Government Fediverse
This post, ironically not on a Fediverse platform, represents my views only and not those of my employer in the Government of Canada. This is very much a discussion piece and I look forward to comments here, on Mastodon, Twitter, or LinkedIn where I reside.
July 2023 edit: Threads, the new social platform by Meta, is planned to carry ActivityPub support here too, which is an interesting development to say the least.
In November, presumably due to policy changes made by Twitter’s new management, activity on the nascent and much smaller rival Mastodon exploded. Esteban Moro, an assistant professor at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, noted on November 30 that after a tremendous spike on November 17, the service was growing by 50,000 new users daily. Spikes in user growth directly coincided with dramatic events in Twitter’s management since Elon Musk’s purchase.
Mastodon’s sudden and rapid growth has revealed some usability issues of the platform (if it is a platform at all), raised concerns around the quality and fairness of moderation, and kicked off legal questions about regulating vastly decentralized networks. Throughout all of this is the potential opportunity of a social media presence that is not ad supported and is part of a larger, interoperable ecosystem of services known as the “Fediverse.” Where we’re used to princes, the Fediverse presents a quasi-parliamentary approach to social media governance, with all of its pros and cons.
So here I’m going to look at the ups and downs of Mastodon, and the Fediverse writ large, from the perspective of government service delivery as of today. As this landscape is still changing quickly it’s really only a snapshot in time.
Fediverse
The Fediverse is a series of interoperable services that help a user accomplish social tasks, like blogging, microblogging, or sharing pictures or video. These services are owned separately and communicate via agreed-upon protocols. One of these protocols is ActivityPub, a W3C standard, which is in effect a W3C response to an internet that has arisen full of walled gardens and oligopolists. Per Axbom wrote a very simple explanation of this emerging network.
Mastodon as a microblogging service is part of the Fediverse, but not its only part. Wordpress, the popular blogging platform, is as well. A particularly interesting development in the past month has been open discussion by Flickr and Tumblr about whether or not to adopt ActivityPub support. Should they adopt this standard, the content of these established platforms could be digested by other Fediverse services, which could allow users to see each other’s content without necessarily joining the other service. In this case, Flickr and Tumblr would be part of the Fediverse, but not part of Mastodon.
What might emerge is a constellation of competitive but interoperable third party apps that provide greater user experiences. You could curate a feed of videos, long-form writing, podcasts, and microblogging on the content you want from different services.
Mastodon
Mastodon is interesting if not a little confusing to navigate. It’s Twitter-meets-Reddit-meets private forums, a thing that looks and feels like Twitter in that it’s a microblogging platform with hashtags, but is not engineered at all like Twitter. As soon as you can release yourself from the crutch of comparing the two, the better.
Briefly, you subscribe to a specific server called an instance that looks and feels similar to other instances, but other than a few common rules binding all of the Mastodon platform, this instance may have its own server rule sets. Anyone can set up their own Mastodon server and set their own rules, provided that they meet the general “covenant” set by the central Mastodon nonprofit. These servers are not ad supported, and they are usually administered and moderated by volunteers. People in one server can see the content in another server (usually, but not always), so that you could eventually curate an experience that looks and feels sort of like Twitter, but operates on fundamentally different principles because the central authority is weak. That said, some Mastodon instances are islands without bridges to their neighbours, meaning they do not engage more broadly with other instances. This also means that growth in numbers does not neatly correspond to growth in community.
Editorializing for a moment, people leaving Twitter weren’t looking for a new engineering paradigm, rather they were looking for a place to rebuild a community they had lost or or felt they had lost. Usability is difficult because we’ve been trained to accept the existence of large platforms that operate with a single, centralized authority over it. The new user experience doesn’t provide a way for someone untechnical to evaluate different servers and know what’s right for them. Changing instances is possible, and many people do it once they understand the landscape a little better, but it’s not the most intuitive process at the moment.
Mastodon asks that people take a sliver of their identity, community, or interests and root their foremost — but not all — experience in it. Again, with the right hashtags and the right connections one can easily break out of instance-based content but it isn’t a singular, algorithm-driven pipeline of information like Twitter is.
Additionally, the decentralized model means that moderation decisions can vary wildly from server to server, and decisions are effected by volunteers sometimes without experience or training. This has led to high-profile equity issues recently manifested in several Black activists being suspended from mastodon.social or .online, two of the largest servers. Social media communities develop their specific cultures and Mastodon is going through the critical process of revising that culture (or cultures) in light of its substantial growth and decentralized nature. A bad experience in one island can taint the view of all of them, and personally I can’t blame anyone for feeling that way, especially people of colour that have built communities on Twitter that can’t immediately be replicated (something I am very much still learning depth and breadth).
There is real opportunity here, as with the right incentives and support, this diverse and interoperable landscape has the ability to offer a fair suite of services without conglomerating power into a single entity driven to hoover up your personal information to drive ads.
Government and Fediverse
The existence of governments and government actors on private platforms was always an ethical trade-off. Perhaps we forgot about that ethical trade-off over time, but it was always the scenario where announcements were being made on platforms where individuals’ data was being commercialized by foreign companies. Governments have made these sacrifices because that’s where people are (were?), and they needed to push messaging about public safety or new program offerings where people spend their time. As a result, Twitter and Facebook became an essential source of information during disasters or emergencies. This was likely a result of prevailing ideology that eschewed public ownership in digital communities that has existed for decades across much of the world.
Mastodon, or the Fediverse writ large, will not be the same unless authorities are on there fulfilling those needs. The difficulty with Mastodon is that without hashtags, discoverability of content across server instances is entirely reliant on the people that you follow. So if the Government of Canada decides to create a server instance for all of its own accounts (potentially useful for managing messaging), to get information into Canadians who live on mstdn.ca, it would need to effectively use a combination of hashtags and local bots or accounts to boost government messaging. All Canadians Mastodoners (?) aren’t all on mstdn.ca however; some have joined the large instances, some chose instances based on hobbies, some joined small servers with friends or colleagues, and others may be sitting on their own. Somewhere in their network, someone would have to boost content.
The Government of Canada could develop an ActivityPub-based broadcasting and/or collaboration service that could theoretically be carried on other Fediverse applications for important public safety or service delivery announcements and then use Mastodon or some other service to engage with reactions, but people would need to care enough to subscribe to it. I’m also not 100% sure that this would technically work so very open to musing in the comments below (or on Mastodon!). Governments putting videos on PeerTube or broadcasting on Owncast all from their own, publicly-owned servers is interesting and an extension of the way their view the web.
Then there is also a problem of whether or not it’s worth governments joining this ecosystem now, and lend legitimacy to the ecosystem. Some governments are tiptoeing in that direction (see the German Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information as an example) Social media platforms rely on network effects: the value of the network increases as more users participate in it. That tipping point of utility will differ by person and the spheres of participation they want to engage with (my peers, colleagues, family, celebrities, journalists, official accounts, etc) as well as usability and the ability for the network to provide them a safe and reliable experience. Government joining now can attract individuals who want announcements or journalists that will report on these announcements, which could create a virtuous cycle enough to perpetuate a network effect.
Moving forward on Fediverse
I don’t have strong recommendations, personally. I mostly wrote this to trigger discussion among people in different sectors on the utility of the system. It’s probably for the best if governments dip their toes into the ecosystem to see what it’s about without a large commitment to it. Largely governments could:
- Join an existing Mastodon instance, though this would not be a good idea as they rely on volunteer accounts. There could be contractual or contribution relationships that could be thought through to maintain this but I don’t see the point when governments can…
- Create Mastodon instances of their own (as Germany appears to be doing with social.bund.de*) and direct its constituent agencies to create accounts on it, then somehow get content served on other popular instances through outreach. This is possible and might be successful but it will require a lot more active engagement than Twitter currently requires. Hooray publicly-owned digital infrastructure! Also this will have costs, however nominal.
- Prototype an ActivityPub-based digital broadcast/collaboration forum (assuming technically feasible) that can be used to reach out to constituents in the Fediverse. This would require a product team, a couple of years, a mandate to be very open about its work, and an incredible patience for failure. But it could teach the world a lot about this potential future.
I haven’t really addressed an elephant currently asleep in the room: that of the Fediverse as an “entity” subject to regulation. It’s going to be hard; servers are everywhere and so I look forward to the legal community trying to unpack how jurisdiction will work in something so wildly decentralized. This was an interesting blog post about considerations under English law, for example, but I haven’t seen any Canadian-specific analysis.
I’m more intrigued in the potential for the Fediverse to upend governance than spending calories in figuring out relevance in a virtual reality wannabe monopoly. There is real interaction potential in the Fediverse, and it fulfills some of the early romanticism people had about the internet in the early days. It could certainly be all for naught, but I believe that it’s worth trying.
Welcome to my new pet interest over which I have no influence.
*Useful to note that Mastodon was founded in Germany and has its largest community instances there.
