Critical reverse engineering includes a normative component: the goal is to make something better than the original. What is “better” can vary quite a bit. In my research, I’ve studied alternatives that center protections for free speech, seeking to avoid censorship....
Critical reverse engineering includes a normative component: the goal is to make something better than the original. What is “better” can vary quite a bit. In my research, I’ve studied alternatives that center protections for free speech, seeking to avoid censorship....
Pasek is also thinking about aesthetics and ways to manage media....
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....
Who pays for the fediverse? The answer is: all of those who create and participate in it. They donate, run instances, spend time moderating, contribute code, post, write codes of conduct, read codes of conduct....
However, much as ad-hoc governance practices on Mastodon have evolved into the more formalized social protocols of codes of conduct, many instances have established formal structures to govern funding....
When I joined Mastodon, I was leading a research project, the Social Media Alternatives Project, at the University of Utah, where several grad students and I were building an archive of documents about alternative social media....
Rochko’s resistance to importable instance blocklists was the ultimate argument against the feature, because what Rochko says goes. Throughout the life of the Mastodon project, Rochko has maintained a “Benevolent Dictator for Life” organizational structure....
It appeared that the corporate social media representatives to the larger W3C were right – the group was “small beans,” not capable of creating anything that could threaten the status quo....
Codes of conduct are very important in Mastodon cultural practice. They specify rules that members ought to abide by in order to participate on the instance. To Shork’s point, they don’t have to be complicated – they tend to have a few rules....
As Ro put it, that sounds suspiciously like Southern US segregation and “Whites Only” signs. This is “about people not wanting to relinquish their title to this space, you know? Which I think is particularly ugly…. People want to say, ‘oh', " there's no culture [on the fediverse]....
Finally, covenantal fediverse care isn’t equally distributed. Even a cursory glance at the Fediverse Observer map shows that the network is simply not present in the Global South, particularly Central and South America and Africa. It is concentrated in North America, Eastern Australia, Western Europe, and South and South Eastern Asia....
Pasek’s experiment is one example of imagining and implementing a fediverse beyond the failed vision of the infinite scroll. For his part, Roscam Abbing has been active with a fediverse server called Lurk....
These are the humble roots of Mastodon: a more cleanly designed, critically reverse engineered alternative to GNU social. Rochko critiqued the design of GNU social and made a more attractive version. In doing so, Mastodon inherited many elements from GNU social. But in doing this work, Rochko also set off a process of critically reverse engineering Twitter itself....
vanta wasn’t surprised by this announcement. Rumors about Threads had been swirling for months. On March 10, 2023, word leaked out that Meta was building an ActivityPub-compliant, Twitter-like social media system that would allow Instagram users to post text messages. At the time, details were scarce – including the name of the eventual product....
I argued that GNU social and other alternative social media “are doing more than decrying what they see as the problems of mainstream social media; they are working to build better systems.” ...
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....
Federated social media is a radical departure from corporate social media. While big companies like Google and Microsoft produce email servers that can intercommunicate with hundreds of other providers, in the world of social media, cross-company communication is largely unheard of....
Mastodon is alternative social media – indeed, it is the most important example of this type of media I have found in my research career. As I have shown elsewhere, alternative social media are built in relation to corporate social media in a process of critical reverse engineering. Mastodon is no different....
