More notes on Organizing, Mutual Aid, and Activism on decentralized social networks

"Mutual aid. Organizing. Sharing, contextualizing, and making meaning of news and health information to counter propaganda and information overload. The use cases for alternative social networks – not controlled by techbro white supremacist CEO's working with their cronies in authoritarian governments – practically write themselves in today's world. And with so many talented social scientists, designers, systems thinkers, and developers directly impacted by DOGE, MAGA, et al, there are a lot of people with the right skills for these new networks to make rapid progress....

How to make more rapid progress? The decentralized nature of the fediverses (and the limitations of current tools) makes it challenging to broaden participation and find synergies between the promising work that's happening. Still, gotta start somewhere."

– If not now, when? Mutual aid and organizing in the fediverses, the ATmosphere, and whatever comes next

After the series of conversations with organizers summarized in Notes (and thoughts) on organizing in the fediverses and the ATmosphere, my original plan was to continue conversations at ATmosphere Conf in late March and FediForum in early April. There's a lot to say about both conferences, and I'll hopefully cover that in some upcoming posts, but here's the brief summary:

• ATmosphereConf was outstanding, and talks like Rudy Fraser's Beyond Horseless Carriages: Building Communities for the Decentralized Era and Erin Kissane's People in Platforms did a great job of highlighting the possibilities, challenges, and potential directions.
• FediForum by contrast wound up getting cancelled at the last minute due to several examples of what I had described in If not now, when? as "huge cultural issues as well, including anti-Blackness, misogynoir, anti-trans biases." Oh well.

Still, why let the FediForum organizers' screwups sabotage a worthwhile conversation? Several of us had put a fair amount of work into organizing discussions for FediForum, so we decided to go ahead with a session anyhow⁰ – and it turned out to be a great discussion.

Here's the notes, along with a couple of the slides from the brief intro deck, augmented with some additional links and context (primarily in the footnotes).

Before we got to social networks, we first talked about more secure communications options. There was general agreement that Signal is the gold standard for a free, highly-usable, encrypted messaging with guarantees that you can rely on. If you're not using Signal yet, now's a great time to get started! But ...

• Signal is centralized, so it's a single point of failure and entity for governments to target
• Once you're in a bunch of Signal group chats (or even one large one) the notifications become overwhelming.

Decentralized alternatives like Matrix or XMPP avoid the single point of failure problem. Both have richer functionality than Signal, and Matrix allows for more structure for multiple conversations ... but because they allow multiple client and server implementations, provide weaker security guarantees. And while their usability is pretty good most of the time, there are very definitely rough edges – a real problem, because as one of the attendees said, their standard for usability is "can my cousins use this?"¹

And in practice, operational security is a huge challenge no mater what platform you're using. If you mistakenly add a journalist to your group chat, it doesn't matter how good your encryption is. A mutual aid organizer on the call talked about complexities like needing to disable people's accounts when they were arrested, and constant discussions about when to purge accounts that had been inactive for a while: "all these nuances get tricky even when an Instagram group chat is right there."

So in practice, at least for now, social networks are also critical for private-ish communications as well as public communications. As an attendee said

"It makes sense to have many options and understand that they are at different levels of effectiveness, the most important is to build that community and that trust."

And of course social networks are also critical for public communications. With protest and dissent increasingly criminalized, it's an open question how long public social network organizing (or even sharing news and discussions) and private-but-not-encrypted social network organizing will be a viable options. Still, at least for now they are for many people in many situations, so we need to make the most of this window – while continuing the work on more secure options.

At least for now, public organizing on decentralized social networks seems to be largely coalescing on Bluesky and the ATmosphere (the ecosystem of software using Bluesky's AT Protocol, as opposed to the older ActivityPub protocol that Mastodon and compatible software is built on).² ATProto is optimized for large, all-public networks, and its identity model allows Bluesky's millions of users easy access to any other AT-based app. Bluesky's support for three-minute videos, and the emergence of Spark, Skylight Social and other "video on ATProto" platforms, is also hugely important on this front. "When we get arrested at mutual aid, videos go viral – we see that people are reaching our content, and journalists see it." And Bluesky's custom feeds and labellers have a lot of potential. Bluesky's still relatively small compared to the big corporate social networks, but it's growing rapidly; and at least in the US and Brazil, we're starting to see a fair number of media outlets, politicians, and journalists there.

But Bluesky is still a lot less diverse than Xitter, Instagram, or TikTok, especially for non-US-based content. Social media plays a critical role in routing around the selective and extremely biased coverage of the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets; as one of the attendees said, "I didn't find out about the Tigray genocide until I saw it discussed on Twitter." Even now, Xitter is a much better place to find accurate information about Sudan or Palestine than Bluesky.

Not only that, Bluesky's default Discover algorithm is not great for organizers (unless you're into blue wave emojis, resistance grifting, and engagement farming). In principle, ATProto custom feeds give a way of getting around this – and they really are incredibly useful once you find the right ones. But power dynamics are a big problem here. How are people going to find custom feeds that don't just reinforce the party line? Today, only a handful of custom feeds have significant adoption, and at least so far none of them are tuned for organizing.

So there's still a lot of work to be done on this front.

A huge gap, although there's some encouraging stuff happening

Still, despite the challenges, a lot of the functionality needed for public conversations on decentralized social networks is already available. That's a lot less true for private-ish conversations. One critical gap is any decentralized equivalent to Facebook groups. Facebook is evil, but Facebook groups can work for thousands of people in ways that messaging systems can't (yet).³

The ActivityPub protocol that powers Mastodon, PeerTube, Mobilizon, GoToSocial, Bonfire and compatible software should be a good basis for this. But no. In my 2017 Open Source Presentation on Grassroots activism is hard. Can open source help? (also available in a high-contrast version here), I talked about the importance of this functionality... eight years later, as the section on Private communications in the earlier Notes post illustrates, the lack of progress is striking.

Other kinds of private-ish communications in the ActivityPub world are also problematic. Mastodon private messages make it very easy to accidentally include somebody in a message that wasn't intended for them ... talk about violating the principle of least surprise! And the recent Pixelfed vulnerability (which affected people on Mastodon and other platforms as well) is only the latest in a long string of times when followers-only posts were exposed.

More positively:

• Local-only posts (which don't federate to other instances) do provide some very useful private-ish communications on ActivityPub.⁴
• Platforms like Bonfire (which is just about to start beta testing) have much more flexible support for private communications.⁵
• The Website League and other island networks (subnetworks using allow-list fedieration) are an interesting, relatively-new approach that in addition to other benefits provides alternatives to public communications.

Meanwhile, Bluesky has announced plans to extend ATProto to support private communications, and various ATmosphere projects are exploring off-protocol implementations; Blacksky's Cypher project (bringing local-only posts to the ATmopshere) and Rashid Aziz's AtmosphereConf talk on Protocol composition: extending atproto for private data for one interesting example are two useful examples. It's all early days yet, but the enthusiastic response to Rudy Fraser's just-published An internet of many autonomous communities is very encouraging.

Still, there's clearly a lot of work to be done on this front as well. Right now, the best option for private communications is probably a forum like NodeBB, which currently support non-decentralized private discussions along with decentralized public discussions that are compatible with Mastodon and other AcitivityPub platforms – and with Bluesky, thanks to Bridgy Fed.

Let's talk about some of those cultural issues - and about accessibility

We also spent some time discussing the "fediverse HOA" (homeowners association) problem.⁶ Refugees in Libya ran into a classic example of this when they attempted to use Mastodon: people giving them a hard time because they weren't putting content warnings (CWs) on their posts. I mean really, wtf. These are people who have been enslaved and tortured, whose communities are being hunted by the Libyan government, and whose organizing in Italy are being shut down by the police and attacked with live ammo. Who on earth would tell them that they should put content warnings on their posts because people might not want to hear about the harms? The fediverse HOA, that's who!⁷

Needless to say this is only one example of a much broader pattern. Erin Kissane's Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn't summarizes experiences from Bluesky users who had tried Mastodon but didn't stick around, and #1 on the list is "got yelled at, felt bad." Of course, most people on Mastodon aren't like that, but quite a few are. And while there's a lot more to the ActivityPub Fediverse than Mastodon, it's still by far the largest – and best-known – software platform, so it really sets the tone.

We also discussed the experiences of a deaf-blind person who gave up on Mastodon because it wasn't accessible.⁸ On the other hand, accessibility on Bluesky is worse – both in terms of the software and the prevalance of alt text on images.

So there's a lot of work to be done on these fronts as well. Hey wait a second, I'm noticing a pattern here.

Value propositions, langauge, and the (real) complexities of decentralization

Another topic that came up, as it does in most conversations about decentralized social networks, is the challenge of bringing people from centralized, corporate social networks. Advocates often focus on the very real problems with Facebook et al, but as Rudy Fraser said in Beyond Horseless Carriages, trying to scare people into moving is a lot less effective than giving them positive reasons to move. And advocates often focus on decentralization as a benefit ... and then go on to o explain the details of decentralization, which immediately gets so complex that you've already lost them. No, it's not "just like email!"

There are clearly better ways to talk about it. Blacksky users, for example, explain decentralization well – because it's clear to them that Blacksky couldn't exist on a centralized platform.  How to similarly demystify it and explain the value proposition for activists ... and everybody else?

That said, it's not just the language. As Engine Room's report on Exploring a transition to alternative social media platforms for social justice organizations in the Majority World says,

"A transition to alternatives needs to be centered around the needs and capabilities of non-technical communities.  Alternatives have a higher technological barrier to entry than mainstream platforms with easy user interfaces. Moreover, alternative platforms can be expensive for smaller organizations to host and maintain their own servers (e.g. self-hosting an instance of Mastodon may require a dedicated staff member [s] with technical expertise), as opposed to using a commercial platform."

Decentralization makes many things more complicated, and the user experience often makes it worse. One of the people on the call talked about their experience inviting a lot of activists to a Mastodon instance (aka server) they had set up. Despite helping them with tutorials and one-on-one support, most didn't stay. And this experience is far from unique; the summaries in Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn't for why people didn't stick around include "couldn’t find people or interests, people didn’t stay", "too confusing, too much work, too intimidating", "too serious, too boring, anti-fun", and "complicated high-stakes decisions."⁹

And while on the one hand the ability to control your own data is a huge advantage (DAIR's use of PeerTube, ensuring that they can reach their audience even when YouTube censors them, is a great example), it also means that you have to run your own servers. Even the small number of organizers who have the technical skills to do this (and do it securely) would rather not, because it's a huge time sink; and most organizers don't have the skills.¹⁰

The good news is Bluesky is easier to get started on (although finding the right labellers and blocklists as well as custom feeds is challenging). And in the ActivityPub Fediverse, there are lots of other options besides Mastodon; A lot of good stuff is happening in the fediverses! talks about why I'm so excited about GoToSocial, Bonfire, Letterbook, Piefed, and other platforms, and that's only the tip of the iceberg. Still, none of those are as high-profile as Mastodon (or other relatively-well-known projects like Pixelfed or Lemmy that suffer from many of the same issues as Mastodon), so it's a huge challenge.

Not to sound like a broken record but ... guess what, there's a lot of work to be done on all of these fronts.

Let's get organized!

You probably won't be surprised to hear that we didn't solve all of these issues during our one-hour discussion. We did however decide on some concrete next steps: collecting and prioritizing organizing, mutual aid, and activism needs – and then working with projects and organizations who are (hopefully) incentivized to make progress on these issues – Bluesky and others in the ATmosphere, forward-looking ActivityPub platforms like Bonfire, and organizations like Ragtag and May First.¹¹

Just like any other kind of organizing, this will involve a mix of private and public communications (which is a great opportunity to experiment for ourselves with how to use various technologies). If you've got thoughts on organizing, mutual aid, and activism on decentralized social networks (or feedback on this post), here's a CryptPad form.

And if you want to join in on some of the public discussions, please do! Here's links to threads on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Lemmy.

Notes

⁰ We wound up doing it as a Signal group chat video, an approach I would strongly recommend to others considering something similar. We had about a dozen people present, and even thoug all were currently based in the US and Western Europe (and almost none of us were younger than 30), it was quite diverse in several other important dimensions.

¹ People also mentioned Threema and Session as potential alternatives, and there are others like Wire, but as far as I know none of these have anywhere near as much independent security analysis as Signal (and there isn't a free version of Threema). Also, Threema doesn't have a free version; Session has a reputation for being a hub for CSAM distribution (and the protocol doesn't have Perfect Forward Secrecy). Germ Network (an MLS-based platform) is promising, and so is Veilid, but they're not there yet. So right now there aren't any great alternatives to Signal.

² Somewhat bizarrely, there's intense debate about whether or not ATProto is actually a decentralized protocol. There's also intense debate about Bluesky should be considered part of "the Fediverse", and for that matter what "the Fediverse" even means. For the purpose of this series, ATProto is decentralized, "the Fediverse" refers to the ActivityPub Fediverse, and Bluesky is part of both the ATmosphere (a fediverse in its own right) and the ActivityPub Fediverse.

But if you're into definitional struggles, oh boy, do I have some treats for you: There are many fediverses (in I for one welcome Bluesky, the ATmosphere, BTS ARMY, millions of Brazilians, Black Twitter, and sex worker Twitter to the fediverses!) goes into detail on the terminology I'm using, and you might also want to check out Is Bluesky part of today’s Fediverse? and “Decentralization” and erasure: Blacksky, Bluesky, and the ATmosphere.

³ One of the attendees asked whether there are any studies or long form writeups about activists use of Facebook or Whatsapp groups. Good question! Blueprints for Change has a draft how-to on using Facebook groups for political organizing, and Activist Handbooks has a short guide, but they're both quite basic. Back in the day I remember a lot of discussions of Un millón de voces contra las FARC and the One Million Strong for Barack Facebook group in 2008 (although these were both based on old-style Facebook groups, which were somewhat more like forums). Somebody in the chat mentioned Anna Gibson's What Teams Do: Exploring Volunteer Content Moderation Team Labor on Facebook, which looks at the moderation aspects, and no doubt there's other stuff as well.

⁴ Although, as I discussed in A tale of two prototypes and elsewhere, Mastodon's founder Eugen Rochko has long refused to support local-only posts. As a result, they're not available in the official Mastodon release, but only available in forks like Glitch or Hometown that most people don't know about (and aren't widely supported by hosting providers). However, Rochko has recently stepped down as CEO of Mastodon gGmbH, so hopefully we'll see some movement on this front. More generally, Fork it! It’s time for a Mastodon hard fork makes the case for a community-driven Mastodon fork that focuses on safety, community, accessibility, and working well with others. Under new leadership, Mastodon itself has a great opportunity to move in that direction . Time will tell!

⁵ So does the Friendica / Hubzilla / (((streams))) / Forte thread of projects, all originally created by Mike Macgirvin. The Forte v25.3.2 announcement post notes that it

"Forte is the first fediverse platform to provide full nomadic identity (with near realtime sync of your cloned fediverse instances) completely over ActivityPub, using no other nomadic support protocols....

Forte is compatible with Mastodon and all your other favourite fediverse platforms, but being based on the legendary streams repository - goes far beyond the Twitter experience with contained conversations, groups, integrated cloud storage, events, locations services, and more. We use it for instance to replace email, due to the wide range of features and lack of spam. We also like the way it handles fediverse identity management so that you can aggregate different fediverse tools and push content from all of them from a single fediverse account."

In the March 18 Fediverse Report #108, Laurens Hof says

"With Nomadic Identity, you create a single identity that can be connected to multiple different servers, so when one server becomes unavailable, all your personal data can be transferred and accessed from another server linked to your account. Forte, as well as Hubzilla and Streams, remain on the bleeding edge on what’s possible with ActivityPub. However, Forte also suffers from the same issue that its predecessors have, namely that getting to use the software is surprisingly difficult.

Indeed, if you look at Forte's codeberg page there aren't any installation instructions or link to a documentation site. There is a doc folder, with seven sub-folders some of which have .mc files, so it's quite possible these do exist somewhere, but that's asking people to do a lot of work! Usability and lack of app support and ecosystem have been barriers for broader adoption of these projects. More positively, though, these are all potentially-solvable problems, and it would be interesting to see what happens if a diverse community came together around Forte.

⁶ I first heard the term "fediverse HOA" from Dr. Johnathan Flowers and Mekka Okereke use to refer to the casual racism so common both in HOAs and on Mastodon. Flowers' The Whiteness of Mastodon and Twitter vs. Mastodon podcast, Marcia X and Ra’il I'Nasah Kiam's Blackness in the Fediverse, and the links in Dogpiling, weaponized content warning discourse, and a fig leaf for mundane white supremacy have much more discussion of this. Rather confusingly, the term is also sometimes also used by white people to describe pushback on their racism (watch appropriation work!), or by cis people to describe pushback on anti-trans bigotry, or by people who are unaware of this whole complicated history and are just making analogies to other problematic aspects of HOAs without realizing that the terminology is a minefield here.

At any rate, it's definitely a problem.

⁷ It's worth highlighting just how similar the hostility that greeted Refugees in Libay to Margaret Kibi's description in Fringe Mastodev: The Beginnings of the weaponized demands that Black people put content warnings their own personal experience that started within just a few weeks of when CWs were first introduced back in 2017. As Allie Hart pointed out in a follow-on discussion, "the technological affordance–ness of CWs don’t cause them to be overindexed on a bit; it’s an easy thing to point to to say “no look, mastodon really is racist”, but respectability policing / etc is not new and would happen regardless of the technical existence of that feature." Still, Mastodon's implementation (which has also been adopted by other ActivityPub platforms) certainly doesn't help, and probably magnifies the probolems. Shel's On Content Warnings is a deep dive into the general topic and specifics of the Mastodon implementation, which has been inherited by other ActivityPub software.

⁸ This is an area I find especially frustrating because the fediverses actually have some huge strengths that they're not leveraging. As Accessibility resources for Mastodon and compatible software discusses, the percentage of people on Mastodon who put alt-text on their images is much higher than most other social networks – enough that I've seen posts from blind people saying that it's a game-changer for them – and there are some apps which are very accessible. But unless you already know what the right apps are, it's not easy to find them; and I've seen multiple examples of disabled people getting hassled for not putting alt text on their images. wtf.

⁹ The first complicated high-stakes decision people need to make – before even signing up – is to choose an instance. Resources for choosing the right fediverse instance talks about that in detail, but really, how many people have the time to read a 5000-word post and follow a dozen links before signing up for a new social network?

¹⁰ Over time, hosting services could provide an alternative here; the NorthSky Social cooperative (who's creating a safer social media experience for 2SLGBTQIA+ people, powered by ATProto) is one early example – as is Blacksky. These are all at a very early stage, but there's a enough momentum around ATProto that it's certainly possible we'll start to see more offerings. And there are also several small companies providing hosting services for various ActivityPub platforms (some of which are now also providing ATProto-based offerings).

¹¹ We didn't explicitly talk about it in the meeting, but we should also add funders to the list – and, as I discussed in Design from the margins – and fund it!, ensure that the funding goes to work by and with people from decentered communities. Darius Kazemi and Erin Kissane's Governance on Fediverse Microblogging Servers includes a short writeup on Fediverse Governance Opportunities for Funders & Developers that's also very relevant here.