Fediverse Report Newsletter essay - #114

Hi {name},

It is now some 2.5 years since decentralised social networks have gotten significant mainstream attention, after Elon Musk bought Twitter in November 2022 and there was a large amount of media attention to the people moving away from Twitter to Mastodon. It is striking to me to what extend there is still unclarity over language, and how these networks actually function.

This week's fediverse drama around the Fosstodon server (TD;LR: a Fosstodon mod made hateful comments on his Reddit account, and other servers defederated from Fosstodon over this and how the admin team handled the situation) is an interesting example of how much of the actual operation of the network is not documented nor explained to people. The mental model of Mastodon is that instead of 1 large Twitter you have many smaller Twitters which are interoperable with each other. So far, so good, but there is surprisingly little attention being paid of how this interoperability works on a social level. Conversations revolve around the technical aspects, and making the protocol work. But the much more challenging part is social: what are the social agreements for servers to interoperate, and how do disputes get handled? Personally I don't feel that "yelling at each other in the feed" is a particularly constructive way to go about things, even if the underlying reason for doing so is valid. There are two things missing here: there is no clear agreement between different fediverse servers on which terms they interoperate with each other. But clear language to describe such an agreement is also missing. I've been calling it a federation policy to describe such an agreement, but that's not a widely used term. We need both a name to describe it, as well as the agreement itself.

Over on Bluesky, the Bluesky team is struggling with the term 'decentralisation'. ATProto does various things which are cool, useful, and fit within the decentralisation ethos. But the terms 'federation' and 'decentralisation' are usually associated with complete entities (usually servers) that are interoperating with each other in some capacity. What ATProto does is splitting up the 'entity' into many different smaller components: data hosting, aggregation, transformation and moderation are all separate components that can be run by anyone. This clearly fits with the decentralisation ethos, but does have the strange problem that it makes it much harder to use the term 'decentralisation' to describe what is going on.

This is made even more confusing by the fact that conversations around decentralisation cover two different problems: a technological architecture, as well as a social distribution of power. Bluesky has a major concentration of power, with over 99.9% of people on the network using the Bluesky infrastructure. A major open question is to what extend a technological architecture can compensate for such a power distribution.

But this is also what fascinates me, and motivates me to write about these networks: there is such a huge amount still unknown, and we are still in the process of figuring out how these networks function and how to describe them.

Thanks for reading, and until next week!