The Fediversalist Papers

It has been a whirlwind several months in our research—our interviews with people who run Mastodon and Hometown servers proved so fruitful that we wrote about twice as much analysis and documentation as we’d intended to do, and then spent the summer working through peer feedback. A more formal publication may take place later with the folks at the Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund and the rest of our project cohort, but in the DIY spirit of the Fediverse, we wanted to get the findings out as quickly as possible so that they can start finding their readers.

Here’s an excerpt from our introduction, for orientation:

We proposed this project in the fall of 2023 based on our shared sense that the Fediverse’s history of resilience and expansion positions it as one of our best chances to allow more people to maintain strong social connections online while escaping the behavioral manipulation, pervasive surveillance, and capricious governance that characterizes large-scale centralized social platforms.

We were drawn to this research question because the socio-technical aspects of Fediverse governance often seem opaque from the outside—from outside any given server, and especially from outside the Fediverse. Most servers offer some documentation about their practices and a few offer extensive explanations and policies, but whole swathes of knowledge about the aspects of server management that extends beyond the more purely technical concerns of hosting, provisioning, and technical upkeep exists only as insider knowledge.

Above all, we wanted to understand more about what happens behind the curtain of Fediverse server operation, and distribute this knowledge widely to help other server teams level up together—and perhaps to uncover characteristics of server governance that might be meaningful to others trying to build sustainable alternatives to centralized commercial platforms, whether on the Fediverse or elsewhere.

The main findings report is chunky—it’s the primary and most complete record of our research, and we’re offering it as a big PDF and a small website to ease reading.

We also made two short satellite docs:

• a Quick-Start Guide to Fediverse Governance Decisions (PDF), which is is an abbreviated introduction and a densely hyperlinked alternate path into the full Findings Report for people who run or are considering running a Fediverse microblogging server.
• the Fediverse Governance Opportunities for Funders & Developers (PDF) is a condensed version of our findings for individuals and institutions interested in building and supporting stronger infrastructure for Fediverse governance, also with links to more comprehensive information in the full Findings Report.

We’re both speaking at the XOXO Festival in Portland, Oregon this weekend, and after we’re back from that and the dust has settled a bit, we’ll be writing more about the things we didn’t get to cover in the findings report itself, and about the things we’re most excited about extending in the future.