Hello, everyone, and thank you for attending this presentation! I'm Robert Gehl, an associate professor in Communication and Media Studies, and I have an Ontario Research Chair of Digital Governance for Social Justice here at York. I'm affiliated with the Science and Technology Studies grad program, the Communication and Culture grad program, and Connected Minds. Today I will present ideas from my current project...
Move Slowly and Build Bridges: Mastodon, the Fediverse, and the Struggle for Ethical Social Media, which is set to be published from Oxford University Press next year. The book focuses on...
...The fediverse, which is a network of noncentralized, alternative social media servers.
The most popular of these is Mastodon, which is a Twitter-like microblogging system. Mastodon was developed in 2016, though it gained a great deal of media coverage when...
This guy, Elon Musk, bought Twitter in late 2022. As I found in my inteviews that I conducted for the book, Musk's purchase of Twitter prompted a surge of people who either experimented with Mastodon and the fediverse, or switched to it entirely, in late 2022 through 2023.
Mastodon and the fediverse caught my eye in 2017. For much of my career, I've been interested in activists engaged in what I call "critical reverse engineering." What I mean by this is activists who engage in the critical dissocation of communication technologies, taking them apart, and who use the knowledge they gain from that process to make something more just.
So when Musk bought Twitter, and millions of people left for Mastodon and the fediverse, what I saw was one of the first major instances of people fleeing corporate social media to the sort of ethical, alternative social media I had been researching and advocating for since the earliest days of my career.
My plan for today is to talk about two things. First, the technical aspects of the fediverse. Second, the...
...governance aspects of the fediverse. Taken as a whole, this would be a sociotechnical description of the fediverse. Another way to put this...
...Is to think about the double meaning of "protocol." On one hand it refers to a technical system, a set of standardized rules governing the communication of information between endpoints in a system.
But another meaning, an older one, refers to rules of conduct for governance and diplomacy. Think here of diplomatic customs, or the rules governing an interaction with a head of state. Of course, as we know from Science and Technology Studies, technical systems and social practice are mutually constitutive, so I will eventually speak of the fediverse and Mastodon as a sociotechnical system.
Let's talk about the technical dimensions of Mastodon and the fediverse first. This is useful because it allows me to explain how federated social media works. To understand the fediverse, let's start with what seems to be an ancient digital technology...
...email. Email is a federated system.
Email resources appear on multiple computer servers, which can communicate with one another. For example, let's say a friend of mine uses Gmail, another friend uses Microsoft Outlook, and I use Protonmail. Despite the fact that we're each using the services of very different companies, we can still communicate. This is because all email servers agree to abide by a set of technical rules, a protocol called SMTP (Send Mail Transfer Protocol.) Today, there is a means for social media data to be treated like email.
In 2018, five technologists working with the World Wide Web Consortium published an open standard called ActivityPub. ActivityPub provides a protocol for social media data, much like SMTP provides a protocol for interoperable email servers. It standardizes typical social media activites: making a profile, posting something, liking or favoriting that post, boosting a post, and commenting on posts. Let me walk through this by considering three distinct fediverse systems.
The top logo is that of PeerTube, which is server software that allows for people to post videos, comment on them, and share them. The logo to the left is for Pixelfed, which allows people to post images. And the logo to the right is Mastodon, which is a microblogging system. All of these servers can communicate with one another via ActivityPub. That means my friend could post a video on a PeerTube server, another friend could see it in Pixelfed and comment on it, and I can like and boost that post in Mastodon.
It's hard to overstate how radical a departure this is. You CANNOT do that with corporate social media. You cannot post to Facebook and expect a friend on X to comment on it.
You cannot even post to Instagram and expect a response from Facebook, even though they are both owned by the same company, Meta.
The result of ActivityPub has been a global network of heterogenous social media servers. The average size of each server is around 500 accounts, but the network itself is comprised of 10s of thousands of servers with somewhere between 8 to 14 million users.
The ability of ActivityPub to handle traffic was tested in late 2022, where, as you can see in this graph from Fediverse Observer, the network saw a massive uptick in growth relative to its previous state. This growth was prompted by Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter.
However, I likened all this to email. And when you think of email, you might think about the fact that it can reach across different servers -- you have to type in @outlook.com or @gmail.com, etc. What you may not think about governance all that much. Of course, there is governance in email -- spam filtering, for example -- but the vast majority of us don't think of email in terms of governance. You get an email address from an employer, or you sign up for one. But governance of email is largely out of your control. You're not invited to think about it much. The fediverse, by contrast, has developed in such a way that governance is front and center -- indeed, the contemporary fediverse demands its members engage in governance practices. That brings me to...
The social dimensions of the term "protocol."
One meaning of protocol in the Oxford English Dictionary, 6.a, is tied to “The official rules of etiquette to be observed by the head of state and other dignitaries... the procedure governing diplomatic occasions... the observance of this.”
Another meaning has to do with treaties. Meaning, 3.a: "a draft of a diplomatic document... signed by the parties concerned, of agreed provisions to be embodied in a formal treaty.” Let's keep these meanings of protocol -- rules of etiquette, rules of diplomacy -- in mind.
Indeed, if you sign up to a Mastodon server, very often you will see some ground rules, such as these on Mastodon.social: rules about marking sexually explicit materials, and rules prohibiting harassment and bigotry. The inclusion of such rules is not a technical requirement of Mastodon, but is a cultural custom.
For example, I am the admin of a Mastodon instance called aoir.social, which is for members of the Association of Internet Researchers. The first thing we did was...
...write a Code of Conduct. We took this to be a basic part of running our own social media. This idea didn't come out of the blue.
The inclusion of codes of conduct in federated social media is a product of historical context. Right as Mastodon was being developed in the mid-2010s, activists like Coraline Ada Ehmke were pushing the broader tech sector to adopt codes of conduct to help put an end to sexual and racist harassment at tech conferences. While Ehmke and her allies received death threats for their works, ultimately...
...They succeeded -- today, Ehmke's code of conduct, called the Contributor Covenant, is a key aspect of technology development. Similarly, codes of conduct are now an expected part of a federated social media server.
These codes of conduct provide moderation guidelines for federated servers. They provide the rules for moderators to make decisions about whether or not to sanction members of the server.
They also provide a signal to would-be members about the values of the community. For example, if you want to join a community that has strong moderation rules, look for that in their COC.
But these rules don't just provide the basis for content moderation on individual fediverse servers. Recall that the fediverse is a network of tens of thousands of small servers, where individuals can interact with others on different servers, much like a Gmail user can contact a Protonmail user via email.
You might wonder, if folks on my server are well-moderated, but a server appears on the network, one that's full of trolls, what good are my local rules? What happens when trolls from outside my server harass folks on my server? Let's return to the idea of treaties in protocols. Fediverse servers also include the ability to block other servers. And the decision to block a server is often based on the existence -- or lack of -- moderation on other servers.
That Troll Server likely has no code of conduct, or at least one that says "anything goes!" But there is no guarantee other servers will maintain their connection to it. Indeed, throughout the history of the fediverse, alt-right, troll servers have been isolated through by the rest of the network.
Indeed, Gab.com, a white Christian Nationalist site that is literally full of self-identified Nazis, tried to adopt ActivityPub in 2019. However,...
As Derek Caelin documents, Gab was isolated by the rest of the fediverse. Other fediverse admins cited Gab's outright courting of white supremacists, transphobes, and conspiracy theorists, noting that these things violate their codes of conduct, and blocked Gab. Again, none of this has anything to do with the underlying technical protocol, ActivityPub. Instead, it has to do with cultural practices, which are now codified in documents such as...
The Mastodon Server Covenant, a voluntary agreement among fediverse servers to abide by the same basic set of ethical rules.
It also appears in new projects, such as The Bad Space, built around shared blocklists, which collect the wisdom of many fediverse admins and share it with the rest of the network.
Or consider a new nonprofit, IFTAS, which provides resources for fediverse admins and moderators to share knowledge, build blocklists, and solve disputes between servers. These practices give rise to what a colleague and I have called...
The Digital Covenant...
This is a network of small, autonomous communities banding together into a larger, noncentralized network through shared ethical values they all consent to.
The members of this network enjoy liberty within the bounds of those shared ethical values.
Overall, I suggest the fediverse needs to be understood not just as a technical protocol, but as a suite of sociotechnical protocols -- a mixture of code and culture that simultaneoulsly allows people to leave corporate social media behind but also demands that they govern themselves online.
And with that I will stop -- happy to take questions!