Sasha Costanza-ChockSome quick notes on how we might build some of the essential infrastructure and governance processes that will be needed if #Mastodon is really going to be sustainable and viable as a mass-adoption social network (1/n):
a) We need to scale content moderation. A LOT. Corporate social network sites (SNS) do this by using armies of poorly paid, outsourced contractors. The #Fediverse should do it better. Perhaps by organizing a worker-owned content moderation cooperative?
a2) Smaller instances can self-moderate / use volunteer labor / whatever. But large instances will need to be able to scale, so a content mod coop (or a federated network of multiple such coops) that can be hired/contracted by larger instances would be amazing.
a3) Another option is for larger instances to hire more mods directly. Hopefully, some of the larger instances can themselves be organized as cooperaqtives. Probably some combination of in-house moderation & contracts w/coops would work well.
b) funding mechanisms. It is going to take money to scale. For hosting, development, ongoing improvements, #a11y, localization, UX improvements, security, and perhaps most of all, to pay content moderators just wages.
b2) currently, most of the money is in the form of small recurring donations to the german nonprofit that is the largest instance. every instance running its own patreon is part of the puzzle, but it probably can't be the whole thing.
b3) probably there will be a mix, with large donations from individuals, private foundations, and perhaps increasingly some state actors (for example, municipalities, libraries, state agencies, etc) providing contracts. There will also be some companies that want to donate (and contribute coding time, etc).
b4) All that money flowing in, mostly to the largest instances, ideally should be governed at least in part through participatory budgeting mechanisms. Alternately (or in addition), there should be formalized governance mechanisms (elections for the board of the mastodon non-profit? liquid democracy? sortition? stakeholder board members?) to truly democratize resource allocation.
c) Now that the 'don is taking off, from DIY small community to wider adoption, intentional bad actors are in the mix at scale. We will need to take this seriously, and invest HEAVILY in various approaches to minimizing harm, constantly working to block and limit bad actors, defederate the worst instances, and ... create our wildest dreams in terms of care, follow-up, and support for community members after troll attacks!
c2) we control the fediverse, not the market, the state, or the billionaires, not surveillance capitalism, not ad markets, so why would we limit our dreams of how to create community safety to content moderation alone? Let's dream bigger. We can create (and resource) new tools, implement shared banlists, provide resources for rapid response teams and after-attack processing support, and so much more!
(pause for now as I'm heading to a budget meeting, hope to return soon with more).
Bob Kopp@schock This is an important thread. As a newcomer to this community, it seems to me that a lot of the guidance for prospective new admins is purely technical — what is there to guide admins through the social, legal and governance questions? Having ways to support admins, including options for shared institutions, seems key.
“Looking at running a social network as running software” isn’t that distance from one of the issues the new Twitter leadership has.
Sam Muirhead
@cameralibre @schock @darius Seems useful, but targeted at very small instances — I don’t see much there about governance (do we really want all our shared online spaces to be benevolent dictatorships?), moderating at scale, or legal protection (DMCA for US-based instances, etc).
Darius Kazemi@bobkopp @cameralibre @schock fwiw I am working on followups for all three of those (3 different projects)