Mayel

“Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin

If you're attending #FediForum let's have a discussion tomorrow around this open access paper: Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media which argues that decentralized platforms like the Fediverse focus on governing within communities, but ignore the frictions between them. From workshops with 24 Fediverse community organisers, they identify six design challenges (visibility of governance decisions, collating issue information, controlling what's shared and with whom, enabling new inter-community relationships, customising governance, and minimizing adoption barriers) and propose three principles for "inter-community governance": modularity (shared vocabulary, like governance nutrition labels) and forkability (copy and adapt others' governance structure or rules), and polycentricity (overlapping trust bubbles instead of one global network, i.e. archipelagos).

Decentralisation and autonomy alone aren't enough, communities need connective tissues to interconnect them beyond just technical federation (a mycelium network if you like 😊)

If you're interested and are able to read or peruse it ahead of time that will help us have a more grounded and potentially productive discussion based on it...

The paper Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media by @s0hw@hci.social @andresmh@hci.social and colleagues at hci.princeton.edu (which we will discuss at #FediForum today) takes on a tension at the heart of decentralised social media. The fediverse promises to empower communities to govern themselves and set norms in their own context, on their own terms. But communities can't actually govern in isolation. Their members talk across boundaries, bad actors hop between servers, and the rules one community sets can directly undermine another's. The authors call these "governance frictions."

Their argument is that we've spent a lot of design effort looking inside communities, like improving moderation tools and onboarding, but almost none on what they call inter-community governance: the infrastructure that lets communities coordinate, share information, and manage their relationships with each other.

To explore what that infrastructure could look like, they ran four design workshops with 24 Fediverse admins, moderators, and developers. Participants imagined ideal tools, and the authors synthesized those ideas into six concrete challenges, like making governance decisions visible, sharing nuanced information about issues, controlling who you share what with, and minimizing barriers to adoption.

The synthesis lands on three design principles:

Modularity: communities need a shared vocabulary, like a "Governance Nutrition Facts" label, so they can read each other parsimoniously.

Polycentricity: communities should sit in overlapping "trust bubbles," not one global network, so they can have nuanced, evolving relationships.

And forkability: communities should be able to copy and adapt each other's governance structure and rules, preserving autonomy while reducing labor.

The big takeaway: decentralisation alone isn't enough. If we want community-run social media to actually work, we need to design the connective tissue between communities, and the design principles here may apply well beyond the Fediverse, to any platform where multiple communities coexist.

bonfire.cafe/post/01KQETGFGP...

Today at #FediForum we'll have a discussion with some of the co-authors of the academic paper Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media. There's no better time to read this paper!

bonfire.cafe/post/01KQDCWGK0...