Community governance models on small-to-mid-size Mastodon servers
328 | Fri 02 Aug 5:30 p.m.–6:15 p.m.
Presented by
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Darius Kazemi
https://tinysubversions.com
Darius has been working on federated, decentralized, FOSS social media since his Mozilla Open Web Fellowship in 2018. He maintains several federated social media software projects including Hometown (a small community focused fork of Mastodon), and published Run Your Own Social, a guide to hosting a small social media site for your friends. He is an independent researcher based in Portland, Oregon, and is co-authoring an ethnographic study of the governance of small-to-medium size Fediverse social media servers funded by the Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund.
Darius Kazemi
https://tinysubversions.com
Abstract
Decentralized social media's rapid expansion, notably via the Fediverse and FOSS project Mastodon, brings both opportunities and multifaceted risks. For the first half of 2024, independent researchers and Fediverse denizens Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi spoke to the admins and moderation teams of about a dozen Fediverse servers. The research sought to identify current server administrators’ most promising models for mitigating those risks and outline the biggest and most important gaps in risk mitigation, with the aim of helping the broader Fediverse level up governance quickly, safely, and collaboratively.
This presentation will cover what we found when we spoke to the people on the ground whose job it is to govern social media servers of about 100 to 2,000 active users. We'll discuss the risks we identified in detail, a set of best practices for risk mitigation that have emerged on various servers in our sample, and discuss a set of variously intense interventions to address currently unmet needs and unmitigated risks to successful Fediverse governance. We will also discuss the role of FOSS tooling and where the FOSS community can step up to fill in the gaps in some of these needs.
Decentralized social media's rapid expansion, notably via the Fediverse and FOSS project Mastodon, brings both opportunities and multifaceted risks. For the first half of 2024, independent researchers and Fediverse denizens Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi spoke to the admins and moderation teams of about a dozen Fediverse servers. The research sought to identify current server administrators’ most promising models for mitigating those risks and outline the biggest and most important gaps in risk mitigation, with the aim of helping the broader Fediverse level up governance quickly, safely, and collaboratively. This presentation will cover what we found when we spoke to the people on the ground whose job it is to govern social media servers of about 100 to 2,000 active users. We'll discuss the risks we identified in detail, a set of best practices for risk mitigation that have emerged on various servers in our sample, and discuss a set of variously intense interventions to address currently unmet needs and unmitigated risks to successful Fediverse governance. We will also discuss the role of FOSS tooling and where the FOSS community can step up to fill in the gaps in some of these needs.