Fediverse Governance Drop
The fediverse governance processes of moderation, server leadership, and federated diplomacy. (Courtesy Bayerische Staatsbibliothek)
Back in the fall, I wrote about a research project I was diving into with Darius Kazemi. Now, after a few months of prepping and conducting interviews with people who run Mastodon and Hometown servers about how they govern their parts of the network and then many more months of analyzing and writing up what we found, we’re releasing our findings. We found so much.
The main report is a little over 40,000 words and 110 pages long, and includes dozens of excerpts from interviews with our extremely generous research participants, who spoke with us for many hours back in the spring. There’s a lot there. Much of it will be familiar to veteran fedi mods and admins, but I suspect most people will encounter at least a few things they haven’t encountered before.
In the findings, we get into…
- Why we think the fediverse’s structure can allow for particularly humane and high-context moderation—and which of the cultural, technical, and financial gaps that our participants identified must be filled before the network can achieve its potential.
- The interrelated governance configurations that make a server more or less manageable, and the different ways servers in our sample approached those configurations to serve their various communities.
- The biggest gaps and annoyances in available governance tooling—spoiler, it’s mostly moderation stuff, but it also includes some fascinating things related to shared/coalitional moderation and better communication between servers.
- What kinds of future threats are most on server operators’ minds, and which things they’re not particularly concerned about.
- The things that keep volunteer server runners on the fediverse, give them hope, and make them feel excited about possible futures.
And so much other stuff, too.
The two satellite documents we made—Fediverse Governance Opportunities for Funders and Developers (PDF) and the Quick Start Guide to Fediverse Governance Decisions (PDF)—are essentially alternate ways into the knowledge collected in the full findings report. Choose your own adventure!
Content stuff
I wouldn’t have guessed, going in, that we’d end up with the major structural categories we landed on—moderation, server leadership, and federated diplomacy—but after spending so much time eyeball-deep in interview transcripts, I think it’s a pretty reasonable structure for discussing the big picture of governance. (The real gold is of course in the excerpts and summaries from our participants, who continuously challenged and surprised us.)
There are no manifestos to be found here, except in that our participants often eloquently and sometimes passionately express their hopes for the fediverse. There are a lot of assumptions, most of which we’ve tried to be pretty scrupulous about calling out in the text, but anything this chunky contains plentiful grist for both principled disagreement and the other kind. Our aim is to describe and convey the knowledge inherent in fediverse server teams, so we’ve really stuck close to the kinds of problems, risks, needs, and challenges those folks expressed.
I have a lot of sympathy for journalists and other professional explainers who are trying to make sense of new networks without themselves being deep in the networks’ development or maintenance ecosystems. Partly because of that sympathy, I threw in some basic theory about the fediverse in the plainest, least dashing way I could. I think talking about the fediverse as a social component of the open web, with all the joys and horrors that entails, is useful in helping non-fedi people understand that a.) it’s not a platform at all, and b.) that this genuinely does confer benefits for people who want to build communities that interconnect—carefully—with other communities. I don’t think the fediverse is fully equipped for that use, yet, but it’s my hope that the experiences, insights, and recommendations we’ve collected will help the network move in the right direction(s).
Process stuff
Although we intentionally limited our research sample to servers of a given size and with a fairly strong public commitment to intentional governance, our findings reflect a pretty high degree of heterogeneity in the specifics, which I’m really happy about. I don’t myself think that there’s a right way to approach the fediverse—some ways are obviously bad and destructive to people and communities I care about, but there are a lot of paths toward being together in better ways. I also think, even more now more than before we did this work, that the relatively subtle differences in the way our participants run medium-sized fedi servers are actually extremely meaningful for the shape of the community they end up hosting.
A brief word about how this came together: Darius and I pitched the project last fall, designed the interviews in the winter, and conducted the interviews over the spring and into early summer. When analysis and writing time arrived, Darius crunched through endless hours of transcript corrections and built out the tooling, legal, and financial findings and recs, and I wrote up the other sections of the report and the introductory analysis. Darius also built a great mini-site for the main report, which you can also read as a PDF if you’re into that.
Gratitude
Huge thanks to our participants, to Katharina Meyer and the other folks at DIIF, to the many kind experts who read early drafts and offered generous suggestions, and to my partner and kid, who cleared a lot of time and offered a lot of support so I could hole up and write yet another giant crunchy thing about the internet.