The Challenges of Federation, in Social Media and Elsewhere

And the final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Jim Brown, whose interest is also in Mastodon’s Fediverse. The move from Twitter to Mastodon following Twitter’s muskification was slow and halting in part because it was seen as a new silo whose community was smaller that Twitter’s, which ignores the federated aspects of Mastodon as a platform – why is this so, and how may it be overcome?

There are many historical examples of federation, from FidoNet and other past platforms to labour unions and other offline community practices; these are concerned with person-to-person but especially also with group-to-group practices, and there’s plenty to be learnt from such histories, and how these federated groups have dealt with attempts (by political actors or employers) to undermine this federation.

Practices of maintaining federation between such groups should be given special attention, in fact; Jim points to the federated Bookwyrm network (an alternative to GoodReads) as an example for this. Especially important here is boundary maintenance and the communication of expectations about the fluidity of boundaries between and around federated networks, as well as clear communication about moderation and exclusion practices – this also means being actively repulsive towards undesirable participants. Scale is also an issue: network effects mean that the largest servers will always tend to attract the greatest number of new signups, even though it makes more sense to add more servers in dealing with growth.

Federation is up against the atomisation of people and groups: interactions online are now highly individualised (at the levels of actual individuals as well as individual groups), and moving to a federated network is easier if one’s network can move as well; this remains difficult. Recent social networks (like WhatsApp, Slack, or Discord) are particularly catering to such small-group spaces, and federating these is very difficult – although these platforms are slowly starting to develop more cross-instance functionality.

If initiating groups is easy(ish), then, federating them is hard – and commercial interests tend to prefer groups to remain separate entities, or perhaps to take over federated networks altogether.