Research report on Fediverse microblogging server governance: risks and mitigations, moderation, server leadership, federated diplomacy, and governance tooling.
Are We Decentralized Yet?
Statistics on how concentrated user accounts and data are across the Fediverse, the Atmosphere, web hosting, email, and other Internet infrastructure.
On the coordination for better moderation systems
There is a need for better moderation systems on the fediverse. But getting people to coordinate to build and adopt such systems is proving to be a challenge.
Modular Politics: Toward a Governance Layer for Online Communities
Governance in online communities is an increasingly high-stakes challenge, and yet many basic features of offline governance legacies--juries, political parties, term limits, and formal debates, to name a few--are not in the feature-sets of the software most community platforms use. Drawing on the paradigm of Institutional Analysis and Development, this paper proposes a strategy for addressing this lapse by specifying basic features of a generalizable paradigm for online governance called Modular Politics. Whereas classical governance typologies tend to present a choice among wholesale ideologies, such as democracy or oligarchy, Modular Politics would enable platform operators and their users to build bottom-up governance processes from computational components that are modular and composable, highly versatile in their expressiveness, portable from one context to another, and interoperable across platforms. This kind of approach could implement pre-digital governance systems as well as accelerate innovation in uniquely digital techniques. As diverse communities share and connect their components and data, governance could occur through a ubiquitous network layer. To that end, this paper proposes the development of an open standard for networked governance.
AI, Agency and Protocols_ Power and Governance in Open Social Networks.pdf
The Purpose of Protocols
Every open social protocol generates shared resources, but none has produced a governance framework adequate to those resources. So who fills that vacuum?
(PDF) The Drain of Scientific Publishing
PDF | The domination of scientific publishing in the Global North by major commercial publishers is harmful to science. We need the most powerful... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate
Governing Online Speech: From 'Posts-As-Trumps' to Proportionality and Probability
Online speech governance stands at an inflexion point. Platforms are emerging from the state of emergency invoked during the pandemic and lawmakers are poised t
The Internet Transition
The Internet is allowing us to build a richer, more complex society but the way in which we Internet today is failing to support the governance systems that a more complex world requires. I take a look at why these issues are related, try to develop an intuition for a way forward, and point at the emerging field that is coming together to build that future.
The rise (and future fall) of Discord
I want to talk about Discord. Not about all the issues like privacy, accessibility, performance. No, the good things. The part where it completely revolutionized the internet. And how it will destroy it all.
Social media algorithms can be redesigned to bridge divides — here’s how
"It falls to both the tech companies that built these systems and an engaged public to create technologies designed for social cohesion."
🇪🇺🌐 The future of social media may be decided in Europe
A survey of European AT Protocol projects, including 4 mini case-studies
The Drain of Scientific Publishing
The domination of scientific publishing in the Global North by major commercial publishers is harmful to science. We need the most powerful members of the research community, funders, governments and Universities, to lead the drive to re-communalise publishing to serve science not the market.
W-Social: What does sovereignty mean for social media? – Open Future
The European Commission’s move to W-Social frames it as a European alternative to X, but its closed-source code and reliance on Bluesky’s infrastructure show that sovereign social media requires open infrastructure—not European ownership alone.
Update #1: Getting started and keeping momentum - Decentralizing FedCM
At the start of March this year I started working on ensuring FedCM supported decentralized ecosystems, such as AT Protocol, funded by a grant from Bluesky S…
🔭🖤🚀 Social media’s next evolution: decentralized, open-source, and scalable
How Blacksky grew to millions of users without spending a dollar
