Hello! Thanks to Nate for inviting me to talk to you today, and for your attendance. I'm Robert W. Gehl, speaking to you from Toronto, Canada.

I am currently wrapping up a book, 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 later this year. The book focuses on...

...Mastodon, as well as the broader fediverse. These systems comprise a network of noncentralized, alternative social media servers.

Today, I'll give a bit of background about the fediverse.

I'll talk a bit about how I came to research the fediverse.

And finally, I'll talk about some of the benefits of building a research program that focuses on the fediverse. All in all this should take about 15 minutes and then I can answer questions.

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.

Next, I'll talk a bit about how I came to researching this network. Now, a lot of folks starting taking a serious look at the fediverse 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 for $44bn USD prompted a surge of people who either experimented with Mastodon and the fediverse, or switched to it entirely, in late 2022 through 2023. It also prompted folks to start researching the fediverse.

However, I had been researching what I call "alternative social media" for many years prior to that. I like to say that I was critical of X and Facebook before it was cool. Mastodon and the fediverse caught my eye in 2017, because at that point I had been studying activists who were building what I call "alternative social media" for roughly a decade, starting with my doctoral work and culminating in my first book, Reverse Engineering Social Media, in 2014.

In fact, I was inspired to do this sort of research back in the mid-2000s, after another wealthy entity, Google, bought Youtube for what seemed to be the astronomical figure of $1.65bn USD. That was quite a shocking moment, because prior to that, Youtube was a relatively small site known for people sharing "vlogs" or video diaries.

Back in the mid-2000s, there was a great deal of talk about "Web 2.0," where as technologists such as John Battelle and Tim O'Reilly put it, the new business model of the Internet is to get your users to build content for you. This inaugurated concepts such as "user-generated content," "collective intelligence," and a bit later, "big data." Google's purchase of YouTube was very much in this vein: users create the videos, users watch the videos, and Google itself watches the users to see what ads they might respond to. Now, of course, we have a more critical term for these things today...

..."Surveillance capitalism," a system where our sociality is monitored and mined for profit.

For much of my career, I've been interested in activists who are leading the way out of surveillance capitalism -- away from corporate social media into a new form of alternative media -- community-run, small social media systems that are self-governed and funded through non-capitalist means. Now, I could talk for hours about the wonderful range of projects that people have built to combat surveillance capitalism...

...but for the sake of time I will say that I currently find Mastodon to be the most promising of them all. One big reason is not a technical one, but a social one. And we can see it with the Mastodon server you have set up for your seminar.

I trust I don't need to translate this document for you. This is the Code of Conduct for your experimental Mastodon instance, admined by Nate and intended for members of your seminar. I have a whole chapter in my book on the history of why Mastodon and other federated servers have a culture of including codes of conduct, and I'd be happy to say more in Q and A. The short version is: the inclusion of such a code of conduct is not required by the underlying technology. Rather, it's a cultural practice typical on the fediverse -- it's a social norm. Now, if you compare the Code of Conduct for your own Mastodon instance to other Mastodon instances, you will find many similar ethical standards: respect for others, no racism, no transphobia, no data collection for marketing and advertising, and calls for nonviolence.

As your server federates with other servers with similar values, we see a network that is not merely a technical network, but a social network, where autonomous groups are joining together through shared ethical values.

This has resulted in a structure a colleague and I have called "the digital covenant" -- a large federation of small communities who share ethical values and post freely within the bounds of their collective covenant. This is what I find most compelling about the fediverse -- it's a federation in the political sense of autonomous communities banding together and communicating across their boundaries. It is radically different from corporate social media.

So you can see why I'm interested in the fediverse: it's largely comprised of noncapitalist, community-run instances where people -- not corporations -- make moderation and governance decisions. There are many benefits to studying this system, too.

First, unlike the study of corporate social media, academics can actually have a tangible impact on the shape of this network.

Second, for those of you studying platform governance and content moderation, you can put theory directly into practice.

Third, you can pursue your research program for a long time without having to worry about it being undermined by the decisions of a for-profit corporation.

In terms of impact, let's compare the impact academics have had on the shape or direction of Meta versus the impact academics can have on the shape of the fediverse. How many decisions have been made by Meta due to the criticism of academics? Perhaps this is controversial, but I would say that Meta does not care one bit about the two decades of academic critique leveled at the company. Instead, that corporation is legally required to seek profit for shareholders over all concerns, including those of academic critics.

Compare that to the fediverse. Literally right this second you -- yes you! -- can join the Social Web Incubator Group run by the World Wide Web Consortium and get into meetings with key fediverse developers who are shaping its underlying protocol as well as content moderation practices. I know this because I just joined such a group. And this isn't the only way to have an impact. Do research on fediverse user interfaces, content moderation practices, or online communication. Share it with people on the fediverse. They will not only listen; they will adapt the network based on your concerns.

I also mentioned that studying the fediverse gives you the opportunity to put theory into practice. I'll use myself as an example: I study the history, culture, and technical elements of the fediverse. I also participate in the fediverse -- in fact, I run an instance, AoIR.social, the Mastodon instance of the Association of Internet Researchers. As the admin, I helped draft our code of conduct, help with moderation, and make decisions about whether or not to block bad instances on the fediverse. You don't have to do the same, but how exciting is it that this is even possible? That we academics can RUN social media, not just study it! I have also run Mastodon in classrooms, letting students have the opportunity to actually govern themselves online.

Finally, I mentioned that a benefit of studying the fediverse is that you are far less likely to have your research program destroyed by the choices of corporations or billionaires. After Musk bought Twitter, he changed the pricing structure of the X data application program interface, a means by which people could import Twitter posts en masse for study and analysis. By changing the pricing, Musk effectively prohibited many researchers from continuing to enjoy access. I can't tell you how many PhD students and doctoral advisors I heard at conferences say a variation on: my doctoral project is ruined now. My research program has been undermined. Let's set aside the intellectual value of studying Tweets to make claims about society, and focus on the fact that a corporation dictates how social research is to be done and by whom. This is not the case on the fediverse.

Now, I should note that I believe that one cannot simply shift corporate social media research whole cloth to the fediverse. As Roel Roscam Abbing and I argue, standards of informed consent operate differently on the fediverse. This is in part because fediverse members often fled corporate social media due to their perceptions about privacy invasions and misuse of personal data. I am happy to chat more about research ethics and the fediverse in Q and A. For now, I will say that, if done well, research on the fediverse is far less likely to be simply decimated by a change in an API.

Now, you might be thinking, what about the future? Will the fediverse survive? Along with several colleagues, I recently published an article that addresses that question. There are many challenges to the fediverse, including corporate actors seeking to take it over, state regulations that stifle it, or reputational harms. The fact is, the fediverse may in fade out. However, what I have found over the past 15 years of study is that the desire among people to have community-run media systems has remained constant. I don't think the fediverse is going away. In addition, the desire for communication outside of corporate control is of course much older than the fediverse. As academics, one thing we can do is help make this desire a reality by studying what activists do and contributing to their projects.

And with that, I'll conclude. Happy to take questions!

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