Can This Platform Survive? Governance Challenges for the Fediverse

Abstract

In the wake of recent crises at commercial social media platforms like Twitter and Reddit, the “fediverse” has gained adoption and visibility as a noncommercial alternative for individuals, communities, and institutions to develop channels of public communication, dialogue, and debate. In this article, we draw on illustrative examples from the history of digital civic discourse and identify 6 ways in which history shows us how the potential benefits of the fediverse are at risk of subversion. We discuss several potential threats to these spaces of civil discourse, including challenges inherent to distributed governance, commercial platform capture, inclusive access, moderation at scale, reputational assaults by commercial competitors, and the neoliberal technoromanticism familiar from previous digital innovations. These threats must be addressed collectively and proactively by key fediverse stakeholders in an ecology whose ruling values are noncommercialism, decentralization, open source, free association, and wariness of traditional governance.