In his article “Decentralized Networks vs. The Trolls,” author Derek Caelin discusses the Fediverse. It’s a combination of the words federation and universe, and it is something I had never heard of until reading this chapter. The Fediverse is made up of a number of alternatives to popular social media sites, and they all rely on software developed by ActivityPub. Rather than hosting all users on one central website like Twitter or YouTube, the Fediverse is made up of individual servers that can all communicate with each other, creating opportunities for more niche communities and broader communication.
“ActivityPub drives a suite of alternatives to the well-known and familiar services that make up the daily Internet. PeerTube is a free and decentralized alternative to video hosting platforms like YouTube and Vimeo. Pixelfed stands in for image-based social networks like Instagram. WriteFreely replicates Medium. The largest and most active of the ActivityPub-based services is Mastodon, a Twitter-like social network with 500-character posts presented in a reverse-chronological timeline,” (Caelin, 2022, pg. 147).
As with many other current events like coronavirus and the war in Ukraine, this chapter exhibits uncannily good release timing. The piece focuses primarily on Mastodon, an alternative to Twitter. Like the rest of the Fediverse, I had never heard of it before this week. However, the news that Elon Musk has purchased Twitter has fueled Mastodon’s numbers, and they recently had the most new users added in a week ever. The possible need for a Twitter alternative has brought Mastodon and sites like it into a much more prominent conversation.
Luckily, Caelin’s chapter delves into many of the questions people curious about this new form of social media might have. Traditional social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are known to be overflowing with bad actors, trolls, and even rhetoric that can increase instances of violence. While many of these sites have moderation teams and have recently implemented stricter conduct policies, there is no way for them to control their millions of users. In echo chambers online, white nationalists and nazis thrive.
Mastodon presents an alternative solution: decentralized social media. Moderators can make their own servers, called instances, and implement any code of conduct they choose. Users then join individual communities that they feel best suit their desires for online interaction. Instances can often be organized around a central theme, from a band, to a city, to an identity. Users can then see a timeline that displays posts from their instance, as well as a timeline of posts from all the federated instances. The federation is what allows different servers to communicate with each other.
Each node writes and enforces its own code of conduct. These codes are usually transparent, dynamic, and customizable. Active and wide-reaching moderation is possible because of the relatively small size of most instances. Where a Twitter employee has to monitor reports from millions of users, an instance had an average user size of 870. Moderators also have a variety of tools they can use to cultivate the climate of their servers. They can silence individual users on their node, and in larger cases, they can defederate a node. This makes it so the two nodes no longer communicate. Posts and users from the blocked node will not appear on your server’s federated timeline.
While these decentralized social media sites do have a lot of benefits, they do not eliminate hate speech; they just make it possible for those who don’t want to see it to avoid it. The smaller, more intimate servers can heighten the effects of tribalism for all users, and for polarized or extremist groups, they can accelerate the effects of an echo chamber, as users of an isolated node truly only hear views from like minded people. Additionally, separating users into different servers creates issues surrounding visibility and discoverability. It is harder for a user to find posts from other nodes, and posts reach a much narrower audience. There is not really an opportunity for an unknown account to go viral like there is on Twitter.
This chapter was written before Elon Musk bought Twitter. Most of the users quoted don’t seem optimistic about Twitter following their model or their sites becoming extremely mainstream. I would be interested to know if those perspectives have changed in light of recent events. Musk advocates for open source Twitter code, elimination of bots, and an increase in free speech. Whatever Twitter becomes might push more and more people to alternatives like Mastodon. Already these effects can be seen as people discuss what they should do if Twitter dies. It has happened before in the almost total irrelevancy of sites like MySpace and the significant decline of once major platforms like Snapchat and Tumblr. The online world is constantly evolving, so thought and discussion about the benefits and consequences of these evolutions are essential.
About the Author:
Stella Hudson is a Graduate Assistant with the Baha’i Chair for World Peace. She graduated from the College of William and Mary in 2021 with a B.A. in English. She is attending the University of Maryland and pursuing a Master’s of Library and Information Science.