And still others left because other people were leaving. In probably the most painful story I heard, one person – a friend of mine – told me that her Twitter feed simply died the day Musk took over. An avid cyclist, she had been following professional cyclists for years to study her sport. She also followed people fond of sharing cat pictures....
In addition to content moderation concerns, those who sign the #fedipact or otherwise pledge to block Meta cite many other reasons for doing so. vanta’s fedipact site sums up several: “that time they helped facilitate a genocide. that time they helped try to rig an election....
FOSS and federated alternative social media are important because they fundamentally challenge our assumptions about how social media needs to work. A basic insight from the field of science and technology studies (STS) is useful here: it could be otherwise....
They were effective. Gab was blocked from the vast majority of the fediverse. In fact, it was so well-blocked that Andrew Torba indulged in what could be characterized as a childish rage-quit....
Observing fediverse members’ disdain for unethical research and the contentification of social media posts, I sought consent from fediverse members. In the case of interviews, I have engaged in standard institutional review procedures for informed consent and drew on Internet research ethics guides....
By late 2017, Mastodon had shifted from being described by its founder as a GNU social alternative to being reported upon by tech journalists as a Twitter alternative....
D. Olifant
boosted
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....
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....
Del wasn’t the only one seeing such growth. The explosion of traffic was affecting the entire fediverse of Mastodon and other ActivityPub-speaking servers. Eleven thousand kilometers away from Del, across the Pacific ocean, Aurynn Shaw was also seeing a massive jump in Sidekiq....
The existence of a standard set of ethical principles is clear in the Mastodon part of the fediverse. In 2017, some students and I collected hundreds of codes of conduct from Mastodon instances, and we often saw repeated language used across multiple instances to describe their moderation practices....
For all the infuriating difficulty they endured while producing it, Guy, Prodromou, Lemmer-Webber, Tallon and Shephard’s ActivityPub protocol has helped bring about such a transition....
If the fediverse never touches regions of the world, does that mean that its members are free to not care about those regions of the world? No. “Technology has made it possible for the effects of our actions to extend far beyond the range of our personal encounters,” feminist ethicist Carol Card reminds us....
All the while, Del was watching the impact of all the new members on the Mastodon.art server. Using Sidekiq – software designed to monitor and manage computer processes – she could see how her server was processing all the social data flowing through it....
Second, the use of Amazon and Cloudflare could also be a violation of the ethical covenant many fediverse instances adhere to, since these are corporations with poor reputations for their anti-union activities or willingness to host conspiracy theorists....
This is not to say I will ignore the experience of individual Mastodon and fediverse members, but that I will consider the individual’s experience with the fediverse in relation to the instance level....
Their experience replicates what many people have found on corporate social media: if someone is lucky enough to be graced by the content algorithm, they can get their posts promoted to wider and wider audiences....
Rochko’s vision had attracted many people. But his decisions have also rankled people. Even in the heady early years of Mastodon, Rochko’s central role as final arbiter of features grated against many Mastodon contributors. In 2019, The Daily Dot reported that many formerly enthusiastic Mastodon contributors and instance members were quitting....
While I think this form of caring too much will always be present on the fediverse, I find some wisdom in noncentralization....
The answer is yes, but artists are also hedging their bets....
Limited sign-ups on corporate social media seems almost unimaginable. Corporate social media are often publicly-traded companies, beholden to their investors, who demand growth quarter after quarter. Investor-driven thinking leads to what philosopher Bernard Stiegler calls “short circuiting”: the overriding emphasis on short-term profits....