Critique of corporate social media is now a major concern of fields such as media studies and software studies. However, unlike many of my peers, I argue for something more than mere critique. In my view, in spite of years of criticism leveled at Facebook (now Meta), Twitter (now X), or YouTube, their commodification and manipulation of sociality continues apace....
There is another reason to refer to Mastodon as noncentralized: Mastodon isn’t the only federated social media available. In his 2018 eruption, Rochko pointed to “the alternatives.” He wasn’t telling people to go back to Twitter. Over the past several years, a host of other ActivityPub-enabled projects have emerged....
The biggest indicator of the success of ActivityPub is that it survived the stress-test of millions of new people signing up in the wake of Musk’s purchase of Twitter. As I discussed in the previous chapter, those new fediverse members caused a massive spike in the network’s traffic....
There is another reason to refer to Mastodon as noncentralized: Mastodon isn’t the only federated social media available. In his 2018 eruption, Rochko pointed to “the alternatives.” He wasn’t telling people to go back to Twitter. Over the past several years, a host of other ActivityPub-enabled projects have emerged....
In 2015, there was a tremendous amount of anger over Facebook’s emotional contagion study. Facebook researchers partnered with academics at Cornell and the University of California—San Francisco to study how emotion-laden phrases might affect the emotions of Facebook users....
Aral Balkan is one half of the Small Technology Foundation....
That the covenantal fediverse enjoys the active contributions of queer and trans people is not surprising. Recent internet histories have revealed the central role queer and trans folks have played in digital technologies....
Simply comparing corporate social media terms of service agreements to typical Mastodon codes of conduct reveals the user/member distinction. Corporate terms of service are full of legalese....
The challenges here are huge. For one thing, there is a glaring problem: the sun sometimes does not shine. Not only does it go behind clouds on occasion; it also goes below the horizon for hours on end....
we don’t have to be regulated by the auspices of profit, right? We can connect in authentic ways, rather than just trying to jury-rig these algorithms to get more attention....
While the fediverse has grown in part through the radical solution of code of conduct-driven covenantal federalism, it also has had moments where instances have been radically isolated. Isolating an instance can be controversial, and until recently, it required a concerted campaign by many admins....
For the first – I don’t know how long – chunk of time the group was working, the focus was on, OK, let’s figure out which one of these approaches we’re going to standardize. And all the conversations were focused around that. And as you can imagine, it went round and round in circles. No one could agree, because everyone was invested in their own option....
Thinking about these complicated histories, I had to ask Ro: if something like The Bad Space and instance blocklist importing were available during Playvicious’s run, would Playvicious still be online? “That’s a big question, man,” he replies. He pauses. Then he says, “the way I think about it now, PV did what it was supposed to do…....
Finally, there was the Indieweb approach. Led by Tantek Çelik – one of the co-chairs of the SocialWG – Indieweb was (and still is) a growing community of Web developers who placed the homepage at the center of everything....
Overall, corporate social media Terms of Service pit an individual user – the Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or X user – against a massive corporation. Those who abide by the rules of the corporation – including its claim to a license to whatever content users post and the use of user data for intense marketing purposes – can keep using the system....
The open federation argument: This is related to the free speech argument. The open federation argument says that blocklist importing would break the federation, because it would sever too many connections between fediverse instances and isolate people from one another....
This was quite disappointing to Ro. In light of the toll that racist trolls were taking on moderators like Marcia, he could not understand why safety features, such as importable instances blocklists, were not being implemented. From Ro’s perspective, Rochko’s vision has actively prevented safety features from being a part of Mastodon....
Then, not much later came 2016: the Brexit referendum in the UK and the US Presidential election. As a site that allows for political advertising, Facebook (and its child company Instagram) figured heavily in both events....
In addition, Mastodon codes of conduct also aid in server-to-server connections. As I will show, the presence (or lack of) a code of conduct helps server admins to make informed choices as their instances federate with one another. In cases of disputes between server admins, codes of conduct provide guidelines for resolution....
While Rochko intended Mastodon to be an improvement on GNU social, Mastodon’s likeness to Twitter prompted people to compare it to that site. Rochko initially discouraged such comparisons. “I’m a realist so I don’t think that it will be able to compete with Twitter,” Rochko told people on Hacker News when he first publicly announced Mastodon in late 2016....