Imagine a city of several million people where, for many years, the only shoes available on the market are cheap sneakers sold in just three or four adult sizes. Anyone not interested in or capable of making their own shoes has to pick one of those sizes and live with it. In wet and sleety seasons, everyone gets sodden socks and sometimes frostbite. People whose feet are larger than the largest available size must learn to make their own shoes or put up with cramping and blisters. People whose feet are smaller than the smallest size, including all children, have to walk around in clownshoes, or make their own, or go barefoot.

Then, on the outskirts of the city, a mile-long row of shoe-selling stalls opens up—first a few, then dozens, then hundreds. Most of the stalls are little, a few are big, and all of them are ready to help the citizens of the city get better shoes. Many display signs touting the many benefits their shoes provide: special eco-friendly materials, ultralight designs, a range of colors.

Unfortunately, there are no standard sizes or display pairs: the shoes are sold from closed boxes bearing names that reveal little about what’s contained within them. Some boxes are marked with activities the shoes are meant to support or a prose description of their size ("quite big"), but you can’t try them on.

Many of the stalls sell shoes of good quality, though some have very long toes or unexpected closures. A few sell shoes that are exceptionally sturdy, stylish, and comfortable. Some stalls sell shoes come with holes pre-installed in the soles (to allow the free flow of air and/or water), while others have sharp spikes that gradually emerge through the insole as the wearer’s weight breaks the shoes in. Some shoes fall to pieces by the time their buyer has made the long walk back home, or dissolve in the first heavy rainstorm their wearer encounters. Some shoes will work well for some buyers but, without explanation, deliver a series of painful electrical shocks to others.

All these qualities are unadvertised; there are no reviews to guide decisions. There are many people offering advice about which stall sold a pair of shoes that suited them, though you can’t actually talk to most of these people until after you’ve bought your first pair of shoes. (Should you complain aloud about a pair of surprisingly ill-fitting pair of shoes, shoe enthusiasts will pop up to shout at you about how wrong you were to choose the particular shoe-seller you chose—after all, everyone in the know already knows they’re unscrupulous.)

But! If you don’t like the shoes you buy, a generous return policy ensures that you can return them for a refund and retain both your socks and your feet, though the process of buying a new pair may consume several hours.

In the end, finding even one workable pair of shoes may take multiple trips back to the Alley of Shoes.

When an enterprising shoe seller in the Alley of Shoes expands their stall into a whole shoe store that promises never to sell spiked, holey, or otherwise boobytrapped shoes—and that shoe store is right at the beginning of the long alley of shoes—it’s quite likely to attract a majority of first-time shoe-buyers, and many of the others who’ve been burned purchasing terrible shoes from smaller sellers.

The shoes in the big shoe shop won't accommodate everyone—especially people who have especially large or small feet, or who need to work out in the rain and snow, or who require special shoes to accommodate disabilities or unusual feet, or pole dancers. But at least you know what you’re getting.

this isn't about shoes

For folks coming into this site's zone late, I’m talking about a network problem on the fediverse network of ActivityPub-based sites and services, the largest and most influential of which is the Twitter-like Mastodon service. I think this layer of the internet is weird and interesting and so promising, and I get into a lot of detail about why I think that—and what needs fixing to fulfill all that potential—in an early section of the fediverse governance report (context here) I published with Darius Kazemi earlier this fall.

To be “on” Mastodon, you need to start or choose a home server, sometimes called an “instance.” Anyone can run a server, and often anyone does, including both super-thoughtful and completely unscrupulous people, hyper-competent people with lots of experience and absolute dilettantes (affectionate), and people who are clued-in on the stiff challenges of moderation and community leadership as well as those who are…not.

Right now, for people who aren’t fully immersed in the fediverse, it’s remarkably difficult even to know what to look for in a home server, and there’s a thick cloud of conflicting advice about it. Some get lucky and pick a great server on their first try (maybe because they got advice from a friend) and have a good experience of being on the fediverse. Others really, really don’t. I’m a reasonably technical and motivated person and although I've avoided the worst cases, it took me several years three tries to find a server that didn’t collapse around me—and I moved again after that to a server with more aggressive moderation.

Mastodon gGmbH, the organization that develops and controls the Mastodon software, is trying to make server-picking easier by promoting their flagship server, mastodon.social, as the default for people who want to use Mastodon. I think it’s a pretty solid piece of harm reduction, because the consequences of picking the wrong server include being exposed to the worst things (and people) on the internet. But nudging new members to mastodon.social doesn’t solve the underlying challenge of helping people find the real gems of the fediverse—servers that take their needs seriously and work hard to meet them, in sustained and sustainable ways.

I picked shoes for my analogy because shoes (like social media) are often coded as frivolous, but (like online sociability and communication) they're essential to the functioning of most human societies.

Fixing the entry process for the fediverse may be a harder problem to solve than setting up ways for people to buy good shoes.

why it's hard

This problem is so hard to solve because it’s actually at least four different problems in a trenchcoat:

  • It's hard for potential fediverse members even to understand what they should care about when picking a server. (It’s governance! The answer is governance.)
  • For those potential members who’ve somehow figured out what they need from a server, it's hard to understand which servers actually offer those things, either from outside the fediverse itself or from inside it but without a strong network.
  • It's hard for server runners to define and effectively communicate what really distinguishes them from other servers at the level of governance, and how this shapes their members' experience of the network.
  • For the server teams that can differentiate themselves by speaking fluently about their approach to governance and its benefits, it's hard to find ways to communicate the benefits of their approach to potential members.

Many fediverse projects that take this problem on try to solve it with available structured data which is itself not currently structured around “how we govern and how that will affect your experience of the fediverse.” Structured data and technical tools should be parts of solutions, but there’s cultural work to be done underneath that—user research with current and potential fedi members, server teams, and various communities of people who care about what the fediverse feels like—to make the data and tooling solve the right problems in ways that are useful to the people they’re ostensibly being solved for.

There may even be a place for the kind of work that's usually classed as "marketing" (!!) in that potential members need to be educated in respectful and accessible ways on how to think about server choice and what experiences the network may make available to them/inflict on them because of that choice. It's not entirely unlike the moments when genuinely new product classes are introduced to a society, and consumers have to be taught to care about, for example, how many hours a battery lasts or whether a pre-wrapped bandage is sterile.

the dream of home rule

The reason I think these problems are worth solving is because one of most valuable gifts of the fediverse as it currently exists is the ability to experience the fediverse from within a home server that is good for you—that cares about your experience, that moderates (locally and remotely) in ways that meet your needs and protect you from the things you actually want protection from, that is built to last. And if we can’t help people figure out how to find those good homes, more people are going to have a bad time, and a ton of those people are going to bail before they even get started.

I’ve been simmering on these ideas in a project-shaped way for about a year, and the governance research with Darius ratcheted up my belief that the fediverse really can offer unique and potentially very good ways to handle the big problems of the past generations of online moderation—abuse and trolling and spam, but also the fact that many communities and groups are persistently overmoderated, and the collateral damage that happens when big commercial platforms apply one-size-fits all moderation policies…which are the only policies they can maintain, at scale.

Now, I want to make a start. I’ll be looking for grants, fellowships, or anything else institutional that can make it sustainable for me as a human, and also for collaboration and small-scale support via wreckage/salvage’s membership option. If you have leads on ways to help move this work—especially the initial underlying cultural and design work—forward, please let me know!

In the meantime, I’ll be posting about it. (If you’re not sold on governance as the central/defining factor in server choice, great, because I wrote a whole post just for you that’ll be coming out next week, and I’d hate for it to go to waste.)