Digital Public Spaces -- Governance and Stewardship

October 29, 2023 9:08 AM

Let the community work it out: Throwback to early internet days could fix social media’s crisis of legitimacy.

We believe it is time to consider not just how online spaces can be governed efficiently and in service to corporate bottom lines, but how they can be governed fairly and legitimately. Giving communities more control over the spaces they participate in is a proven way to do just that.

That article is based on "Community Governance to Customer Service and Back Again: Re-Examining Pre-Web Models of Online Governance to Address Platforms’ Crisis of Legitimacy".

And New_ Public is a place for thinkers, builders, designers and technologists like you to meet and share inspiration for better digital public spaces.

posted by NotLost (14 comments total)

The "in service to corporate bottom lines," goal is indeed the problem. Governance should first be about the users and not about how to squeeze every possible cent out of users.
posted by Mitheral at 11:02 AM on October 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

We have gotten used to a false dichotomy between top-down control and asshole behavior, looking to large corps and governments to protect us from malevolent hatemongers online.

It's false because neither billionaires (e.g. Elon Musk) or governments (e.g. Narendra Modi) are necessarily opposed to hatemongering, and their muscle can even back hatemongering and give it more power. Under capitalism, even neutral businesses disproportionately give a platform to those who can bring in lots of money, harmful or not (e.g. Spotify and Joe Rogan).

Meanwhile whatever decentralized Mastodon is doing seems to be working for the most part in terms of producing kind, thoughtful communities.
posted by splitpeasoup at 11:28 AM on October 29, 2023 [4 favorites]

I've heard mixed signals about how kind Mastodon communities can be, and it's certainly failed to capture the journalistic crowd that was fundamental to Twitter's success.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 11:34 AM on October 29, 2023 [5 favorites]

X harassing and chasing away journalists (like NPR) is much more of an X problem than a Mastodon problem. It again debunks the notion that centralized platforms are inherently civil.

The reason that Mastodon has not absorbed journalists and other X refugees is that Mastodon is not an X replacement. Its nature lends itself to small creators not large audiences. The emphasis is on community rather than individuals and private rather than public figures.
posted by splitpeasoup at 12:48 PM on October 29, 2023 [5 favorites]

PS: to be clear, Mastodon communities do have scope for improvement, key among which is making Black folks feel welcome.

But most people's dissatisfaction from it stems from an expectation of being able to easily consume rather than create, like X allows for.
posted by splitpeasoup at 12:54 PM on October 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

Early internet began with more seekers and spreaders of reliable information, with less people seeking affirmation of beliefs (and those who spread beliefs to affirm them). It flipped through expanded coverage.
posted by Brian B. at 1:02 PM on October 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

The reason that Mastodon has not absorbed journalists and other X refugees is that Mastodon is not an X replacement. Its nature lends itself to small creators not large audiences. The emphasis is on community rather than individuals and private rather than public figures.

The fact that they don't have quote reposts is simultaneously Mastodon's best and worst feature.
posted by joedan at 4:30 PM on October 29, 2023

Is there anything stopping somebody from bringing up an ActivityPub site that does support quote reposts, and if not, how would those of you familiar with Mastodon rate such a site's likelihood of staying federated, assuming its moderators were essentially competent?
posted by flabdablet at 7:12 PM on October 29, 2023

As an example, the Akkoma software I use to host my little Fedi server does support quote posts. I have not been defederated (that I am aware of). I believe Firefish supports quote posts. Probably other implementations do too.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 8:13 PM on October 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

Most discussion I've seen on Mastodon either supports quote posts or seem resigned to their inevitably.

I'm sure there are instances that would defederate, but that's just how mastodon works.

Most of the unhappy critiques I've seen of Mastodon are from people who can't shift from expecting it to be like Twitter. It's superficially like Twitter (you post, people comment) but the underlying differences are profound.

The most obvious being the lack of an algorithm pushing posts into your feed.

eg Liking a post does nothing except to notify the person that you liked it. It doesn't make it more visible in any way. Just that is a quite profound difference in how one interacts.
posted by Zumbador at 8:24 PM on October 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

This is an ironic thread for this community.
posted by lkc at 8:38 PM on October 29, 2023 [4 favorites]

I'm a big fan of the "secret cabal" method of governance, myself.

Not that I am aware of any examples.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 1:56 PM on October 30, 2023

It all sounds great, but the reason things could be run like that in the old days (community-based, volunteer mods, power-of-the-commons rules, etc) was that the systems were not being run for profit at all. It can take a lot of money to run a social media site. (MeFi is largely text and still has $$$ challenges on a regular basis.) The vast majority of these social media platforms started out as cool ideas that picked up some venture funding and evolved into huge money-sucking cyclones hoping to be the next Alta Vista or Myspace or Facebook. They're very resource-intensive because they usually handle a ton of media and they cost a lot to run while not always having a great idea how the money part might work. "We lose $2.87 per transaction but we're buying mindshare." "The money will follow once we're woven into the larger fabric of the internet." "This idea is bigger than money." You know the evangelization I'm talking about. They mostly collapsed into pleas for Google, Apple, Facebook or MS to buy them, of course, but they started as concepts more than solid businesses.

There is still a lot of that bonkers evangelizing going on these days (eg Twitter's financial model never made that much sense) but even the big dogs are having trouble justifying some of this spend. They're trying to balance the books by altering product designs to drive whatever numbers move the money rather than whatever pleases the users.

But today's platforms are so large they make news, they are news, they're kind of too large to succeed. So a further trouble is there's much less commonality in "the users" compared to the old days, and "obvious" moves like banning trolls or deleting posts gets you caught up in all sorts of very public fights that were solvable in a much smaller, more cohesive community with a simple "not one of us" banhammer.

Simply put, who is "the community" that's going to "solve" Twitter/X bans or Facebook feed algorithms? Any decision that does align completely with some folks' demands is dead on arrival, and the community of the aggrieved is going to howl until they get exactly what they want because they know it usually works (or they kill the site.) Color me skeptical about this sepia-toned notion.
posted by Cris E at 2:04 PM on October 30, 2023

Everyone missed the link to New_ Public, which is not at all focused on the behemoths, and includes some nonprofits, for instance.
posted by NotLost at 6:03 AM on October 31, 2023 [1 favorite]