Reading group for the "Governance on Fediverse Microblogging Servers" Report

General Discussions
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Events are up on Luma!

This report came up in conversation at our AGM, I think there is value in reviewing the findings and seeing whether there are considerations and improvements for CoSocial we should consider. This is a personal task I set for myself but also thought would be the perfect thing to do with others.

Context

Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi’s report Governance on Fediverse Microblogging Servers was released in August.

:spider_web: Web version
:page_facing_up: PDF version

Their initial research question was: “What are the most effective governance and administration models/structures in place on medium-to-large sized Fediverse servers, and what infrastructural gaps (human and digital) persist?”

Their main takeaway was: “we don’t think that the Fediverse is likely to realize the potential benefits [of thoughtfully governed, medium-sized Fediverse servers] without ongoing and intentional emphasis on—and funding for—addressing the cultural, financial, legal, and technical governance needs and gaps highlighted by our research participants.”

… so let’s read this report together and identify those gaps?

Plan for our calls

Sept 30 1: Read “Fediverse Governance Drop” Post and “How to Use These Findings” and “Our Goals” Sections (page 1-7 of the PDF version)
Oct 21 2: Read page 18-61 in the PDF version (web version):

  • Section 1: Overall Observations
  • Section 2: Moderation

Nov 11 3: Read page 62-88 in the PDF version (web version):

  • Section 3: Server Leadership
  • Section 4: Federated Diplomacy

Dec 2 4: Read page 89-116 in the PDF version (web version):

  • Section 5: Tooling
  • Section 6: The Case for the Fediverse

Early Dec 5: (to confirm) tentative Q&A with the authors

We can use this thread for conversation and notes.

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I also posted about this and got some interest so will move this to our General Discussions section.

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Notes from September 30

Who

  • Melissa
  • Django
  • Gene
  • Austin
  • Dawn

Notes

  • Decided to take notes locally and post them on the thread after (we can shift this later)
  • Decided for high-level notes, not attributed to individuals and a link dump
  • Chatted about our interest in this report and themes we are thinking about elsewhere
  • Big theme of the report that idea of a social component of the open web (“pre-platform”), yet need structure of some sort, how does the coop model suits it
  • What want to get a sense long-term: how are things appropriately moderated without retraumatising people?
  • What is in all the “governance tooling”, beyond just about governance on the fediverse (posts on masto, moderation on masto)?
  • Thinking about how governance happens:
    • What things needs to be affordances and interfaces?
    • What things need to be known in a stance (maybe guided by specific values)?
    • What things need to be written out processes?
  • Noticing server admin burnout, mastodon servers shutting down, it not being a sustainable space
  • Mostly interested in social aspects of how this gets dealt with, what the tech makes easy is also important
  • We are all interested in trying a new things with social media!
  • How do we encourage people to go into the coop-style fediverse instead of tiktok, treads, insta?
  • What is and how do we describe the value of mastodon and our servers?
  • How are things “sticky” for people when they join us?
  • Some cooperative and Cosocial-specific questions
    • Values of the cooperative beyond the coop principles, what are those ancillary values? Are we a values-based coop?
    • How appeals processes could work in moderation that are compatible with the processes we might have in the coop
      • In CoSocial there is a process for terminating membership and appeal (from the Coop Act), and we have a sense of escalation in our Code of Conduct, but more laying out concrete details important
    • Report mentioned legal liability requirements, what are they for a legal entity like a coop? What should we be thinking about?

Links

Next steps

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I completely missed all the prep for this, but very much appreciate these detailed notes so i can follow along and meet you at the next session.

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Cosocial Reading Group 10-21

Attendees

  • Melissa
  • Gene
  • Holli
  • Austin
  • Dawn
  • Curtis
  • Steven

Notes

  • High level things people were most interested in:
    – overall considerations okay, moderation a bit more practical in terms of content, dicussion of risks

  • p.19 fediverse can be most tailored in terms of community needs… how does this work in a national platform?

  • p. 24 emergent nature in fediverse governance- how do we ascertain emergent nature of governance? How can governance change in a context of rules? in one sense, codes of conduct are emergent, wanting to give space for responses and discussion, rather than just being hard rules

  • in cosocial, where decision-making happens is under discussion, and relying on principals in documentation is easier than drafting attempts at exhaustive laws

  • p. 35 “moderation begins at account registration” payment provides a barrier that controls registration, and likely contributes to good behavior… filtration generally, either by survey or invite list is seen as a good way of ensuring those who join want to be members

  • p. 42 hachyderm (many people and open registration) documentation seems extensive and impressive, but demonstrates some of the different approaches to moderation. sometimes people document everything, so they can refer to rules.

  • there are lots of “gray areas” but what kinds of reports actually require action?

  • there are interpersonal conflicts, but also lots of instances where you are explaining why what someone has said isn’t safe for others or appropriate for the community

  • if things are member owned and board governed, then consultation and coaching may be seen as important for setting the right moderation culture

  • lots of interest in moderation stats, including reports per week and breakdown by type

  • how are new moderators supposed to understand the vibes the community is trying to set? Where do they get support?

  • ultimately deliberating with other moderators can be very rewarding and ground moderation decisions in community values and consensus, while helping the moderator to understand the community and their role in it.

Links

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November 11 Notes

Attendees:

Gene
Dawn
Alka
Melissa
Hollie
Austin

section 3 and 4

server leadership and federated diplomacy

areas of interest:

threads and meta and the divergent responses

how do we encourage more membership to be active

there’s more to being in a coop than they covered!

esp for cosocial, mastodon is not the sole purpose, it’s just one of a suite of services

  • providing alternative social media for members

cosocial creation - talked about principles and values

many people want to be more democratic but don’t have the resources

Governance:

sense of ownership - the non-coop instances have different participation

report says most instances are some version of Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL)

  • constraints around succession planning

independent top down governance is predicated on growth

note that cosocial is a non-profit as well as a coop

commericial services seem to show that having just one person in charge doesn’t always go well
^ this has held some of us back from joining non-coop servers

working group and board relevance to membership

  • participation is the biggest challenge of any coop, offline or on
  • how do we define participation?
    – welcoming members?
    – membership on committees?
  • ease of participation matters
    – need to communicate to members if we want them to be part of things
  • what are the EXPECTATIONS of participation?
    – always evolving
    – unique to each group

people are showing up where we show them to go, but we’re “failing to convert” to higher levels of participation

how do we explain what we as coop orgs do?

  • leads back into how to do we measure participation
  • services, education for members
  • coops help coops/solidarity
  • “we need more spaces where people can practice democracy in our lives”
  • time in those spaces matters

Community can grow in a lot of places, examples include bluesky and facebook

the quote about how it’s possible to have a coop that doesn’t have full participation from all members

  • speaks to some difference between cosocial and social.coop

the quote about avoiding getting a board was really interesting as well

  • board can be led by folks who want more formalism
  • how do we set our vibes so we’re not board driven?

Paths to explore:

  1. mapping people-people to tech-people
  2. benefits of having institutions join
  3. pathways for participation

growth vs sustainability

Diplomacy:

example of server diplomacy when multiple servers are run by the same org

  • would it make sense for cosocial or someone to host instances for other orgs?
  • must have aligned plans: growth v sustainability

solidarity could help us:

  • moderation work
  • member education
  • even maybe how to participate?

“Then he isn’t safe?” said Lucy. “Safe?” said Mr. Beaver. “Don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.”

difference between safety and goodness

  • maybe we don’t have safety
  • feel like the coops are good

Threads federation

  • none of us are completely sure what stance our servers took, likely pretty wait-and-see
  • some contentious discussions online; loomio or on the fediverse
  • whatever we chose to do, hasn’t been a huge response from the membership

anecdotally :

  • seen people move off of Threads (to the larger Fediverse?)
  • has a lot of notifications, pulls people into Threads, even if the content itself is not very compelling
  • Bluesky easier to join than Fediverse because not having to pick a server
    – also fees can be a barrier to some people

Interest from some membership about whether to be in the bluesky space

  • might be contentious

links:

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plus
Two links from the document:

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Final Reading Group featuring a Q&A with Erin Kissane

Hi all! Exciting news that Erin Kissane is able to join us for our last session this coming Monday, Dec 2, 2024.

Call link for your calendars: Fedi Governance Report Reading Group - Featuring a Q&A with Erin Kissane! · Zoom · Luma

I have extended our call 15 minutes (4:00 - 5:15 PT / 7:00 - 8:15 ET)

0:00-0:30 - The reading group chats about the last section and
comes up with some key questions we’d like to ask

0:30 - Erin joins us for 45 minutes

  • We share a brief recap of major themes and discussions.
  • Erin may say a few words at the top, I said in particular cooperative related thoughts would be welcome
  • We have a casual Q&A for the remaining time, we will have a couple key questions but then hopefully it flows into open discussion

1:15 - We wrap up

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December 2 Notes

We used a hackpad: HackMD - Collaborative Markdown Knowledge Base

Attendees

Gene
Alka
Melissa
Hollie
Austin
Evan
Dawn
Erin

Notes

Themes from earlier calls

  • Thinking about how governance happens:
    • What things needs to be affordances and interfaces?
    • What things need to be known in a stance (maybe guided by specific values)?
    • What things need to be written out processes?
  • practical discussion moderation
  • dicussion of risks and if or how they are accounted for (the legal liability requirements)
  • threads and meta and the divergent responses across the fediverse
  • how do we encourage more membership to be active
  • what’s missing from the conversation that is true to coops
  • many people want to be more democratic but don’t have the resources

Actionable Items to take away

What are the actionable items we’d like to take away from this report?

  • Austin: concrete software tools, OAuth, moderation tools
  • Austin: Leader in helping people set up other federated social media
  • Melissa: Nice to have validation of same challenges
  • Dawn: how do we support tooling (but not take on building it ourselves)
  • Dawn: solidarity as a mode of doing server diplomacy
  • Melissa: Hachyderm moderation
    • 1 documentation on moderation, including the reporting interface
  • Gene: involvement with Melissa and Holli (social.coop) has been important
  • Connections with the other coop: Mastodon | data.coop
  • A member popular education collab workshop possible?
  • Is another reading group possible?
  • Follow up with BCCA

Potential Future readings

We will rescheduled the Q&A for within a week :slight_smile:

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3 posts were merged into an existing topic: Future Reading Group

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Q&A 2024-12-09

  • Round of intros (and maybe we could mention what coop we’re from :slight_smile:
  • Erin: If you’d like to say a few words at the top about this report, your intent in conducting this research, findings that stood out to you

Who

  • Erin
  • Austin
  • Hollie
  • Melissa
  • Gene

Notes

  • We did a round of intros
  • Erin spoke about background for the project, what led to this work
  • OCF dissolution impacted grant-making insitution and their timelines

Question

  • What was most surprising about the findings? Was there something you didn’t expect?
  • How has the report been recieved (so far)? Has it had the impact you were hoping for? Are there sections you wish had more discussion?
  • Not as much burnout and stress as feared (perhaps because intentionally spoke with people doing governance and people who had time to speak with us)
  • Found a correlation: stable and doable server maintenance experiences for the people who are doing the practices as they were laid out in the report
  • Hard to tell much about the reception (no tracking, no analytics) but mostly good and positive comments
  • People are asking deep questions and engaging with it
  • Hard to tell where it is going (outside of the academic citational circuit)

Question

  • How did people talk about growth?
  • No specific questions about that, came up in the discussions, lots of different answers
  • Some hoping for growth, making room for that (think all open registration)
  • Did hear concern about contraction, and a missed opportunity if instances don’t find a way to stabilize
  • Some ambivalance where instances wanted to stay small
  • Heard nothing like a corporate media experience

Question
What did people like about other governance structures than cooperatives? (Versus the magic solution of a cooperative?)

  • Did the amount of time spent coordinating in a coop come up?
  • Non formal coops wanted to move into that, EU based ones not too worried about the administrative part
  • That ladder of participation
    • how to tell if have enough power in community to move from passive arrangement to something more actively engaged
  • Cultural processes on a fedi server to get it up to speed
  • Most people had a coop background, but still not sure the best route for the tech stack / etc…
  • Dawn: TWC recent description: 5 committed people to start a chapter, (in the Acts 3 people to start a coop)
  • Erin: Is it different if online?
  • At least on EU-based one was in the process of applying for some funding

Question
Curious your thoughts now about the tension of people what wanted something more formal (e.g. to incorporate as a coop) versus the couple voices being like: “avoid it as long as possible”?
- When do you see getting formal helping versus hurting?
- How do you inherit an ability to evolve your structure?

  • Person who was clearest on formalizing drawing on personal experience
  • Other instance for an affinity group across borders, only intended for one thing, and light touch. In that case: a personal investment that absorbed some of those tasks
    • For early inklings toward participation: different answer than purely social media as a gift to community
    • Melissa & Hollie: learned more about the history of the coop from the report because that history isn’t documented anywhere.
    • Sign of health of org that not everyone game in at the same time / already has that history
    • Gene: always a small number in a coop doing to legwork, difference for digital coop, Nathan Schneider quote on “economies of attention”. Still fitting a similar pattern, but some advantage, dialogue built into ditial processes (tools)
    • Involvement of social.coop: think of them as neighbours, warm to have them along

Question
Social.coop and on-server community (does certain software like hometown enable that?) what have you seen?

  • In research didn’t see a whole lot of the on-server community being intentionally created
  • Frustration with the technical stack and ability to provide those elements
  • Local-only posting such an importance feature
    • The fact that [hometown] trails behind masto is a downside
  • Bonfire network of tools: also what if? slack, discord, task management? etc… https://bonfirenetworks.org/
    • now doing lots of tricky development work and develop documentation

Question

  • Fediverse diplomacy: it’s been bilateral so far (e.g. social.coop, mstdn.ca) are there other groups of fedi communities? [EP]
  • We had a conversation about solidarity as a lens for thinking about all the themes on server diplomacy you mentioned? What would that look like?
  • Fedipact as an example
  • Website league (https://websiteleague.org/) island archipelago model
  • So much room for collaborative governance, so far mostly reactive
  • Haven’t seen: coalition work because share enough values in common
  • Have seen: Informal list sharing: Hachyderm doing lots of that
  • Interesting: diplomacy has been informal and opaque, makes sense if community defense
  • Question to ask yourselves:
    • what are the groups of support? Identify and support other servers, experienced server teams showing up for people
  • IFTAS, perhaps: not neutral, but provider of helpful tools for a pro-social part of fediverse
    • focus: class 1 T&S topics
    • maybe not a broker of relationships or coalition
  • Quote: “Drama scaled is politics”

Question
Libraries and information freedom?

  • Libraries had a lot on their plate, are such important spaces and social infrastructures
  • [We said nice things about libraries and I forgot to take notes]
  • Asked if people had plans post election. Almost no one had plans as of the report
  • Now: Hachyderm has analysis

Question
What’s next?

  • Erin working on documentation how people can select good homes for the fediverse. Always available, please don’t hesitate to reach out!
  • Erin: Would love to see a resource on how we set it up, here is how you could set up a coop. Specifically an invitation to the cooperative model “you can do it to”