Fediverse Social Media: Proposal to CMDS Faculty

Robert W. Gehl

@rwg@aoir.social

Overview

  • What is the fediverse?
  • Why might we use it for communication?
  • How might we use it?
  • Costs
  • Benefits

Part 1: What’s the Fediverse?

What’s the Fediverse?

  • A network of small, community-run social media servers
  • Can communicate with a shared protocol
  • Similar to email

What’s the Fediverse?

A diagram of the fediverse, with various servers connected to each other

The result is a global network of 10s of thousands of communities.

Part 2: Why might we use it?

Poor Content Moderation on Corporate Social Media

a CBC story about Meta's content moderation rule changes

Meta’s recent content moderation changes

Poor Content Moderation on Corporate Social Media

Elon Musk making a Nazi salute

And this...

We Can Set the Rules

  • Instead of relying on US-based social media, we can run our own and set our own moderation rules.

Or We Can Find Rules We Like

  • Or we can find an existing server that has a good moderation team and a code of conduct we agree with.

Part 3: How might we use it?

Ambitious Plan

  • We set up our own server for students, staff, and faculty.
  • We collectively come up with server content moderation rules and everyone agrees to them.

Less Ambitious Plan

  • We set up a server for only one account.
  • This is a common practice on the fediverse: the “server of one”
  • That account, “@CMDS,” posts about our students, staff, faculty

Easiest Plan

  • We set up an “@CMDS” account on an established server
  • Content moderation is handled by others (much as on corporate social media)

Part 4: Costs

Ambitious Plan Costs

  • Domain name registration (~$30/year)
  • Robust hosting (~$100/month)
  • Posting labour
  • Content moderation labour
  • Server upkeep labour

Less Ambitious Plan Costs

  • Domain name registration (~$30/year)
  • Hosting (~$10/month)
  • Posting labour
  • Much reduced (but still needed) content moderation labour
  • Server upkeep labour (but less intense)

Easy Plan Costs

  • Posting labour
  • Some content moderation
  • Most decisions out of our hands
  • Some fedi folks don’t agree with orgs having accounts like they are people

Part 5: Benefits

Benefits

  • CMDS at the forefront of decentralized social media, getting our messages onto a growing network.
  • Access to ~14m (and growing) fediverse users
  • Access to ~300m Meta users (if we choose)
  • Access to ~30m Bluesky users (if we choose)
  • Buy Canadian! (It can be entirely hosted in Canada)

Fediverse Social Media: Proposal to CMDS Faculty

Robert W. Gehl

@rwg@aoir.social

Here are my notes for this slide. They should not appear in the actual presentation, but they will appear in presentation view.

To understand the fediverse, let's start with what seems to be an ancient digital technology...