Move Slowly and Build Bridges: Mastodon, the Fediverse, and the Struggle for Democratic Social Media (in Canada)

Thank you to Milena Droumeva for starting the process and to Sarah Ganter for hosting!

Before I begin, 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.

I am going to tell stories from my new book, Move Slowly and Build Bridges, which I wrote about Mastodon and federated social media. I want to start with one particular story. In that story, I may use some unfamiliar terms, like "Mastodon," "fediverse," and "distributed moderation," and "defederation." Don't worry! I will unpack those terms during the rest of the presentation.

This is vanta rainbow black, a person I interviewed during the research for my book. vanta rainbow black describes their self as "a cyberpunk cannabis consuming catgirl" and a "transgender enby girl polyamorous lesbian gender terrorist." In her interview with me, vanta talked about difficulties growing up in a conservative family. They were struggling with her gender identity and receiving little support from her parents.

Like a lot of young people, vanta took to social media to talk about their experiences.

“I was on Facebook for years upon years since like the 7th grade,” she told me in an interview. But her experiences on Facebook weren't always positive. As they struggled with mental health issues, and later a gender transition, she found Facebook users to be cruel.

“After I came out, there were people sending suicide guides my way and shit.... And there’s all sorts of pages posting transphobic memes daily, the kind of hateful stuff that gets people killed.” Now, you might think, "just report this stuff." And vanta did. And as she says, Facebook did "goddamn nothing" about the anti-trans hate speech vanta was seeing.

Fortunately for vanta, there was an alternative form of social media to move to: the fediverse.

In our interview, vanta said “I found the community to be such an amazing place that was so accepting and helped me come to terms with my gender and all that… I wouldn’t be the person I am today without [the fediverse]…" This is because, in contrast to Facebook...

"[The fediverse’s] “distributed community moderation makes weeding out things like transphobia easier.”

Things were much healthier for vanta on the fediverse. She was posting fashion pictures, song lyrics, and sharing her pirate radio stream with the rest of the network. And then, something happened.

Late in 2022, Elon Musk purchased Twitter. This put an incredibly wealthy man in charge of a major channel of global communication.

In many ways, this actually benefited vanta's new social media home, the fediverse. That's because Mastodon, a major part of the fediverse, saw a massive influx of new members in the wake of Musk's purchase. (One of the chapters of the book focuses on this moment.)

But increased attention to microblogging was also seen as a new business opportunity. Musk's purchase of Twitter was driving users and advertisers away. A host of for-profit entities arose to take advantage.

One of these was Meta, the parent company of Facebook. In early June, 2023, rumours began swirling about Meta's new microblogging project...

Eventually revealed to be called Threads. Threads would be similar to Twitter -- short posts, follows, likes, and so on. But importantly for this story, Threads was going to be compatible with the fediverse, the social media network vanta now called home.

That meant that Meta and vanta would collide once again. vanta rainbow black realized they needed to do something.

vanta created a hashtag, #fedipact, and started a campaign on the fediverse to convince fediverse admins to sign a pledge to defederate with Meta's Threads. She shared the #fedipact on the fediverse.

To date, the fedipact has been signed by almost 900 administrators of fediverse servers. Full disclosure: I myself am a signatory -- I was the sixth admin to sign the fedipact. So my fediverse server, aoir.social, does not connect with Meta's Threads.

Here, we have one person standing up for the social media they want to see, an alternative form of social media that they believe in, versus one of the most powerful and wealthy corporations on the planet. I know which one I am rooting for. So, that's the main story I wanted to tell from the book.

But you might be thinking: hold on. What's at stake here? What's the fediverse? What do I mean by distributed content moderation? What do I mean, "defederation"? And what does all this mean for us, here today? Well, let's talk about each of these -- let's unpack "fediverse," and talk about content moderation on that system, including blocking and defederating practices. And finally, let's talk about what lessons we here together might draw from this story.

So, what's the fediverse? As I discuss in the book, I would first turn to its underlying technology. A way to do that is to consider something familiar:

...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 (two of whom are Canadian) worked with the World Wide Web Consortium to publish an open standard called ActivityPub. ActivityPub provides a protocol for social media data, much like SMTP provides a protocol for interoperable email servers. ActivityPub 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. Mastodon, incidentally, is the most popular fediverse system -- it grew exponentially after Elon Musk bought Twitter. 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. These are run by small communities of people, not big corporations.

Contrast the idea of a network run by 10s of thousands of people with the sheer power invested in Big Tech -- power easily visible if we look at the guest list of the second Trump inauguration.

10s of thousands of independent servers means a different form of community moderation. I spend a great deal of time in the book on this topic. The way I would introduce to you is to draw a contrast between the practices of corporate social media -- X, Facebook, TikTok -- and the fediverse.

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 social media corporation, attempting to specify in advance every possible interaction you might have with that Corporation.

In addition, companies like X or Meta have the conceit that they can have global moderation policies, as if moderation is something that can be planned for the entire world from Silicon Valley -- and, incidentally, changes based on the whims of whomever is President of the United States. These are not the practices 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 short and easier to read. Instead of specifying every possible interaction, they provide a relatively simple set of deontological rules to abide by.

Their rules are based in part on their moderation: "mastodon.art is a safe space instance. We have strict federation policies that protect our most vulnerable members first and foremost, which means we block any instances that host or platform hate (racism, transphobia, etc.)."

Server rules are often part of Codes of Conduct, used on many Mastodon instances. Rather than being written by corporate lawyers, codes of conduct are often developed by the communities themselves. Their scope is limited to the specific community -- recall that the average size of a fediverse server is around 500 people. Content moderation among 500 people is very different from content moderation for billions of people. 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 other admin, and the moderation team. In addition, the AoIR code of conduct is open to modification by AOIR members.

Our code of conduct includes an anti-hate/harassment policy: "We do not tolerate harassment in any form. Harassment includes, but is not limited to, offensive comments related to characteristics such as gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion, technology choices.”

Instead of a relationship between lonely you and a corporation, you are part of -- dare I say this most dangerous Internet studies 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. The current, ActivityPub-powered fediverse emphasizes the Instance, the community as the organizing principle. The federation functions largely as an instance-to-instance relationship as opposed to the user-to-service relationship that we see in corporate social media.

Codes of conduct at an instance level help shape connections between instances. The result is what Diana Zulli and I have called the "digital covenant" -- an agreement between instances who abide by similar rules. I expand on this idea in my book.

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.

This incldues "Active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia: Users must have the confidence that they are joining a safe space, free from white supremacy, anti-semitism and transphobia of other platforms."

The practices of using codes of conduct for strong local community moderation is a direct result of how the contemporary fediverse developed, with queer, trans, and people of color developers who were invested in having codes of conduct in projects. I dedicate a full chapter to the history of the use of codes of conduct on the fediverse.

Taken as a whole, my book is about what I call the covenantal fediverse: a network of thousands of autonomous communities who agree to band together through a thin set of global values. What I find most exciting about the fediverse is that we see a widely-shared set of ethical norms in communication emerge as small autonomous communities choose to connect to one another. This is unique. Perhaps BBSes or Usenet anticipated it. But neither of those systems built a culture of shared values across multiple independent communities. The closest analog I can find is federated political structures, but of course when we speak of the fediverse, we do not speak of armies or currency. (This is not to say the state is withering away, or that there is no monetary exchange.)

The covenantal fediverse is the social network that someone like vanta rainbow black could turn to when Facebook turned out to be, as she puts it, "a toxic cesspit of hate." This is part of what makes the fediverse "alternative social media" -- it's not a consumer choice, like Pepsi or Coke, but a radically different way to do something, a radically different way to run and be part of social media.

To understand how a thin set of global values emerges through the connections made between autonomous communities, we also have to understand moments when connections are purposely broken. This is where defederation comes in.

To talk defederation, I have to emphasize a key aspect of much fediverse software: it is Free Software. That means that they are licensed in such a way that anyone is allow to study their code, modify them, and use them as they see fit. The Free Software Foundation calls these the four freedoms. The freedom to run the program as you wish, to study how it works and change it, to redistribute it.

While I have talked at length about the covenantal fediverse and the shared set of ethical values emerging through the interactions of thousands of communities, I need to acknowledge that there is no rule that fediverse instances must have a code of conduct. It's free software. People can run it how they wish. An instance might say it has no rules at all, or it might have one that says "we are a free speech instance." There has been a longstanding valorization of absolute free speech in cyberlibertarian thinking, which has become a demand to be heard. But this is a naive view of how speech works. Defederation shows us how.

The problem with a naive free speech view, or a naive openness view, is that it leads to the recapitulation of the power of the dominant -- the loudest, the wealthiest, and those in power are advantaged in such a system. Conversely, the poor or marginalized are drowned out. This is what Herbert Marcuse recognized with his concept of "repressive tolerance." We can see repressive tolerance in corporate social media.

Taken to the logical conclusion, "free speech" then becomes code for "let's keep listening to whomever is in power" -- and our history shows that this is a call to hear out people such as white supremacists, or people who believe trans folks should not exist. Elon Musk's free speech absolutism or Meta's recent turn to platforming hate speech is only one way in which this has been a norm in corporate social media.

As Marcuse argued, “Tolerance toward that which is radically evil now appears as good because it serves the cohesion of the whole on the road to affluence or more affluence.” This leads to the growth logics of corporate social media – we all need to join, even if there are evil people in the network.

But free alternatives, such as federated social media, also have a great deal of free speech absolutism. Take Gab, for example, a US-based social media site running on free software. Gab has a free speech policy, leading to self-identified Nazis having a home on their network.

Earlier, I said that the instance is the political unit of the fediverse, and instances-as-communities band together when they see that they have shared values, usually apparent through codes of conduct. If my instance sees that your instance shares the same values, we are likely to make and keep a connection.

So what happens when a free speech absolutist -- or outright Nazi -- server appears on the network? If a troll server joins the network, fediverse members do not wish to "hear them out." The network is not about naive freedom.

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. Federation also involves defederation.

We can see this when Gab, an alt-right freedom of speech server, attempted to use ActivityPub to join the broader fediverse in 2019. Gab was free to do so. However, the rest of the fediverse is free to block Gab. Many on the fediverse coordinated with a hashtag, #isolateGab, to collectively block Gab.

There are other examples of defederation in practice. One is the Bad Space, a tool to share instance blocklists, which builds on the #fediblock hashtag created by feminists on the fediverse. The Bad Space, and many other blocklists, allow admins to preemptively defederation with identified, poorly moderated instances.

And, of course, vanta rainbow black's Fedipact is one such example.

As the fedipact demonstrates, even if the largest social media company in the world joins the network, the rest of the communities can, if they wish,...

sever any connection with it. Even Meta can be defederated.

If you are thinking to yourself, "Robert seems to be drawing on the story of vanta rainbow black, a person who stood up to Meta, as a kind of parable for the choices Canadians now have to make," then I congratulate you.

Canada's dependence on US big tech is a major problem, particularly after Trump was able to bring Meta, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google to heel.

I probably don't need to remind you of Trump's territorial ambitions. [I am from Michigan, so I will say that Trump's latest threat, which involves seizing the Gordie Howe Bridge between my home state and my now-home province of Ontario, is hitting hard.]

And I likely do not need to paint a picture of what life would be like under this sort of rule.

You may know about two recent deaths at the hands of ICE agents in Minnesota, but those two are only two of nearly 40 deaths and thousands of kidnappings conducted by Trump's federal police force.

The death and repression by ICE is being aided by the surveillance technologies previously developed for things like targeted advertising, which is the lifeblood of corporate social media, as well as tracking people within social media itself. It was just reported on Feb 10 that Google has turned data over to ICE without a judge-approved subpeona.

Part of the task, then, is to disentangle Canada's technological infrastructure from its dependence on US corporations, not merely to protect Canadians' data and privacy, but also to stop supporting tech firms that are complicit in human rights violations.

Now, 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.

If you are looking for an alternative to US-dominated corporate social media, well, as Captain Picard would say, "There it sits."

For the past several years there has been a small but growing sector of Canadian social media: Canadian-run fediverse software. Canadian alternative social media. This is a small but growing sector. How do I know? Well, I've been observing it for several years now. Let me give you some examples of Canadian Mastodon servers.

Cosocial and Mstdn.ca are examples of what I would call Canadian-wide fediverse servers.

What I find exciting is that there are 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).

And there are many of what I would call "special interest" fediverse servers. Among them are Mastodon instances like Sunny.garden, Vmst.io, CanAdapt, or Waff.club are geared towards interests -- gardening, art, technology, activism, and so on.

And I was just talking about Mastodon. There's more to the ActivityPub-based fediverse. Taking a quick look at the Fediverse Observer, in the past 6 months, there are new servers spinning up in Canada running Ghost, PeerTube, Sharkey, Bonfire, Pixelfed, and Lemmy.

So yes, my parable today: be like vanta rainbow black.

Block Meta. Block X. Block Google. Block Microsoft. Do it yourself, run your own social, engage in democratic deliberation, moderate yourselves, and explore your shared ethical values.

Here, we can have a place that stands up for the social media we want to see, a new alternative social media that we can believe in, versus the most powerful and wealthy country and corporations on the planet. I know which side I would take.

END