Governance Challenges for the Fediverse

The next speakers in this AoIR 2023 session are Aram Sinnreich and Rob Gehl, whose focus is on governance challenges for Mastodon’s Fediverse. Other social media platforms tend to fail due to the clash between the profit motives of platform operators and the community interests of users; this should enable it to bypass some of the pitfalls for civic engagement on corporate social media. Yet there may be other challenges for community-driven, federated social media like Mastodon – indeed, there are a number of other platforms that now build on the ActivityPub protocol that is best-known for underpinning Mastodon.

For such community platforms, there are six basic challenges: distributed governance, commercial capture, access issues, moderation conundrums, the reputational stank from association with problematic characters, and techno-romanticism. Distributed governance challenges might produce a leadership and accountability vacuum or forking issues between different groups within the community that have opposing views on future direction, and can be exploited by corporate actors building on but not respecting the communities ethos of non-corporate platform technologies (hello, Threads). These things have happened before, and will happen again.

Another issue is access: such communities can display techno-elitism and engage in gatekeeping against newbies; conversely, efforts to make platforms friendlier and and easier to use for newbies can also hide the unique features of the new platform and channel activity back into the old patterns known from past platforms.

Moderation is a fundamental problem for any platform, of course: it does not scale well and requires a very substantial amount of investment in human and/or automated processes, which is unaffordable for community-led platforms. Community blocklists may provide at least part of the answer to this, but moderation must also match community needs, of course. But this is a problem shared by commercial platforms, so at least both commercial and community platforms are in the same boat here.

The reputational anti-halo problem emerges when some problematic practices that occur on community platforms come to be seen as representative for the community overall – this has happened with filesharing platforms, the Dark Web, and cryptocurrencies, for instance (which do have some legitimate and prosocial uses, of course).

There is also a problem with techno-romanticism: the myths that technology has a liberatory capacity; that tech-bros will save us; and that market success is an indication that commercially successful technologies also have the greatest social utility. All of these need to be overcome by the Fediverse if it is to survive and flourish.