Pushing Electrons

With the recent migration of millions from Twitter to Mastodon, there are now both many more people participating in the Fediverse, as well as far more expertise in running a social media ecosystem.

So far, Mastodon and the other federated services have held up well under the deluge. It feels like the technical elements of federated social media, if not solved, are in a relatively good place right now.

Naturally, though, there's much more to social media than just the tech.

In a recent thread, Whitney Merrill noted that instance owners have some interesting legal obligations based on both where their server is based and where the instance's users live. Along with privacy laws like GDPR, there may be other laws against hosting or distributing illegal content ranging from forbidden speech to CSAM. What happens when a government agency comes with a subpoena?

(Update: the great folks at EFF put together a great primer on the legal considerations around running your own instance)

There's also the actual operation of the instance community. How is moderation handled, and what's the right ratio of mods to users? Instance costs scale surprisingly slowly (for instance, techhub.social costs $500/mo for a Mastodon instance with over 50,000 users), but they still need to paid for. How is that covered? And if the instance owner gets tired of running it, what recourse do users have if, one day, it just gets shut down?

So, looking toward the future of the Fediverse, I feel like the key dimensions guiding it will be:

1. Instance ownership and liability.
2. Moderation.
3. Funding.

Based on this, here are some of the key models I think we'll see going forward.

Model 1 – Organization-run instances

As the Fediverse continues to grow, instances run by organizations will become more prominent. On their face, they solve a lot of Fedi problems:

• Having more than one person involved in ownership should create a more durable instance, less threatened by one owner's whims
• Organizations provide a liability shield unavailable to individual operators
• Many hands make light work...of moderation

They also have the potential to offer options attractive to a broader range of users.

• A for-profit instance could charge users a nominal fee ($8/month?) for 24/7 moderation, algorithmic discovery services, and easy on-boarding from other ad-based social media services. (This is actually a really nice business model, and I'm surprised more folks haven't jumped on it.)
• A professional organization might offer lighter moderation, but provide tools for discovering and amplifying new work by it's members, independent of employers. It could also help on-boarding new members to the profession and connect them with mentors (think LinkedIn x ArXiv x Twitter)
• A non-profit or co-op could offer low moderation options, but have systems that support mutual aid or keep members abreast of special-interest issues.

And so on. There's a huge space for exploration here that I'm excited to see develop.

Option 2 – Individual-run communities

This seems to be the bulk of instances today – run by one person, ad-hoc moderation support, donation model for technology costs. Which is great for getting the Fediverse off the ground, but has some challenges with long-term sustainability.

First, the single mod-king model can easily lead to burnout if the instance gets too big. The donations aren't likely enough to compensate the instance owner for their time, and the owner is at personal financial risk if a user does something illegal on their instance. They may have to be aggressive with the block button to keep bad actors at bay, or nuke the whole instance if it simply becomes too much.

It's a lot for one person to carry. God bless all who have done it and continue to do it. I hope, for their sake, we can do better.

Option 3 – Friends-and-family instances

One way to not get sued is to make sure the only folks on your instance are people who won't sue you.

If you are pretty technically savvy, you can spin up your own instance, invite your circle of friends and family, and only add others you know by invitation. If your neighbor or father-in-law hasn't used social media before, they'll have a friendly, supportive space to help them get up to speed. Hosting costs can be shared in-kind through, like, pizza and beer or something.

There's obvious scaling issues here for the whole Fediverse, but it keeps owners protected while providing a nice level of on-boarding support for those new to the space.

Option 4 – Individual instances

Finally, people can also spin up their own instances and be the sole owner of the island. This will make most sense for people who both:

1. Have the technical skills to do so
2. Already have a network on the Fediverse that they can bring with them (vs trying to build one from scratch without a Local feed).

The “technical skills” piece is still too-large a barrier for the majority of people. I have another blog post on setting up a (this!) WriteFreely instance, and even a simple process requires something like 30 minutes and a technical degree to do right. When Fedi tech finally gets to the place where you can pay $5/month and run your own instance with a button click, I think we'll see much more wide-spread adoption of this model – but not until then.

The Future

The widespread adoption of ActivityPub and the rapid growth of the Fediverse is one of the most exciting developments on the Internet in a long, long time.

And we're still in the early phases. Let's see what we can build together.

Tags: #fediverse

Written by Dulany Weaver. Copyright 2022-2024. All rights reserved.