The Network of Alternative Social Media Researchers

New Bibliography Items: Governance and the Fediverse

Robert W. Gehl, 11 Apr 2025

These days it seems like new work focusing on alternative social media appears every week. This week is no exception. Here are the latest two items we’ve added to the bibliography.

Labour pains: Content moderation challenges in Mastodon growth

This article from Charlotte Spencer-Smith and Tales Tomaz has been published in a recent special issue of Internet Policy Review. That issue, titled “Content moderation on digital platforms: beyond states and firms,” focuses on content moderation and includes two articles on the fediverse (the second is below).

Like many recent articles on the fediverse, Spencer-Smith and Tomaz’s article considers the post-Musk growth of the fediverse, focusing on content moderation challenges. They conducted interviews with a variety of instance admins. As they write in their abstract, “the research finds that challenges and the responses to them vary depending on the characteristics of the instance, such as size, thematic focus and geography, andinstances tend to adopt measures tailored to their communities. However, a tension between centralisation and decentralisation, including Global North-South differences, cuts across the network, which may be accentuated by further growth.”

Safer spaces by design? Federated socio-technical architectures in content moderation

This is another article in that IPR special issue. Written by Ksenia Ermoshina and Francesca Musiana, the article is taking up the question of “safer spaces by design” (echoing ideas of “privacy by design.”) As the abstract states, “The article argues that federation can pave the way for novel practices in content moderation governance, merging community organising, information distribution and alternative techno-social instruments to deal with online harassment, hate speech or disinformation; however, this alternative also presents a number of pitfalls and potential difficulties that we examine to provide a complete picture of the potential of federated models.”