A lot of people are looking for ways to get off networks run by dipshit billionaires right now, and also for refuges online that don't come with their own terrible problems.
The fediverse isn't a panacea. It still leans heavily white and technical, and if you talk about that, some people get defensive and upset. My own experience of the network suggests that some parts of the fediverse missed out on a decade or more of social norming on other, more populous networks, which is very good in some ways and startlingly strange in others. But it's also a space of enormous possibility, and it comes with a whole lot of—imperfect but real—levers for helping people stay connected while also staying a little further off a lot of bad radar screens and out of antisocial swarms.
That said, a huge factor in any given person's fediverse experience is based on what server they join, because that's what determines how their feed will be moderated—who they can see or hear, who can see or hear them. So the fact that to join the fediverse, you have to pick a server before you even understand what to look for, what matters, and whom to trust, is somewhere between goofy and gobsmackingly, disqualifyingly bad.
The best way to find a server right now is word of mouth. This doesn't scale, and a whole lot rests on which mouth you're closest to. There are many, many sites that will help you select a server based on theme/topic, location, underlying software, or even the code the underlying software is written in, as though those are the things that will matter the most. There are a couple of sites that either require featured servers to agree to a set of very light rules or a different set of largely great but relatively idiosyncratic rules. As far as I can tell, there is no good way to learn what to look for when it comes to moderation and governance practices, and no way to view servers by their specific policies and goals.
filling these gaps
In my first two wreckage/salvage posts about the difficulty of finding the right fediverse server if you’re not already integrated into the fediverse, I outlined the problem(s) and explained why I think they’re meaningful to the future of the fediverse and the well-being of the many people who are actively seeking better networks.
Since then, I’ve been talking to people and continuing to think through ways of working on the problem, while keeping an eye on the US election and its possible effects on the ecosystem: The things we need to do would have been the same no matter who was elected, but I knew the timings might change.
They did. With a second Trump administration in the wings—and mega-platform leaders cheering him on as he promises to enact a devastating set of policies and avenge himself on his enemies—I don’t have months to dig into user research and deliver something comprehensive. There are things that need doing now.
So although it would be cleaner and more efficient to do all the research and then all the building and recommending, I’ve rearranged my initial plan that I’ve been poking at between essays and other projects to front-load immediately useful information, and then follow on with deeper research into member (and potential-member) needs, experiences, and knowledge.
phase 1: making server leadership choices legible
This begins with talking to some server teams who are welcoming new members, and who are willing to talk. The work I did with Darius over the summer has left me feeling real hope for the potential of the server-as-network-home model’s benefits, but also hyper-aware of how much work there is to do to build a strong network of servers that are up to the task of making healthy, nourishing third places within a system that is, at its foundation, the open internet, with everything horrible that includes.
There are hundreds (presumably thousands) of server teams with good intentions, but even the best intentions don’t make a server good.
I’m going to do a rolling series of short, structured interviews with server teams to ask:
- how they plan for common problems;
- how they prioritize their various sub-communities in their planning, moderation, and diplomatic actions;
- what cross-server moderator groups or communities they participate in to keep up on adversarial activity and stay current on resources;
- what proactive work they do to deal with various kinds of trouble (spam, CSAM, hate content and trolling, disinformation and influence campaigns);
- how they distribute and sustain the human and financial costs of running their server, and what their succession plans look like;
- hosting location and how they secure user data, including the prevention of accidental handovers of data to outside entities;
- everything else to do with these concerns that they’re thinking about and that I’m not, yet.
A lot of server teams that do a great job moderating for their specific membership will want nothing to do with this, because legibility is the opposite of what they want. To be clear: Great. I love a speakeasy. But I'm looking for server teams that want to offer refuge to people who need it and who aren't already plugged into networks that will teach them to knock three times on the secret door under the ancient yew in the center of the woods.
What comes out of this: A set of on-the-record interviews describing a set of servers’ goals, priorities, policies, and actual practices w/r/t their members and the experience of seeing the fediverse through their server.
Which, with some synthesis and comms work, leads to: A way for potential fediverse members to compare and contrast possible homes, which enables both easier self-selection and, by offering many examples of how servers are run, shows the different kinds of experiences theoretically made possible on different servers. Also, ideally, this work could form the basis of new specifications for structured data collected from server teams when new servers are set up, supplementing the very minimal data currently collected by most Mastodon servers, specifically.
phase 2: what’s happened to people; what do they know
This phase is about talking to fediverse members and potential members and synthesizing what I learn in ways that are useful to people who want to make the fediverse safer, more welcoming, and more inclusive. I want to talk to server members—a group Darius and I wanted to squeeze into our work, but just couldn’t physically do—and to people who are interested in or have been interested in trying out the Fediverse as a place to be sociable online.
- Screening survey + interviews with server members who’ve had good and bad experiences about how they chose a server, what worked well and what didn’t, for themselves and the people around them, and what they think about the effects of server choice.
- Screening survey + interviews with fedi-curious people about their existing model of what matters for server choice, and about their needs and expectations.
What comes out of this: Summary of server members’ thinking—problems, successes, wishes; analysis of existing models of thought among fedi-curious people; analysis of expressed needs and expectations, with emphasis on problems and expressed needs over specific features suggested.
Which, with some synthesis and comms work, leads to: A better communal understanding of what people experience in the server choice process, which we can use to improve that process. A better communal understanding of what people on the outside of the fediverse do and don’t understand about server leadership (and which aspects of it will shape their experience), which we can use to guide and inform our outreach and communication work.
phase 3: is it working?
In this phase, I want to return to some of the servers I spoke with in phase one and ask their members how things are actually working out for them—what’s good, what’s rough, whether they feel like they made the right choice, and what criteria they’re using to assess that. I can’t imagine getting to this part before the middle of next year, but I want to note here that it needs to be done.
but this is so small
A few years ago, I was interviewed by a couple of very nice, earnest young advocates for the then-nascent Effective Altruism movement. They wanted to know about my work with the Covid Tracking Project, and we had a pretty wide-ranging conversation, most of which I don’t remember at all. I do remember that one of them was struck by the fact that while co-running such a large-scale project meant to help lots of people navigate a crisis, I was also throwing time into some super-local and highly inefficient one-to-one volunteer work.
I remember trying to explain as cogently as I could that helping real individual humans is vital even when it’s inefficient, because the world is made of people, and trying to pick which ones to help from afar using stats built on best guesses from the charity equivalents of management consultancies is kind of a weird and dehumanizing act. That working on a human scale and staying connected to the realities of human trouble is a way to keep ourselves humane. I was tired; I don’t think it came across.
I wish I had also said that one of the core reasons our weird giant public health data project made of hundreds of strangers worked at all was that we—all of us, volunteers and ragtag staff—focused with maniacal energy on treating each other and a whole lot of random strangers with care and compassion and forgiveness. Our volunteers ran a help desk that churned through thousands of often-fraught emails to help reporters and members of the public understand public data; we answered thousands of variously terrified, angry, and confused tweets; we insisted that our hardest-working volunteers step back and sleep. When our people made mistakes, we built in more backup and leaned on the essential importance of grace for people who are under wire-snapping levels of stress.
It was a deeply weird culture to bring to a high-stakes precision data project with so many moving parts, but it’s what we did. And the direct exchange of close-up care made the wider work possible.
It’s November 8, 2024. I want to start with close-up, inefficient provision of care.
let's get to it
If you run a fediverse server that takes governance seriously and you're interested in helping new people find you, please send me a note at fedi-servers@wrecka.ge and I'll get back to you with some intro questions.
If you're a fediverse member—or a potential or former member—who wants to talk about any part of the server-selection process, please write to user-research@wrecka.ge and I'll put you on the contact list for the member/user research phase of this work.
That I can work on any of this is down to the people who have elected to support this work. If that's you, thank you so much. The little community assembling here is an incredible source of fuel and permission and light, and I am so grateful. Always, but especially right now.
If that's not you but you'd like to throw in with me, you can do that here—or just sign up there to get my posts delivered to your inbox—which is kind of like inviting a vampire into your house, but good? Either way, thank you for being here and reading this, and for caring.