Building a Covenantal Fediverse in Canada

Thanks everyone! What I will talk about today is a possible future network here in Canada: a particularly Canadian covenantal fediverse.

Note that I am presenting on behalf of the lead author, Alex Martin, a PhD student at York University.

Also, a quick disclosure: no generative AI was used in this research or any part of this presentation. I also don't consent to any part of my work being fed into large language models.

Speaking of my co-author Alex, he published an article with Open Canada magazine, laying out the fundamental problem we're interested in: how Canadians are wrestling with the fact that they have become reliant on predominantly US-based technology firms.

As he writes, "As Canada faces ongoing challenges, ranging from a growing trade war with the US to fears of becoming the ‘51st state,’ it must also contend with a crucial issue: the information war on social media....

...US-centric social media platforms, particularly Meta and X, wield immense influence over Canadian public discourse, with 30 million Canadians using Facebook and 14 million active users on X alone."

Alex invokes a major political moment in Canada -- the reaction to Donald Trump's repeated (and frankly nauseating) suggestion that Canada should join the United States as the 'cherished 51st state.' This set off a massive wave of nationalism in Canada -- the "elbows up" turn, to use a hockey term. We can have a conversation about the perils of Canadian nationalism -- and there are many -- but at least when it comes to media, Canada has had to struggle with questions of identity in relation to the US for generations. The relationship of Canadians to US social media is no different.

Indeed, the fraught US-Canada media relationship includes a ban on sharing Canadian news imposed by Meta, which was done in reaction to the Canadian government's attempt to regulate Meta.

The Online News Act and Meta's news ban has led to a perverse outcome: the top provider of news to Regina, SK is a garbage company's Facebook page. That's because, well, it's a garbage company, so they can share local news on Facebook, while actual news companies cannot. While dealing with the Online News Act and Meta's recalcitrance is a matter for another paper, what Alex and I are interested in is...

...Canadian social media. I don't mean Canadians' use of US corporate social media. Rather, we're interested in social media run by Canadians, for Canadians, and where Canadians can share news. As Jennifer Rhee, quoting Ruha Benjamin, noted yesterday -- "we can imagine otherwise".

Or to use a quote from Science and Technology Studies, "it could be otherwise." It's a humble imagination, but I think worthwhile, to consider how local communities can control their own media. I am particularly interested in the conditions of connection happening in this emergent Canadian social media landscape.

So Part 1: the covenantal fediverse.

This is a concept I deploy in my latest book, Move Slowly and Build Bridges. Two terms there: covenantal and fediverse. Let's start with some background on the fediverse. To understand the fediverse, let's start with what seems to be an ancient digital technology...

...email. Email is a federated system.

Email resources appear on multiple computer servers, which can communicate with one another. For example, let's say a friend of mine uses Gmail, another friend uses Microsoft Outlook, and I use Protonmail. Despite the fact that we're each using the services of very different companies, we can still communicate. This is because all email servers agree to abide by a set of technical rules, a protocol called SMTP (Send Mail Transfer Protocol.) Today, there is a means for social media data to be treated like email.

In 2018, five technologists working with the World Wide Web Consortium published an open standard called ActivityPub. ActivityPub provides a protocol for social media data, much like SMTP provides a protocol for interoperable email servers. It standardizes typical social media activites: making a profile, posting something, liking or favoriting that post, boosting a post, and commenting on posts. Let me walk through this by considering three distinct fediverse systems.

The top logo is that of PeerTube, which is server software that allows for people to post videos, comment on them, and share them. The logo to the left is for Pixelfed, which allows people to post images. And the logo to the right is Mastodon, which is a microblogging system. All of these servers can communicate with one another via ActivityPub. That means my friend could post a video on a PeerTube server, another friend could see it in Pixelfed and comment on it, and I can like and boost that post in Mastodon.

It's hard to overstate how radical a departure this is. You CANNOT do that with corporate social media. You cannot post to Facebook and expect a friend on X to comment on it.

You cannot even post to Instagram and expect a response from Facebook, even though they are both owned by the same company, Meta.

The result of ActivityPub has been a global network of heterogenous social media servers. The average size of each server is around 500 accounts, but the network itself is comprised of 10s of thousands of servers with somewhere between 8 to 14 million users. OK: So we have a network of interconnected social media servers. I said it's a bit like email. I think it's more than that, though. Because it's more than a technical achievement. That brings me to the social or cultural factors that play a role in how these servers are interconnected. That brings me to a major focus of my book -- the concept of "the digital covenant." A way to understand the digital covenant is to start with what it is not.

Ok, so here's a tiny slice of a 7000 word document that few of us want to read: it's a Terms of Service agreement. When you see this, how many of you instinctively reach for the scroll on your mouse, or want to swipe the screen down, down, anything to get past this legalese? We scroll past these all the time.

Terms of Service agreements are a contractual relationship between you, the lonely you, and a vast Corporation, attempting to specify in advance every possible interaction you might have with that Corporation. This is not the practice on the fediverse.

On many fediverse instances, in contrast, a very different relationship is imagined. Consider server rules, such as these from Mastodon.art, a Mastodon instance. Compared to Terms of Service Agreements, server rules are easier to read. Instead of specifying every possible interaction, they provide a relatively simple set of deontological rules to abide by.

Server rules are often part of Codes of Conduct, used on many Mastodon instances. Codes of conducte are often developed by the communities themselves. As an example, I can point to AOIR.social, an instance I helped to set up, which has a code of conduct developed by myself, the othe admin, and the moderation team. In addition, the AoIR code of conduct is open to modification by AOIR members.

Instead of a relationship between lonely you and a corporation, you are part of -- dare I say this most dangerous term -- a *community* of people on a particular server. Moreover, your instance is only a little part of a big network of other servers or "instances," each with their own rules. Each of these communities is relatively autonomous, but they band together through shared values. This is what I call "the digital covenant."

In fact, the Mastodon project uses this language. The Mastodon server covenant is a key document here -- it's a requirement for any Mastodon instances that wish to be listed on the project homepage to agree to this covenant.

We also can see the covenantal fediverse by considering moments when servers break connections with one another. For example, consider what often happens when a troll server full of transphobes and racists shows up.

Instead of remaining connected to a server full of hate speech, fediverse servers simply defederate. There is no requirement that this network expand to include all, to hear all voices. Covenantal federation also involves defederation with instances that do not abide by the shared set of ethical values.

There are many examples of defederation. One is the Fedipact, an agreement by hundreds of fediverse instances to block Meta, which set up an ActivityPub-enabled system called "Threads." Rather than federate with Threads, many on the fediverse block it, citing its transphobic and racist content moderation policies as well as how it engages in surveillance capitalism.

Or the Bad Space, a longstanding blocklist project, where groups of admins share information about what servers ought to be blocked and why.

So, to summarize, with 'covenantal' I'm thinking with federalist political philosophy, including the work of Iris Marion Young,

but also with Indigenous forms of governance, such as the Haudensaunee Confedaracy. Basically, where relatively automous groups agree to band together through protocol in the double sense of standards of communication but also ethical norms and diplomacy.

Ok, with the covenantal fediverse in mind, next, let's turn to the specific concerns of the paper Alex and I co-wrote. We're focusing on Canadian alternative social media, especially Canadian fediverse instances.

The paper Alex and I put together has many concerns: US-Canada media relations, the relationship between social media and news. I will focus today on the question of Canadian alternative social media and connect it up with the concept of the covenantal fediverse. What is Canadian alternative social media? This is a major methodological question in our paper.

To narrow things, we focused on Mastodon (as well as forks like Hometown) -- this is a pragmatic choice in the face of the variety of the fediverse. Mastodon is free and open source social media software you can install on a server (often called an 'instance'). It is a microblogging system, so the 'verbs' are like Twitter -- followers, posts, likes, reposts. You can invite your friends to join your server...

But that server of course isn't isolated. It can connect with other servers via ActivityPub.

So, at first glance, focusing on Canadian Mastodon instances sounds easy -- let's just look at Mastodon servers with Canadian IP addresses, running somewhere in Canada.... right? Well, it's a bit more complicated than that.

A server installed in Canada might simply be using a Canadian hosting service, but otherwise have no connection to Canada. It could serve any group anywhere there's an internet connection. Conversely, a server physically located outside Canada could be explicitly directed at Canadians. Data centers are found all over the world. So mapping Canadian Mastodon instances is not cut-and-dried.

Alex and I discussed the problem, and then we turned a range of tools that provide metadata about Mastodon instances: Fediverse Observer, To The Fediverse, and the Mastodonserver.ca list. Basically, Alex and I separately looked around. We both examined instances discovered via these tools, compared our lists, and refined, with the question "what is a Canadian Mastodon instance?" in mind.

Through several discussions, Alex and I settled on three major categories of Canadian Mastodon instances: instances intended for Canadians writ large, instances intended for residents of specific regions in Canada, and special-interest servers with an explicit connection to Canada.

Examples of the first include mstdn.ca, Thecandian.social, and Cosocial.ca. These instances do tend to be physically located in Canada. But that is not necessarily required -- they could be physically located on a server farm in, say, Portugal. However, they are all explicitly aimed at building a member base of Canadians -- whether those Canadians live in Canada or abroad.

Regional Candian instances like Niagara.social, Ottawa.place, Nfld.me, Newwest.social, or Mastodon.quebec are tied to specific areas (cities, metropolitan areas, or provinces of Canada). The same caveats here -- they may or may not be physically hosted in Canada, but they are all aimed at Canadians (at a regional level).

This category is interesting. Mastodon instances like Sunny.garden, Vmst.io, CanAdapt, or Waff.club are geared towards interests -- gardening, art, technology, activism, and so on. So, what makes these Canadian? One key marker, for us, was explicit mention of a connection to Canada.

For example, Waff.club, which describes itself as a “Furry Mastodon server for art, 3D animations, and general furry stuff,” also includes in the top of its About page “currently hosted in Canada.” Other instances mention that their admins or moderators are based in Canada. Well, so what? The answer, we think, is that announcing the legal jurisdictions of the instance or its admins signals to would-be members. In the case of furries, who are a marginalized group, this might be very important -- privacy regulations, legal protections, protections for free expression, or languages, could be key decisions.

To go back to Waff.club again, their rules include "No posting of illegal content (based on Canadian laws, since the server is hosted in Canada)." So the declaration that a server is based in Canada, or its admins or moderators reside in Canada, invokes a connection to a legal and political regime distinct from, say, the United States or Russia.

There's more to the paper than just the mapping and categorization of Canadian Mastodon instances, but I have limited time. Here, I will say the paper includes interviews with Mastodon admins and members, interviews with Canadian journalists and politicians who are on these instances, and analysis of news sharing practices on Canadian Mastodon. On this last note, let me share a key finding that has implications for my thinking about the covenantal fediverse. Here's a quote from an interviewee.

"I try to promote Maritime-local news, especially community-oriented content. I am motivated by hope for stronger communities, which is what motivated me to start the instance in the first place…. Mastodon’s non-algorithmic feed helps to promote news sharing in local communities." This quote from an interviewee was part of a larger theme we discovered...

A desire for local Canadian news, provided through locally-run social media in Canada. In the wake of Meta's news ban, as well as the long, slow death of local journalism in Canada, some Canadians are hoping that regionally-based, community-run social media might be an antidote to growing news deserts across Canada.

With the Canadian nationalist Elbows Up idea extending to digital sovereignty -- as evidenced by a letter to Prime Minister Carney -- fostering Canadian-run social media -- particularly local/regional Canadian social media -- is a way to achieve such sovereignty. Individual Canadian Mastodon instances setting their own rules and yet connecting to one another would be a noncentralized, and non-American, network.

And yet, while digital sovereignty might raise fears that states around the world could be walled off from each other, the open protocols of the fediverse may help ensure that Canadian alternative social media can continue to connect with local social media around the world.

And with that, I will leave things there, but first a plug: if you are interested in research on alternative social media, check out the Network of Alternative Social Media Researchers at socialmediaalternatives.org. We have a mailing list, an active Signal group, and we host virtual and in-person meetups.

With that, I will conclude. Thank you!

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