The paper Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media by @s0hw@hci.social @andresmh@hci.social and colleagues at hci.princeton.edu (which we will discuss at #FediForum today) takes on a tension at the heart of decentralised social media. The fediverse promises to empower communities to govern themselves and set norms in their own context, on their own terms. But communities can't actually govern in isolation. Their members talk across boundaries, bad actors hop between servers, and the rules one community sets can directly undermine another's. The authors call these "governance frictions."
Their argument is that we've spent a lot of design effort looking inside communities, like improving moderation tools and onboarding, but almost none on what they call inter-community governance: the infrastructure that lets communities coordinate, share information, and manage their relationships with each other.
To explore what that infrastructure could look like, they ran four design workshops with 24 Fediverse admins, moderators, and developers. Participants imagined ideal tools, and the authors synthesized those ideas into six concrete challenges, like making governance decisions visible, sharing nuanced information about issues, controlling who you share what with, and minimizing barriers to adoption.
The synthesis lands on three design principles:
Modularity: communities need a shared vocabulary, like a "Governance Nutrition Facts" label, so they can read each other parsimoniously.
Polycentricity: communities should sit in overlapping "trust bubbles," not one global network, so they can have nuanced, evolving relationships.
And forkability: communities should be able to copy and adapt each other's governance structure and rules, preserving autonomy while reducing labor.
The big takeaway: decentralisation alone isn't enough. If we want community-run social media to actually work, we need to design the connective tissue between communities, and the design principles here may apply well beyond the Fediverse, to any platform where multiple communities coexist.
Today at #FediForum we'll have a discussion with some of the co-authors of the academic paper Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media. There's no better time to read this paper!
