🪐 These are the voyages of the Starship Fediverse.

Highlights and provocations from our community sprint on federated social networks

Three things.

🦣 How we built our all-hands sprint on the fediverse, and why.
🛸 Testing our hypotheses at Signal Boost: Enter the Fediverse.
📣 New ways to participate in the New_ Public community.

Want to see what you missed from our community event, Signal Boost: Enter the Fediverse? Play the first video above, then check out the full playlist.

The fediverse is the perfect place for a New_ Public sprint.

Hello! Paul here. 👋 I’m still pretty new to this team, but one thing I can say for sure about New_ Public is that we love a good community sprint.

Our community sprints bring diverse voices together to quickly iterate on human-centered solutions, and we believe they are a reliable tool for turning thoughts and ideas into meaningful action, especially as we shift our company’s focus from research to product development.

Back in April, we held our first community sprint in Oakland, CA to explore the possibilities of digital public spaces in K-12 schools, to great success. (Read more about that here.)

We knew we wanted to do a second community sprint this year, but we weren’t sure what it would be about… until Elon Musk closed his deal to buy Twitter.

As Twitter destabilized, we detected a growing interest in Mastodon, a federated Twitter clone built on the open ActivityPub protocol. This migration gave us the perfect focus for our next sprint: what can the fediverse teach us about healthier digital public spaces?

How we approached our sprint.

New_ Public’s community sprint methodology emphasizes reflection, mindfulness, and a longer-term perspective on digital health. To that end, we designed multiple touchpoints for this sprint on the fediverse, including:

• A strategy huddle with New_ Public’s brain trust of advisors;

• A speculative product requirements document (sPRD) featuring aspirations and essential features of a digital public square;

• A research paper with New_ Public’s hypotheses on the shift in digital public spaces.

One key question remained: how do we include and represent more community voices in our sprint on the fediverse, the way that we did for schools?

Anchoring our sprint in a research-driven community learning event.

To align the other sprint touchpoints—the brain trust strategy, the product requirements, and the research hypothesis—we hosted a 90-minute virtual community event called Signal Boost: Enter the Fediverse.

For this Signal Boost, we broadened our community reach to a level New_ Public hasn’t seen since our 2021 New_ Public Festival. Close to 200 people registered for this event, and we had over 80 people in attendance, including members of Twitter’s founding team.

Our event was driven by the internal research generated by our team, with an emphasis on the four hypotheses posited by our Community Lab. We facilitated panel discussions and breakout sessions that would generate insights that would test those hypotheses.

Thanks to all of our featured guests: Dr. Casey Fiesler, Jeff Jarvis, Rabble, Blaine Cook, Sarah Masud, Robb Montgomery, Kenny Andejeski, and Wilfred Chan.

And special thanks to Angelica Quicksey and Deb Schultz from New_ Public for ensuring that our virtual event was a success.

Keep reading to find out how we’re making sense of the fediverse, including a breakdown of each of our hypotheses and some provocations for future discussion.

Hypothesis #1: Digital migration is a privilege.

Mastodon is growing at an unprecedented rate, and its growth appears highly correlated with Elon Musk’s changes at Twitter. We wanted to examine this mass migration more closely through our sprint. Who’s moving from Twitter to Mastodon, who’s sticking with Twitter, and what are their respective motivations?

Our hypothesis was that people moving to Mastodon are on average more wealthy, more white, more male, older and politically more left-leaning than the average person in their region or country, or the average person who uses social media.

From the main session:

There are opportunity costs to leaving Twitter, and those opportunity costs are borne differently by different people. If you are, say, an author or some other kind of artist who has built up your audience on Twitter and that's all you have, telling that person to just leave Twitter and join this brand new platform where maybe if you work for a while you'll get a thousand followers, that's very different.

—Casey Fiesler

From the Zoom chat:

that’s why movements to leave Uber/Lyft didn’t stick as they didn’t have an alternative other than going back to taxis

Making sense of it

Our discussions about digital migration led to compelling arguments about the nature of privilege. One could argue that simply remembering the internet that came before can keep a citizen one step ahead.

Those with the curiosity, professional skill, and personal experience to embrace more complex technologies like Mastodon could very well be wealthier, whiter, older, and more progressive than their non-Mastodon counterparts.

But on the other hand, many marginalized communities break that stereotype, finding refuge in services like Mastodon when online abuse made platforms like Twitter unusable.

However, the adoption of services like Mastodon could potentially still be linked to their proximity to the stereotype, so we’re curious if marginalized folks who are positioned a certain order of magnitude away from white privilege would benefit from a facilitated and well-supported fediverse migration.

Digital migration is hard enough to disincentivize even the most tech-savvy citizen from doing so. Perhaps social network embassies and digital immigration policies are in order?

Hypothesis #2: Plurality is vital to online democracy.

Here at New_ Public, we’re fond of quoting Elinor Ostrom as one of our north stars: “No panaceas.” This always makes us think twice about offering any be-all-end-all solution, as wisdom always shows us that there’s never just one answer.

And just like there is no one answer, our second hypothesis asserts that there is no one digital public space, but rather a multitude of spaces that encourage healthy dialogue, support civic life, and distribute power.

We proffer that healthy digital public life stems from the thoughtful replication of attributes of many kinds of spaces, both public and private: the public square, the library, the community center, the corner store, the front porch, and so on.

From the main session:

The one provocation that I’d like to make is, what if Twitter was Mastodon from the start? What if it was just a protocol from the start? The idea that corporate entities can enclose public spaces and public identities is anathema to everything that I believe in, for sure.

—Blaine Cook

From the Zoom chat:

Right now, Mastodon/Fedi could be what Firefox was to Internet explorer, or what Signal is to Whatsapp/FB messenger

Making sense of it

Both Casey and Rabble made excellent points about our habit of framing Internet services as discrete platforms, and using that mental model to extrapolate metaphors for the “spaces” that we seek, ones that can be tangibly owned. In other words, corporate branding can be a heck of a drug!

We’ve garnered attention here at New_ Public for offering public institutional metaphors for these kinds of spaces: parks, libraries, museums, and the like. But instead of focusing on the architecture of those spaces, what if we focused on the activities occurring in those spaces instead?

Jeff recommended Mike Masnick’s “Protocols, Not Platforms” during the panel, and the overall sentiment is particularly helpful when talking about the fediverse. Services like Mastodon assert themselves not as a fully-packaged standalone platform, but as an implementation of a protocol, namely ActivityPub. This means the future could lie not in where we go, but what we do.

Digital public parks could be a potentially beneficial platform for healthy digital public space, but the true measure of its effectiveness would lie in its support of a hypothetical “chess table” protocol, versus a “skateboarding” protocol, versus an “ultimate frisbee” protocol.

Perhaps this means we prioritize the protocols, then optimize the implementations and/or platforms to suit those protocols?

Hypothesis #3: Healthy digital public spaces allow for code switching.

How many different ways do you show up online? Whether it’s IG close friends, Twitter alts, or backup TikToks, today’s social media allows you to “choose your character” and the audience you have in a myriad of ways, and the verbal norms and visual cues are shaped collectively among your chosen people.

These features and behaviors may appear to be fun and games on its face, but one core underlying issue is public safety. Without these tools or platform hacks, digital citizens can be subject to unwanted attention, harassment, and abuse. Letting the right ones in and knowing who’s in the room isn’t just a matter of hospitality; it’s the key to a thriving digital presence.

Our third hypothesis is that the ideal digital public space accommodates the multiple ways we present ourselves and allows for safe and easy “code-switching” between those multiple presentations.

From the main session:

I get angry with journalists who say, “Oh, Twitter's a cesspool. We should all leave.” And I say, “You're leaving behind the voices whom you've ignored for the entire history of mass media, who finally have a place where they can have their own space, and now you turn your back on them again? How dare you?”

—Jeff Jarvis

From the Zoom chat:

Why aren’t we using physical metaphors from nature: ant hills, bee hives, etc. would welcome having this conversation in the Fediverse.

Making sense of it

For a long while, it appeared that Mastodon didn’t require a ton of code switching because the populations on each instance were fairly homogenous. Now that interest in Mastodon has exploded, the culture of the fediverse must reckon with heterogeneity at scale.

Previous growth spurts on other platforms—Twitter, Tumblr, and so on—would suggest a certain amount of culture clashing between the early adopters and the new arrivals, and that clash seems inevitable on Mastodon.

The way that services like Twitter and Tumblr found their way out of the clash was through the management of scale. Twitter eventually became so big that no one section of it could be conquered, while Tumblr maintained more of an intimate homespun vibe through its blogrolls and peer-to-peer acknowledgment of reblogs.

Our panelists and community discussed metaphors at great length as a tool to persuade new people to join the fediverse, the thinking being that if people found the right “code” they could “switch” to, they’d be more inclined to invest.

The hope is that the fediverse is open enough to accommodate all kinds of “codes.” But what about the “switching?” Perhaps the next evolution in healthy digital public space will come in the form of equitable translation and adaptation of cultural codes that protect sovereignty while still promoting empathy and understanding.

Hypothesis #4: Resilient infrastructure ensures success.

One of the features of discrete branded experiences like Facebook and Twitter is that it renders a lot of the costs invisible. There’s no need for the average customer to pay huge sums of money or understand the technical requirements when services are opaque, ad-supported, and funded by venture capital.

The fediverse potentially offers an attractive alternative to incorporated services: a de-commercialization of the experience, a return to the Internet’s roots. But the costs of running standalone implementations can crush an operator rather quickly; look at the suspension of new profile creation on Mastodon’s most popular instances due to overwhelmed servers, for example.

Our hypothesis is that the future of digital space must address the capital and labor resources required to build, maintain, and care for digital public spaces, not just the design.

From the main session:

My hope is that we return to open standards and that we return to the ability for a thousand people to build stuff on these platforms where you don't need, you know, app API permissions to experiment. We need democratic structures, and we need millions of them, that can set the rules for different scopes and spaces.

—Rabble

From the Zoom chat:

It is important for owners to organize as non-profits and think to align with foundations, for example. Cost will only increase

Making sense of it

In the Signal Boost event itself, the responses to the challenge of funding infrastructure were fairly standard: become a nonprofit, or find a wealthy patron, or redirect venture capital towards open-source or federated ecosystems.

The discussion brought a different model to our minds: the co-ops, mutual aid services, and worker’s unions that have prevailed in urban centers as a response to the public health crises and sociopolitical upheavals of the pandemic era.

From community grocers in Brooklyn to casual carpools in San Francisco and mutual aid networks in LA, groups of people have successfully found ways to respond to large corporate forces in the real world to prioritize their community’s welfare and support each other directly.

Perhaps these cooperative models are the key to the success of any digital public space, not just the fediverse. If we’re willing to share the costs of smaller social networks, perhaps we can all gain access to the shared benefits of a space built in our image, one that preserves our dignity and allows us to control our own destiny.

Some hypotheticals, and introducing Chat.

Signal Boost: Enter the Fediverse marked the conclusion of our week-long community sprint, but we here at New_ Public are far from done exploring this topic.

Here are four possible directions for future discussion on healthy digital public space as it pertains to the fediverse:

• What if there were an instance of a decentralized social protocol that centered and celebrated the n00b experience?

• What if there were a protocol that took its cues from infrastructures found in nature?

• What if digital public spaces were made specifically in the image of marginalized individuals, with all the accompanying cultural biases?

• What if we applied mutual aid and cooperative funding practices to supporting the builders of our decentralized social networks? 

If one of these questions interests you, or if you have a good question of your own, we have good news for you: we’re launching Substack Chat today!

Download the Substack app for iOS or Android and join us in Chat as we flesh out these discussions. We look forward to connecting with you in a fun new way.

Community Corkboard

Sunday’s our favorite day to catch up with thoughtful content. If you’re looking to keep the thoughtful tech vibes going, try one of our favorite new finds from the past two weeks.

On Being: Starting Points

What began as a single podcast is now a vast selection of “care packages”, all designed to promote social healing.

Clive Thompson: Tiny Snippets of Code That Changed The World

All the stories in our Signal Boost event about protocols of yore had us thinking about our assumptions around code, and this essay unearths something new and delightful and surprising about the history of our code, in classic Clive fashion.

Knight Foundation: Recorded Sessions from INFORMED

We recommend watching “How the Culture Wars Became Content Wars,” “On with Kara Swisher: Yoel Roth and the Crisis at Twitter,” and “A New Model for Platform Research? The U.S. 2020 Facebook and Instagram Election Study” featuring our very own Talia Stroud.

Our fave Substack post of the week.

Does anyone out there want to start an Anne Helen Petersen Fan Club? If so, we’d be the first to join. 🥰

What Would a Beloved Economy Look Like?

And finally, a call for new contributors.

If you’re the type of reader who makes it to the very end of a very long newsletter, I’d like to thank you, first and foremost. You’re a gem! Thank you for reading!

But I have a hypothesis of my own: dedicated readers are also dedicated writers. And if the New_ Public newsletter speaks to you, I’d wager that you probably have a good idea or two about what should get covered here, and you’ve likely got the writing chops to match.

If this sounds like you, good news: we’re reopening our writing contributor form for 2023! We have ample opportunities for writers to be featured on our Substack. We offer a $250 stipend per contribution, which can range anywhere from 800 to 1000 words.

If you’ve got questions about writing for New_ Public, my inbox is always open: paul@newpublic.org. But otherwise, if you’re ready to shoot your shot, fill out our form today.

Rooting for Messi ⚽️🇦🇷,
Paul