And the final speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Klara Matusewicz, whose focus is on assumptions about legitimate content moderation on Mastodon. Content moderation is of course also highly controversial in corporate platform contexts, and there is always a conflict between too strict and too lax content moderation; the Fediverse promises alternative moderation solutions, but these are not necessarily less controversial.
How do Mastodon moderators negotiate their political legitimacy, then? Since each instance is subject to the decision-making of its operators, issues of concentration, agency, and legitimacy have not been solved conclusively here either, so this does not necessarily always represent a more legitimate form of social media.
Legitimacy depends on the production of consent, which involves participation, representation, and accountability; depending on how this is configured, it can range from democratic to authoritarian legitimacy, and Mastodon moderators can make a variety of choices here. This project explored this by conducting some 15 interviews with Mastodon moderators from both general-interest and specialised-topic instances of varying sizes, which were variously open, closed, or approval-based.
All of the moderators negotiated their legitimacy, but in very different ways. Some instances were bottom-up participatory spaces were moderators sought users’ opinions and made themselves accountable to their user community; others were top-down governable spaces where instances were treated as the operators’ property and treated as political fiefdoms.
This latter view is also enabled by the materiality of the Mastodon software and Fediverse network: the logic is that users can leave and find a different instance if they dislike the setup of the instance they are on – so decentralisation does not by itself return social media to the hands of the people, but may also create a network of small fiefdoms. However, it devolves such political decisions to a more granular level – but this is also true for the difficult decisions about what speech is acceptable in these spaces.
