other non-centralized platforms like GNU Social, Diaspora, Secure Scuttlebutt, the fediverse doesn’t require sophisticated technological expertise to participate as an end user. Our specific project is also “open” in that its stated aims are to bring the many stakeholders involved in the future of the fediverse, including developers, researchers, civil society, and implementers into direct dialogue with one another with the goal of collectively addressing the platform’s greatest challenges in a proactive fashion.
Challenges: This is a fast-moving arena in practice, and a quickly-evolving one in scholarship. We need to be in touch with both practitioners and scholars to develop the most useful and relevant research, which can be leveraged for a high-level discussion of next steps in governance. Governance is an intensely human process, and this project will require both rigorous research and soft skills to work with a range of people who have been driven by their passion and commitment to create these new electronic spaces.
Neglectedness: We have sent letters of inquiry to the Hewlett Foundation, the Mellon Foundation and the Sloan Foundation. Other potential sources for funding might include Canada’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council and the US’s National Science Foundation.
Success: Success will be measured by the completion of the work outlined for the first six months of this total process. This means completing: 1. Complete a working draft paper of the historical antecedents that can be circulated among stakeholders 2. Complete a mapping to identify key stakeholders 3. Complete five or more interviews with key stakeholders and potentially have more interviews lined up 4. Have a grant application for second-tier funding in progress with a larger funder.
Total Budget: $10,824
Budget File: pdf
Affiliations: American University, York University
LMIE Carveout: No, it does not.
Team Skills: Aram Sinnreich: Tenured scholar with 30 years experience researching online community-building, at organizations including Forrester Research, USC, Radar Research, NYU, Rutgers University, American University. Author of several books discussing internet community and governance. Robert W. Gehl: experience in system administration of Mastodon instances, six years of participant observation on the fediverse, completed interviews with over 20 key fediverse figures, partnership with the Organization for Ethical Source, the Varia Collective, working on a book about Mastodon. Thomas Struett is a current PhD student. He has experience working in and studying the multistakeholder process in internet governance. He has relevant policy experience in privacy, data governance, and digital trade. Patricia Aufderheide: University Professor, American University. Co-facilitator of multiple standards & practices documents that changed industry practices in the relevant fields.
Submission Number: 154
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