It’s been a pretty packed week, between the end of the semester, my participation in a small conference, and a sick kiddo at home. So this week’s ASM update is a short one.
Along with some colleagues at American University, I have a new publication out.
Can This Platform Survive? Governance Challenges for the Fediverse
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.
Academic publishing is slow. We worked this up over a year ago. It’s interesting to see what parts of the paper hold up – frankly, I think all of our challenges are still at play.
As avid readers of my blog know, I am livin’ the FOSS Academic Lifestyle Dream: I use FOSS tools to do my academic work. I use Nextcloud to manage files and handle appointments, Zotero and Zettlr to take notes, and LibreOffice Writer to write books and articles. This blog runs on Jekyll. I love it all!
But there has been one part of the Lifestyle that has consistently been a disappointment: LibreOffice Impress, the presentation software. While I use Writer all the time and enjoy doing so, Impress has always bothered me. But I’m not one to complain too much, since LibreOffice software is provided free-of-charge and with a FOSS license. I’ve soldiered on with it to make presentations for conferences and class teaching.
But that might change. Marp – the Markdown Presentation Ecosystem – is poised to become a key part of the FOSS Academic Lifestyle Dream. If you’re familiar with Markdown, Marp is a really awesome tool.
It’s a simple, yet deep ASM update for this week. Last week, I posted about some recent research in the realm of alternative social media. I also drew attention to the bibliography I maintain here on this blog. In response to that post, folks on the fediverse alerted me to other bibliographic projects collecting research in related ideas. Here I want to highlight two of them.
But instead of focusing yet again on Bluesky, this week I wanted to do something that is long overdue: I want to draw your attention to some new research in alternative social media. You can find these works in the bibliography page of this blog, or reach out to me if you want to join the corresponding Zotero library.
Here will highlight some new papers, mostly focusing on Mastodon (and to a lesser extent the rest of the fediverse). As you will see, there’s a variety of concerns: archiving and curation, moderation, and news sharing. Links are in the titles below.
Also, I am now building an email listserv focused on academic research on alternative social media (broadly conceived). Are you an academic who wants to join the list? We have 50 colleagues there now! If you want to join, contact me (preferably with a university email address) and give me some background info and I can add you to the group.
Here’s what caught my eye (and ear) this week in the world of alternative social media. I didn’t plan this, but it turns out a lot of this is coming from 404 Media – shout out to them! If you aren’t reading their articles… do it now!
Yesterday, I gave a presentation at York University in Toronto as part of their York Circle program. The audience was comprised of York alumni.
My presentation was “Fleeing Facebook and Exiting X: How activists show the path away from corporate social media.” Here’s the abstract:
The purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk in 2022, coupled with Meta’s blocking of Canadian news sites, has prompted people in Canada to consider their social media options. Social media has now fragmented, with a small but growing population of people turning to non-corporate, alternative social media, such as Mastodon and the fediverse. This talk will discuss how non-corporate, alternative social media provide Canadians not just with a path away from Facebook or X, but also provide a new way to engage in online democracy.
If that sounds interesting, well… read on! This is a version of that presentation, edited into blog form. (Note: this is another long post.)
I recently gave a presentation to the Cultural Studies PhD program at George Mason University. That’s the program where I earned my PhD, so it was an honor to come back and talk to my professors as well as some of the new students currently in the program.
I took the presentation as an opportunity to reflect on my academic career from my time at Mason (2005-2010) to my latest book project. I’ve modified it for this blog. Take a look at the abstract and, if piques your interest, feel free to read it! (It’s a bit long.)
Abstract
In my time as a PhD student in GMU’s Cultural Studies program, I learned
that I must let my object of study tell me what methods to use to
analyze it. I also learned not to merely interpret the object, but seek
to change it. Since I chose to study what was then called “Web 2.0” and
what I now call “corporate social media,” I needed to bring Marxian
political economy, science and technology studies, and software studies
to bear on the object. And I began to examine the practices of activists
who sought to make something better than corporate social media:
alternative social media. Over a decade ago I began my adventures in
alternative social media, chasing it through hacker collectives,
cyberlibertarian organizations, and even onto the dark web. Through
digital ethnography, close examinations of code, and hands-on experience
running alternative social media, I developed an approach I call
“critical reverse engineering.” Here I present critical reverse
engineering as a methodology for activist engagement with digital
technologies. To illustrate this approach, I will draw on insights from
my forthcoming book, Move Slowly and Build Bridges: Mastodon, the
Fediverse, and the Struggle for Ethical Social Media (Oxford, 2025).
I think I’m going to stop using Firefox altogether. It was a tiny little weather app that did it.
Firefox is no longer my default browser, and it has a sad face. I'm sad about it, too.
So, one day I opened a new tab in Firefox and there it was: a weather report. A tiny little temp reading for my area. I didn’t think about it much, but someone on the fediverse noted that this little weather app is sponsored by AccuWeather, a company long criticized for its attempt to privatize public weather information. Hovering over the little temp reading revealed this to be true – it said, “Sponsored by AccuWeather.”
In this ASM update, I’ll write at length about a new research study on Mastodon that gets the ethics of research right – even though they pulled data from my home Mastodon instance. I’ll also discuss a recent podcast episode that talks about the ethics of using and promoting FOSS.
I took a family vacation, so I was away from my work laptop when I learned Zotero has launched version 7, a major upgrade. While I enjoyed my vacation, I was naturally eager to get home to try it out!
In my initial review, I found an improved interface design with small changes that improve (instead of interrupt) my workflow, as well as some nice improvements to the PDF Reader (which is now really an Attachment Reader).
I may do a more substantial review as I use Zotero 7 to get stuff done, but my first glance leaves me quite happy with this new version.
Nothing major this month, but I do want to note two things. First, I wrote a post on the fediverse that must have hit a nerve. It’s about corporations selling off academic work to AI companies. Second, I presented research to a panel at the IETF, talking about the development of ActivityPub by the W3C’s Social Web Working Group. The presentation is based on my forthcoming book.
Meta’s Threads, which is slowly enabling ActivityPub capabilities, has just posted a list of servers it is blocking. The list (as of this writng) has over 660 entries. Since I am finalizing a chapter on Threads for my forthcoming book, I will definitely have to consider this list in detail. For now, I wanted to offer a few comments on this development, since it’s a decidedly important moment in the ActivityPub-based fediverse.
Multiple people have pointed out how this violates consent on the fediverse. In response, the CTO of Maven, Jimmy Secretran, has explained their reasoning:
We are trying to connect up to the Fediverse, to allow interaction with other ActivityPub servers. This definitely seems to me to be within the spirit of what ActivityPub enables, but of course, I don’t want to have Maven connect to anybody who doesn’t want it.
[Note that I normally do not quote fediverse posts without permission, but in this case, I am making an exception, for reasons that I think will be obvious.]
I replied in the thread, arguing that, no, they are not really abiding by the spirit of ActivityPub:
This isn’t how this works. No one starts a fediverse (AP) server by ingesting a bunch of posts from others without their consent. They start servers and start federating with the rest of the network.
Please stop ingesting posts from AoIR.social (I’m the admin, btw).
and
The custom is to start a server with a code of conduct, including clear moderation rules, so that the rest of us can make informed choices about federating. What you’ve done with Maven is a pretty massive violation of norms, and likely it will result in your being defederated from many other instances. It’s a poor way to start an ActivityPub implementation.
To be fair to Secretran and Maven, they have since stopped scraping my posts and, I presume, those of others who have asked them to stop. Still, I eagerly await Maven’s full ActivityPub implementation so that we can block them effectively.
This incident got me to thinking about norms and customs on the fediverse and how important they are.
It seems people are upset – so much so, they are talking about switching to Linux. For those of you who are academics (or in related fields), I can tell you: the switch is entirely feasible.
I’ve been using Linux since about 2008 or so to do my academic work. After writing three books with a fourth on the way, as well as nearly 30 peer-reviewed articles, I’d say it’s clear the work can be done with Linux.
I should note I’m in the humanities, not computer science, so I’m using Linux mainly to write, research, and collaborate with other authors doing social science work. And it’s also important to note that I have worked at “Microsoft Campuses” for my whole career, meaning most of my colleagues use Windows and the IT folks support mostly Windows. In fact, when IT finds out I use Linux, they tend to say “We don’t officially support that” (and then they help as best they can). So I am definitely proof an academic can survive using Linux.
Here, I want to talk a bit about my experience using Linux and Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) as an academic for the past two decades and toss in some tips for those thinking of switching. I hope it’s helpful, and if you have questions, let me know!
(Also, before I begin: use whatever computer OS you like! I’m not judging! I just want to help academics who might want to switch.)
I’m nearing wrapping up drafting Move Slowly and Build Bridges, my book about the fediverse. I do several things in the book: provide some history, show the struggles of instance admins, talk about the politics of blocklists.
I also develop a concept in the book, “noncentralization.” In this blog post, I want to talk about what this means and contrast the term with the more popular one, “decentralization.” To do that, I want to contrast the fediverse with another system, Bluesky.
The Online Harms Act is currently the talk of Canada. As the government’s website describes it,
The internet is an exceptional tool for people of all ages to learn, play and connect with family, friends and those with similar interests. However, just like the outside world, the digital world can pose significant dangers. Social media can be used to sexually exploit children, promote self-harm to children, incite violence, put people’s safety at risk and foment hate. Online harms have real-world impacts with tragic, even fatal, consequences.
The Government of Canada has introduced legislation to hold social media platforms accountable for addressing harmful content on their platforms and for creating a safer online space that protects all people in Canada, especially kids.
As something that addresses speech on the internet – and includes some strong penalties for spreading hate speech – the Act has led to massive debates. I won’t summarize them here, but you can read thoughtful critiques from Professor Michael Geist and you can listen to a discussion on Canadaland’s Backbench to get a sense of things.
My interest here is not to delve into the controversies, but instead read the Act while wearing my Mastodon admin hat. I am one of the two admins of AoIR.social, a Mastodon instance for members of the Association of Internet Researchers. AoIR.social gives our members access to the fediverse – the global network of thousands of social media servers, with millions of users engaged in social media activities.
An initial question: does the Act apply to the tens of thousands of fediverse instances with their millions of users? Does it thus apply to AoIR.social? Considering that the Act defines “social media service” as “a website or application that is accessible in Canada, the primary purpose of which is to facilitate interprovincial or international online communication among users of the website or application by enabling them to access and share content” (page 5), then the answer is yes. AoIR.social operates internationally, including in Canada. So do many of the other tens of thousands of fediverse servers.
Since I’m one of the two admins of AoIR.social, am I affected? I believe so: I would be an “operator,” “a person that, through any means, operates a regulated service.” It could also be that the AoIR organization itself would be the operator, since in this Act “person” also applies to corporations.
The Act would create a Digital Safety Commission, an agency that would govern social media services. The Act notes this Commission should consider things like the size of the service and the operator’s financial and technical abilities. This is good – many fediverse instances are small and are run by individuals or a handful of folks. They also often run on very small budgets as not-for-profit organizations. Regardless, however, I believe small fediverse servers would be affected (unless they find a way to not be available to Canadians).
So: will the Act radically affect fediverse instances, such as AoIR.social? The Act specifically says our service should not harm freedom of expression, and reading it leads me to believe that AoIR.social won’t be affected in that manner. While we welcome debate and discussion, we’re not in the business of platforming the sorts of harmful content the Act discusses.
But, the implementation of the Act could prove to be very burdensome to the administration of fediverse instances, such as AoIR.social. Much is going to hinge on how the Act understands the fediverse.
Dunbar-Hester’s article discusses a controversy – and a harassment campaign – centering on the #asstodon hashtag on the fediverse. She created (or co-created) that hashtag in late 2022, not long after the large wave of people joined Mastodon due to Musk’s purchase of Twitter. The #asstodon hashtag was used predominantly to share pictures of donkeys. However, because of the double-meaning, there was at least one buttshot included in the mix.
In this paper, which is a kind of accidental autoethnography, Dunbar-Hester discusses how one donkeyposter become irate over the presence of human butts instead of donkeys in #asstodon posts. The donkeyposter eventually began harassing people – including Dunbar-Hester, using multiple accounts, posting racist content, and even emailing Dunbar-Hester at her work.
In researching donkeyposter’s actions, Dunbar-Hester argues that the structure of Mastodon may not be amenable to hashtag activism.
I should note the article has a delightful amount of butt puns! I only managed one in this post (see if you can find it).
I want to draw on Dunbar-Hester’s article to write about something I’ve been wrestling with: methodologies for studying the fediverse. Specifically, I want to highlight a distinction between Dunbar-Hester’s approach and the one I’ve chosen for my book project. This is not to say Dunbar-Hester did it wrong – in fact, her paper is excellent, and as fediverse scholarship grows, we will need multiple studies and many perspectives. I will highlight my instance-centric approach as a contrast.
My current book, Move Slowly and Build Bridges: Mastodon, the Fediverse, and the Struggle for Ethical Social Media (Oxford University Press 2025) is mostly drafted! I am drafting a conclusion, but for now, I figured I would provide an overview of the book.
This post gives a chapter-by-chapter summary of the draft. Since it’s a draft, things can still change, but as of today, I’m pretty pleased with the structure.
(Sorry about the provocative title, but I just had to do it.)
Today, a lot of people have thoughts on Threads, which is actively testing ActivityPub federation. The reactions range from triumphant proclamations about this making the fediverse more legitimate to abject horror that a company so reviled is attempting to join the fedi.
Full disclosure: I’m more in the latter camp.
As readers of this blog know, I’m working on a book about the fediverse, and part of my process is to share ideas out in the open. Since any book about the fediverse will have to talk about Threads, I figured this might be a good place to share a rough idea of how a chapter about Threads might go. Comments are welcome, of course!
Yesterday, I taught one of the final meetings of my undergrad “Ethics and the Media” course at York. We’re using Charle Ess’s Digital Media Ethics (3rd edition) as our textbook, and so we’ve had a good guide to ethical theories, such as virtue ethics, deontology, utilitarianism, and feminist ethics of care. (I also supplement Ess with readings and ideas from Shannon Vallor, Kwame Gyekye, Carissa Veliz, Michael Zimmer, and others).
Much of the course has been about learning the ethical theories and then discussing case studies. It’s been quite an enjoyable course to teach, particularly because I’ve seen the students go from the vague and intellectually unsatisfying statement “Ethics is a subjective, personal thing” to the more robust “Let me lay out how a virtue ethicist would think about this.”
But I wanted to have at least one day of the course dedicated to applied ethics. Instead of looking at a case that happened in the past, I wanted the students to apply the ethical theories to a concrete situation.
And these days, we have a great situation in digital media ethics to consider: what to do when we start up a Mastodon server?
In this post, I’ll write up what we did in the class, in case anyone out there wants to try something similar.
My first full-time academic job was at the University of Utah. Utah is, of course, very famous. No, not because of cold fusion or teaching Ted Bundy about the law.
It is famous because it was the fourth node on the ARPAnet, the forerunner to the modern internet. The other three nodes were in California; connecting to Utah was a major test of the network’s ability to work across long distances.
Although it was a US Defense Department-funded project, the ARPAnet was a playground for academics who took its mission (command-and-control even in spite of a nuclear attack) and turned it into research into networking and collaboration. The pattern continued: academic exploration of computer technologies has produced a bewildering array of experiments, and no doubt students at institutions have benefited greatly from being able to play with local, experimental computer tools while they study.
Fast forward to the early 2010s. I’m working at Utah, hired in part to teach a Web design class to Communication majors. Simple enough: each and every person affiliated with Utah had their own domain (something like domain.utah.edu/~username) on a local server, complete with FTP access via their email credentials. I taught students the basics of HTML and CSS. I got to see students who were openly scared of coding make things that appeared on their screens – and on the internet. It was fun!
Until it was not. I was at Utah from 2010 to 2020. Over that time, it became harder and harder to get students into their web space. It turns out that Utah was winding down web hosting for everyone, centralizing its web presence and no longer providing web space to anyone. To support our class, the IT folks helpfully carved out some space on a server, specifically for our Comm Intro to the Web Design students, but we knew this was an exception.
At the end of my time there, even the machines in the computer lab were outsourced. Instead of fully-functional desktops, students were accessing their servers over a convoluted “thin client” computer lab setup. I had to spend the first 2 weeks just showing them how to find their files – since they were no longer local – and then FTP into a server to move those files over a client-to-cloud-to-FTP setup. This was for students who had no networking or web design experience – it was rough. (And if we needed software – such as basic text editor – good luck getting it when all the software was on a cloud somewhere).
I’m sorry to say I spent a great deal of that time in an increasingly adversarial relationship with the IT folks.
As this happened, my colleague Sean Lawson and I would vent our frustration by jokingly saying, “Welcome to Node 4!” The irony being that Utah was once 25% of the freakin’ Internet but we could not get easy access to basic Web hosting. It was an ordeal just to get students to the point where they could move a text file they were working on to a server.
Fast forward to today. Now, I am happily employed by York University in Toronto. But just the other day, my colleagues met for a faculty meeting, and we discussed recruiting students. Someone suggested we post information about our faculty to our department website and social media. “No,” the chair said. “All of that would have to go through the central administration” – the implication being either it wouldn’t be allowed, or that it would take months to achieve.
Someone’s Gotta Write This Book
I would propose, were I to have time, to write a book called “How Universities Lost the Internet.” How did we get from many nodes to everything being dumped into California or Redmond, WA? How did we get from a system of experimentation to seeing digital media as a controlled environment to market a brand? How did we get to the point where university core functions were run by for-profit firms?
It would be a fascinating book. (Someone else can write it, though; I’m too busy with my current project!)
On October 18, at 8.30 am, a group of about 30 Internet Scholars gathered for a Association of Internet Researchers preconference, called “Building an Alternative Social Media Network.”
Organized by Jessa Lingel, Ashwin Nagappi, and myself, the preconference achieved one of its big goals: getting many researchers in a room to talk about alternative social media (ASM). Yay!
The other big goal was igniting a research agenda for ASM. Did we succeed?
In a couple days, I head to Philadelphia for the 2023 version of the Association of Internet Researchers conference. It’s my favorite conference. And to give AOIR even more credit, they were one of the first professional academic organizations to set up their own Mastodon instance (I participate in that project by helping run the instance).
While there, I will present a paper about the creation of ActivityPub, the protocol that allows the contemporary fediverse to run.
Titled “The Non-Standard Standard: A Critical Genealogy of ActivityPub,” I will argue that ActivityPub is a very unusual standard. While it was created by a W3C working group, the Social Web Working Group during a W3C standard process, there were many non-standard aspects to its creation.
In this post, I’ll sum up my findings, arguing that there are four ways in which ActivityPub is a non-standard standard. This work is informed by reading the Social Web Working Group (SocialWG) meeting minutes, interviews with SocialWG members, and a study of historical documents.
Comments are very welcome, since this is going to be a chapter in my forthcoming book about the fediverse, Move Slowly and Build Bridges.
So I tried to take part in Fediforum today, but I wasn’t really able to participate. My initial idea was to get into a debate with my friend Roel Roscam Abbing, who is an incredibly deep thinker and is writing what will no doubt be a foundational dissertation about the fediverse. We were hoping to prompt a discussion about importable, instance blocklists on the fediverse.
He and I disagree their utility. He thinks they’re bad; I think they’re good. I’ll let him post his reasons why, but here I wanted to share my defense of them. What follows is a longer version of what I planned on presenting at Fediforum.
This is a minor update, but I hope it’s useful to anyone interested in doing alternative social media research. I’ve long hosted a Zotero group, the Social Media Alternatives Project, which has a library. As much as I love Zotero, though, I’ve not had much luck with groups for fostering public discussion. Their libraries are a bit too tucked away.
Since many people are requesting resources about ASM, and that Zotero library may not be the easiest thing to find, I’m going to regularly port that library to a Bibliography page on this blog. I’ve got to do some cleaning up, but there’s some good stuff in there. As Steve Brule might say: check it out!
I am very excited to announce that my next book, Move Slowly and Building Bridges: Mastodon, the Fediverse, and the Struggle for Democratic Social Media will be published by Oxford University Press.
Earlier this year, I sent a proposal (a short synopsis of the book, audience considerations, and two sample chapters) to Oxford. They moved fast. They recruited two peer reviewers who turned around reviews very quickly, and then Oxford’s editorial board reviewed the project. I just received a contract based on these reviews.
The word I got from Oxford is that they are excited about the project – and about the fediverse. That’s really good news, because the normal advice an author would get is to promote one’s work on corporate social media. But I think that any book about the fediverse has to be talked about on the fediverse. Maybe this project can help other academic authors break away from Twitter/X and Facebook/Meta.
This is just a short note to announce that, thanks to some generous funding at York University, I am recruiting graduate students (MA and PhD) as well as post-docs. I’d like to work with folks on alternative social media, in particular. Methodologically, I tend to use qualitative approaches, such as digital ethnography, software studies, and grounded theory/situational analysis. I am a critical scholar, as well, so I prefer working with people who are actively examining power relations in technical systems.
Grad students, York has two programs I’m affiliated with: Science and Technology Studies and Communication and Culture, a communication and media studies focused program. My understanding is that STS in particular is eager for students, so if you have any background in STS, I would recommend that route. Either way, please do contact me via email (I have a protonmail account, robertwgehl) or find me on the fediverse.
Post-docs, York U has received a very generous grant called Connected Minds which includes many funding opportunities. Contact me if you have some interest there.
NB: I’ve started an alternative social media email list, and I regularly email the list with news from the world of ASM. Since many ASM are free and open source software, it occurred to me that I should mirror those emails here on the blog. These might be the next iteration of “FOSS finds,” a series I ran in previous posts. If you are an ASM researcher and want to subscribe to the email list, contact me and I can add you. Or, just watch this space for (roughly) fortnightly updates.
Here’s an update on the world of ASM – at least as I see it!
NB: This is the second in a series of posts where I will share my notes on my readings of the minutes of the Social Web Working Group. The first one is here. Future posts to come.
As I mentioned several months ago, my book about Mastodon and the rest of the fediverse can’t be complete without a deep understanding of ActivityPub, the protocol that powers the fediverse. ActivityPub itself is getting a bit of love in the press (see this Verge article for an example).
And to understand ActivityPub, we have to look at the group that created it, the W3C’s Social Web Working Group, or SocialWG for short. They posted their meeting minutes on the Web and I have read all of them.
In the previous post on the SocialWG minutes, I focused on the very early years, 2014 to 2015, finding that the period was dominated by organizational issues – how to meet, how to make decisions, and so on. In this section, I will cover the development of ActivityStreams 2.0, the first goal of the SocialWG charter.
So, as I noted in the last post, AoIR.social is live! It’s in beta testing, so to speak, as we bring on board moderators to learn the system before rolling out to the Association of Internet Researchers membership.
And moderators can’t mount up and moderate without a Code of Conduct. Along with Sarah Roberts and Aram Sinnreich, we drafted a COC based on the successful one found at scholar.social. We posted it to AoIR.social this week, and the moderators are weighing in.
This post is meant to document this process, not just for posterity, but also for the Fediverse writ large. Below, I’ll post the full AoIR.social COC and document the feedback the moderators are giving it.
I’m excited to announce that AOIR.social is going to happen. In fact, it’s live right now, but we’re not actively signing up AOIR members just yet. First, we’re going to let our volunteer moderators join to learn the tooling (and the tooting).
And I have to do some work on preemptively blocking instances that don’t share our values.
Oh, and we have to finalize our Code of Conduct (both for the Mastodon instance and for the organization as a whole).
And I want to investigate signing the Mastodon Server Covenant. (I want this to be a respectable part of the fediverse, after all).
There’s probably more that I’m not thinking about, but in any case… it’s happening, people!
Ok, you all probably remember last fall, when the Muskening happened. When Mastodon saw a massive influx of new members. When Mastodon admins were struggling to keep up with the influx but ultimately showed that the network can, in fact, scale up. It was, in my view, the biggest stress on the ActivityPub protocol – and ActivityPub kicked ass. Millions of people signed up for Mastodon.
That’s the titular Mastodon “bump.”
Since I’ve published academic articles on Mastodon, during that Eternal Muskvember, I was approached by a lot of journalists (here, here, and here, for example) to talk about Mastodon, answering questions ranging from “what is it?” to “will it replace Twitter?” It was an exciting and sometimes exasperating time. I basically told myself, “Self, this sort of media attention is rare. Enjoy it, but know that it won’t last.” And indeed, a few weeks later, the story died down.
I also told myself to expect the inevitable follow-up. That’s what I’m writing about here.
As many readers of this blog are likely aware, after the new year, Mastodon’s active user base dropped off. As with every wave of social media movement from platform to platform, some percentage of people just don’t stick with the new site.
There’s the titular Mastodon “slump.”
Last week, I got an interview request from WIRED’s Amanda Hoover, who was working on a story about how Mastodon’s drop in active users signaled that it had failed in its mission to replace Twitter.
Now, before I go any further I will say Hoover’s reporting on Mastodon has been excellent. She asks great questions, and she does more than just interview Eugen Rochko – she talks to instance admins, lawyers, and academics like myself. And, in fact, the article I’m going to critique is quite good.
But I am going to use her latest WIRED article to illustrate an all-too-common trope in reporting on alternative social media: it’s what I call “The Killer Hype Cycle.”
NB: This is the first in a series of posts where I will share my notes on my readings of the minutes of the Social Web Working Group. Future posts to come.
As readers of the blog know by now, Goal 2 of the blog is to document my writing of my next book, which I’m tentatively titling Move Slowly and Build Bridges: Mastodon and the Struggle for Ethical Alternative Social Media.
To that end, I have been studying the workings of the Social Web Working Group (SocialWG), a W3C standards group which ran from 2014 through 2017 and ultimately produced, among other things, ActivityPub, the protocol that underpins much of the fediverse.
I figure I cannot tell any stories about Mastodon without understanding the production of ActivityPub. Looking through the SocialWG meetings, it’s quite clear that Mastodon and ActivityPub’s histories are deeply intertwined. Mastodon adopted ActivityPub it prior to AP being a Candidate Recommendation (the penultimate stage in the W3C recommendation process). Mastodon is also a key reason why the Social Web Working Group got a 6 month extension for their work in 2017 – see this meeting. They even set up a Mastodon instance (w3c.social) to show W3C members that software.
This post will discuss the early period of the SocialWG (circa 2014 through 2015). I’ll follow up later with more posts and notes.
Importantly, I need to offer a couple caveats.
First, I didn’t participate in the group. Instead, I’m basing much of this off the meeting minutes, as well as blog posts by SocialWG members, and to a lesser extent on informal discussions and formal interviews with some of the members. It’s possible – likely, even – that I will get details wrong, not simply because I wasn’t there, but also because this poor English major was not trained in computer science. The notes here are things that caught my eye. If you have corrections or critiques of my interpretation, please do share in the comments! And, as I talk to more people, I might change my interpretations, as well.
Second, my focus is predominantly going to be on ActivityPub. However, the SocialWG produced quite a few other standards. That said, in focusing on the group’s history, I should cover a lot of ground, even with my emphasis on ActivityPub.
Third, the meeting minutes are not verbatim transcripts (which makes sense – meeting minutes almost never are). They were taken by volunteers from among the SocialWG, who were trying to transcribe phone conversations while an IRC chat was going. So, any quotes I include here should not be taken as verbatim statements. In addition, given the sheer number of times I read statements such as “who’s speaking now?” and “I can hear weird noises” – these were largely telephone conferences, after all – I would take any attributions here with a major grain of salt, as well. Take, for example, the following exchange from this meeting:
harry: so a cheapo understanding of heirarchy
… am confused when I read the spec
scribe: was that harry or dret ?
sorry if I set the wrong one
dret: me
Notice in this example statements are attributed to harry when they were actually said by dret. So, I will tend to cite statements and ideas with minimal attribution unless I am 99% certain the statement can be attributed to the person.
I don’t often do “Year in Review” posts, but… this past year has been something else. I’ve started a new job in a new country, I published another book, and my area of research (alternative social media) got a lot of media attention. In addition, I’ve formulated a new book project – and in doing so, I almost regret the name of this blog! But don’t worry: the FOSS Academic Lifestyle Dream is still alive, even if it is a bit more self-reflexive about what FOSS means.
I’ll do this post in roughly chronological order. Buckle up: it’s a long post.
I came across Ro’s work while Playvicious was running sometime in 2018, and I made a note of it – and then forgot. I got distracted by a major project: my co-authored book on disinformation, Social Engineering. I put off my Mastodon/fediverse studies in order to understand social media and propaganda, especially in relation to US presidential elections.
While I don’t regret diving into disinformation, I do regret not witnessing Playvicious’s run. It was an early, if not the first, Black-run instance on the fediverse. It was a source of joy for a lot of people. As Ro puts it, the idea of “play vicious” is
The energetic, unfiltered, sometimes uncomfortable, but the relentlessly progressive pursuit of understanding ourselves through creativity. It defined us as a group of thinking and feeling people who wanted to burn away all unnecessary details and get to the essence of why we loved what we loved and exist in that space for however long we could.
But that energy attracted some hate. As Ro will no doubt relate, Playvicious.social faced harassment and racism. Ro shut it down after watching as his moderators were traumatized.
I missed its run online. And I really regret that.
But Ro (and others – I think more folks are starting to talk about PV) is giving all of us a great gift: an inside view of this most important Mastodon instance.
The story Ro is telling is intensely personal. It’s also deeply important for the big questions of the fediverse, such as content moderation, how instances should relate to one another, and how societal injustices are replicated again and again online.
As Mastodon grows, a big stain has been not only the end of Playvicious.social, but also the experience of Black Mastodon members more generally. When people left Twitter after Musk’s takeover, it included the community known as Black Twitter. But Black Twitter ran into casual racism on the fediverse, and currently people are struggling to create #BlackMastodon. (I recommend following that hashtag and boosting posts).
Fortunately, while PV.social is gone, Ro is not done. He’s building new software to this day, he hosts a microblog (a Misskey instance), and he’s contributing moderation tools to the fediverse – even in spite of all he and his colleagues went through.
I’m grateful to Ro (and other PV folks) because I believe I cannot write my current book (Goal 2!) about Mastodon without talking about Playvicious.social. But it’s also not my story to tell. It’s Ro’s and other folks’ story. My job is to talk about it in the contexts that I can dig up through research and interviews.
The majority of scholarship on platform governance focuses on for-profit, corporate social media with highly centralized network structures. Instead, we show how non-centralized platform governance functions in the Mastodon social network. Through an analysis of survey data, Github and Discourse developer discussions, Mastodon Codes of Conduct, and participant observations, we argue Mastodon’s platform governance is an exemplar of the covenant, a key concept from federalist political theory. We contrast Mastodon’s covenantal federalism platform governance with the contractual form used by corporate social media. We also use covenantal federalist theory to explain how Mastodon’s users, administrators, and developers justify revoking or denying membership in the federation. In doing so, this study sheds new light on the innovations in platform governance that go beyond the corporate/alt-right platform dichotomy.
And I also published an op-ed in the Toronto Star this morning. The op-ed discusses the fact that Twitter is blocking links to Mastodon instances, including my own, Scholar.social. However, Twitter is not blocking links to Gab, the alt-right social network that hosts self-identified Nazis. It seems Musk is concerned about competition from well-moderated, tiny Mastodon instances, but not so much from the alt-right.
He completed his purchase of Twitter right before the annual meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers, held in Dublin in November of this year.
Coincidence? I think not.
The Musk takeover of Twitter prompted a conversation at AOIR’s meeting in Dublin in early November: should AOIR start a Mastodon (specifically, a Hometown) instance? As someone who has been advocating for alternative social media for years, I was all about this. Internet researchers have been among the first to recognize the perils of corporate social media. But of course, AOIR members often deeply engage online, which means using those systems for their pleasures and professional opportunities.
As the old commercial says, there’s got to be a better way: a way to do social media but to do it on our terms. If the Musk takeover is the catalyst that pushes AOIR to adopt the fediverse, then as disturbing as things have gotten, at least there will be a positive outcome.
Spurred on by Aram Sinnreich, we started having informal discussions at AOIR’s 2022 meeting about starting up our own social media. What would it entail? How would we do it? The informal discussion involved some of my favorite AOIR folks: Nik John, Adrienne Massanari, Nick Couldry, Pat Aufderheide, and Esther Hammelburg (if I left anyone out, please let me know).
The conversation went well but we all knew there was a lot of work ahead. Last week, I met with the AOIR Executive Committee to continue the work. They’ve agreed to my posting about this process to this blog.
This post is meant to do two things. First, it documents how an academic association deliberates over whether and how to establish a presence on the fediverse. That ought to be useful for other organizations considering doing the same. I know there are quite a few.
Second, my hope is that by sharing AOIR’s deliberations, the rest of the fediverse can have some insight into our decision to proceed (should it come to that). Given that AOIR members engage in Internet Research, there may be trepidation about AOIR joining the fediverse – would AOIR come to the fedi to study it? To turn its users into objects of research?
Put another way, will AOIR be a good organizational citizen of the fediverse? Will it host a well-moderated instance? Will it respect fediverse cultures and norms? Please read on, fedifriends. I hope that it’s clear AOIR is going to do it right – otherwise, AOIR is not going to do it at all.
A short FOSS Finds this time, but it contains something worth watching out for.
This week I attended a web seminar run by Darius Kazemi (creator of the Hometown fork of Mastodon), Kat Lo, a community moderator, and Aaron Huslage, a computer security professional. It was about Trust and Safety on the fediverse. The event was sponsored by Darius’s employer, Meedan.
I believe the webinar (or a version of it) will be available in video form. I will watch for it and post an update here when I see a link. For now, if you’re interested in content moderation, I’d strongly recommend watching out for a video version of the webinar – especially because of the Q and A.
The webinar itself was quite a good overview of moderation on the fediverse, talking about blocking, muting and the like, so if you need to know more about that, it’s worth a watch.
But during the Q and A, I heard the most interesting stuff. Darius and others talked about a lot of emerging projects that might be worth investigating. For example, co-op moderation collectives, which would offer their moderation know-how to new fediverse instances. I don’t have specifics here, but this sounds fascinating! Also, Darius talked about forthcoming legal guides to running instances. Again, no specifics yet, but something to watch for. Or, reach out to Darius – he seems really interested in helping others with these issues.
Elon, what are you doing? I don’t know. None of us knows.
But it appears you’re tearing Twitter apart. And this is driving people to Mastodon. I will talk about Mastodon at some other point – I am, of course, writing a book about it.
Here, I want to talk about the fall of Twitter and what I think it means.
The TL;DR version is: I don’t think Twitter was all that important.
In this longer blog post, I wanted to give more context for what I’m saying, especially because the Pew report is pretty good work, with the definitional exception. Here I want to explain a bit about why Pew researchers can say “alternative social media” and only refer to exerable sites like Gab and Parler.
This post will also be the skeleton for some upcoming talks I’m going to give, one at the Association of Internet Researchers and another at Malmö University.
There’s a new paper out about Mastodon! But unfortunately, it’s a deeply problematic one.
Nobre et al’s “More of the Same? A Study of Images Shared on Mastodon’s Federated Timeline” is a paper that is now published in proceedings from International Conference on Social Informatics. (Unfortunately, it’s not open access.)
Because I’m currently researching the fediverse and blogging about that process, I thought I’d write up notes on this paper.
Nobre et al’s “More of the Same” is a study of image-sharing. The authors claim that it is about image-sharing on Mastodon, but really their focus is on images they culled from Mastodon.social’s federated timeline. They pulled 4M posts from 103K active users, of which 1M had images. Since they pulled posts from Mastodon.social’s federated timeline, they saw posts from 4K separate instances. The authors state that a “relevant number” of the images they found are “explicit.” They categorize the images as such after running them through Google’s Vision AI Safe Search system. They also run the images they find through Google’s image search to trace where the images came from and how they are shared on Mastodon. Ultimately, the authors don’t really make an argument, other than stating in passing that Mastodon needs better moderation, since people share explicit images.
In some ways, “More of the Same” lives up to its title: it’s more of the same poor scholarship that can be seen in Zignani et al (in fact, Nobre et al cite that controversial paper). Here are my critiques:
This time in FOSS Finds, we’ve got an academic paper on Scuttlebutt, an open source social networking protocol enabling an alternative social media system.
This is an open access academic article discussing Scuttlebutt, a social networking protocol that enables decentralized (and offline!) social media. The authors draw on three years of participant observation on Scuttlebutt: they use it, participate in its governance, and interview some of its users. Their main finding builds on what I’ve found in some of my work – that FOSS-based alternative social media may well offer greater participation than their corporate counterparts. After all, are you invited to discuss Facebook policy with Zuckerberg? Or weigh in on how algorithms sort what you see on Twitter? In contrast, FOSS ASM allow members to not only do social things, but also participate in governance and coding. Mannell and Smith find that Scuttlebutt takes these processes further, actively recruiting people to be in governance positions and recognizing non-coding work (like making user interface design decisions) through monetary contributions. Mannell and Smith use their insights to broaden the now-classic concept of “participatory culture” which was a very popular idea in the early aughts but was put by the wayside as the relatively open Web gave way to closed off, corporate-dominated social media.
This is a must-read for my Goal 2 project of writing a book about ethical alternative social media!
Yeah, I know I haven’t posted in a while, but hear me out: there’s a good reason.
I’m moving to Canada!
Today, I signed an offer to join York University in Toronto as the Ontario Research Chair of Digital Governance for Social Justice. If you’re reading that job title and thinking “that’s a really good fit for the Goal 2, ethical alternative social media book project!”, you’d be right. The central project I’m blogging about here on FOSS Academic is exactly what I’d be pursuing at York.
More to come, but I just wanted to break the silence a bit – in between doing all the paperwork that comes with moving, of course!
As I’ve written before, I’m working on a book about the fediverse. To do that properly, I need to have a good understanding of ActivityPub, a key underlying protocol that enables servers to talk to one another. A member of one ActivityPub-enabled server, such as Mastodon, can connect with another on a different server – even if it runs different software, such as Pixelfed. It’s quite a technical achievement and – I believe – it really needs to be part of the conversation when we discuss things like moderation, platform governance, and the political economy of the internet.
I like to study how such software develops over time, so I’ve been going through the meeting minutes of the W3C Social Web Working Group. It’s been fascinating to see how they, for example, discuss user stories and how they inform the protocol’s functionality.
I posted a short note about doing this work on my home Mastodon instance, scholar.social, and people noticed! This is what I love about scholar.social – when I talk about geeking out about something, people jump in. Another fediverse member suggested I take a look at this week’s FOSS Find. And now, I’m writing up notes about it – at the request of the author of the Find. Read more after the jump.
One major goal for my Goal 2 book project is to learn from people who create things on the fediverse. They might create code and cultures by developing and running instances. Or, they might be using the fediverse to promote their photography, music, or ideas.
As an endowed research chair, I have the privilege of generous research funding. For the purposes of my book project, research includes talking to people, running my own digital infrastructure (e.g., the incredible Nextcloud), and, of course, studying texts.
The meaning of “texts” is quite open-ended. Obviously, I’m reading books and journal articles. But so, so much knowledge is being created on the Fediverse itself – including knowledge offered only to subscribers. There are artists, musicians, and writers using Patreon (or, maybe better, Liberapay) to share their work with subscribers.
This month’s FOSS finds: I was listening to NPR (which makes sense since I drive an electric car and I am a communist) and StoryCorps came on. I usually hear it while dropping my kid off at school, and it’s always a conversation-starter between us. It has been for years. Which got me to thinking: the StoryCorps project must have a lot of archived recordings of their oral history.
Indeed, they do. They’ve been doing oral history for 20 years now.
Which got me to thinking: if StoryCorps has been around for 20 years, they must have done an interview or two about FOSS.
Indeed, they have.
So the FOSS find this time are a few citations of those interviews. I haven’t had a chance to listen to them yet, so these abstracts will be from the StoryCorps site. I will listen to them soon, because I wonder if they can supplement my Goal 2 book project research. I’m conducting interviews of my own, but the more voices, the better, yeah?
Read on to see the ones I found in a few minutes of searching. Feel free to suggest more such interviews!
With my last book wrapped up, I am now hard at work building the next book, which is the Goal 2 of this blog. (Goal 1, recall, is writing about being a FOSS academic. Goal 2 is writing a book about FOSS). My new book project will focus on what I’m calling “ethical source alternative social media” – social media that allows ordinary people to be in control, that uses moderation for social, economic, and environmental justice and not to support oppression, and that runs on FOSS.
Methodologically, this project will demand I use my expertise in software studies, science and technology studies, and critical communication studies to analyze code, protocols, and network structures. But I also want to use participant observation and interviewing. And, I want this to adhere to the highest ethical standands as well as use FOSS technologies throughout.
I want to include the voices of ethical ASM members, developers, and admins. It may be tempting to do what a lot of people seem to have done and quote fediverse posts. However, I’ve observed that many, many fediverse users do not consent to having their posts taken out of context. There are public forums I can quote – for example, the Github issues forum for Mastodon. But I think the best vehicle to hear people talk about their experience with ethical ASM is via interviewing.
In this post I will briefly describe how I will manage interviewing. I hope this resource is useful not just to other researchers, but also to anyone considering being interviewed by me who might be curious about my process.
I’ve not written much about my most recent book, Social Engineering (MIT Press, 2022) on this blog. It didn’t seem like a good topic for this FOSS-centric blog. When I did write about it, I focused on the fact that my co-author, Sean Lawson, and I were able to use FOSS (particularly Nextcloud) to write it. In the parlance of this blog, that’s a decidedly Goal 1 topic – about using FOSS tools to do academic work.
So, I’ve focused instead on my next project, the Goal 2 project of writing a book about FOSS alternative social media. My idea is to use this blog to publicly write that book. Such public writing is new to me – it’s even a bit intimidating – but seems appropriate for this topic.
But the more I’m digging into what it means to envision, make, and realize ethical, FOSS, alternative social media, the more I realize my latest book, Social Engineering, is directly relevant to the project. So, this post is a way for me to make those connections.
This week’s FOSS finds: The big news – or maybe non-news – in this space is the pathetically inept rollout of Truth Social, Donald Trump’s $1,000,000,000 social networking site built on the free-as-in-beer but also free-as-in-freedom Mastodon software base. I watched Truth go online and I have thoughts, but here I will just share some resources I’ve gathered.
As part of Goal 2 of this blog, I’m writing a book about FOSS, specifically FOSS alternative social media. Like any good academic, I need to review the literature. I want to do so a bit more publicly than I have in the past – hence this blog.
[Edited to add: this is one of the more popular posts I’ve written, and so I’ve modified it so people can comment on it through the fediverse.]
About a week ago, I took to my home Mastodon instance, scholar.social, and asked whether people preferred Zettlr or Obsidian. Both are Markdown editors which also provide valuable features on top, including linking together Markdown notes and varying degrees of Zotero support.
I asked because I’m using Markdown more and more. I use it regularly to plan my weeks, I obviously use it for this blog (which is a static Jekyll site), and I started using it to jot down ideas in a journaling program called RedNoteBook. I was hoping to streamline blogging, note-taking, and other Markdown tasks in one system.
So, I have tried both Zettlr and Obsidian – and I also tried a third system, Logseq – and have decided to adopt Zettlr. It meets my needs quite well, which are probably a bit more minimal than people might expect.
However, given what these projects are doing, I do not feel locked into my choice. In fact, I have all three installed and may hop between them.
This week’s FOSS finds: I’m starting to look back at the early days of ActivityPub, and chat apps get some coverage. So once again, don’t count on these posts as a news feed, but more a window into my thinking as I research my FOSS alternative social media book.
In this week’s FOSS finds, I’m thinking about the environmental impact of tech and I gathered sources on Marak’s refusal to keep giving away code. I’m including a few examples here to show my work.
I recently announced my new book project, focusing on ethical FOSS social media, and I’m trying an experiment in writing it openly. That’s Goal 2 of this blog (Goal 1 being discussions of my actually using FOSS to complete this task). To that end, I’ve decided to share items I’ve found as I do my research.
I’m calling it FOSS Finds, because alliteration.
These are typically going to be websites, blogposts, podcasts, or academic research. They may or may not be very recent. I plan on including a citation (exported, of course, from Zotero) and a brief note about each, a la an annotated bibliography, and versions of my Zotero tags. The notes won’t be exhaustive – it’s really about what I’m collecting at this stage, rather than analysis.
For about a year I’ve been teasing at Goal 2 for this blog, which is to write a book about FOSS. It’s probably not surprising to hear that I needed to narrow that focus down. FOSS is a massive phenomenon, and any given area within it deserves lengthy analysis. For example, Biella Coleman’s classic book Coding Freedom focuses heavily on the Debian distribution. One could imagine similar books about the Linux Kernel, or Canonical, or Arch, or web servers.
Given my background as a scholar, however, it makes sense that I should pursue a book-length project focusing on FOSS social media.
I’ve been struggling with having comments on this Jekyll-based static site for a while. For a bit, I used Staticman, but that died for some reason.
Then, it hit me: so many sites use Facebook comments. Why can’t I use Mastodon, the FOSS alternative social media system, to do something similar?
Fortunately, this guide provided all the code I could need to do exactly that!
So this is a test run. Feel free to comment on it using your Mastodon account. (I think other federated accounts might work, but not sure – if so, let me know in the comments!)
If you don’t have a Mastodon account, don’t worry! You can sign up for an instance and join the federated fun.
UPDATE #1
I’ve tested it a bit and have found a few things that give me pause:
It does not respect the distinction between Unlisted and Public privacy settings. Both will show up here.
It does respect DM – that is, DMs do not show up as comments.
It does not respect Content Warnings. This has been fixed; see Update #3.
With all that in mind, I think I may keep it (pending further testing) and include a warning in the “Comments” section.
UPDATE #2
Thanks to another Mastodoner, I found that if anyone who uses Mastodon to comment on a blog post deletes said comment, then it will also no longer appear on the blog. I think that’s a cool feature, but I’m thinking that I have be extremely clear about what happens when people comment on my blog. It’s going to be public – very public – not just in the federation, but also on my website.
However, I’m not 100% certain this is wise. I’d love to get more opinions from Mastodon users. Feel free to leave them in the comments – or, to be certain that your opinion is expressed privately, DM me (@robertwgehl@scholar.social).
UPDATE #3
Thanks to @ashwinvis, the comments system now supports Content Warnings. @ashwinvis wrote a few lines of Javascript that did the trick, resulting in CWs appearing with a small dropdown.
Linux Unplugged is at it again: it’s Tuxies time! I voted, and you can, too. Unlike last year, this year they’re using a self-hosted Nextcloud form – brilliant! Like last year, I’ve voted based on my experience as a FOSS Academic. My picks may not win – but they might just help you live the FOSS Academic Lifestyle Dream.
Earlier this year, in the wake of the attempted coup that happened right here, live, on TV, in these United States, I wrote a post praising how Mastodon handled the alt-right and Donald Trump. As I saw it, Mastodon’s swift action against the alt-right (specifically, their quick repudiation of Gab) was a very different approach than the corporate platform approach of Facebook and Twitter. Yes, the latter removed Trump. But they did so at a pretty convenient moment: after the election was over and the ad dollars were spent. Moreover, while banning Trump was a long-overdue move, it was clearly inadequate. As investigative journalism is revealing, Facebook in particular did little to quell the planning of the January 6 insurrection.
I come again to praise Mastodon. This time, for quickly addressing the problem of Trump’s new platform, Truth, which appears to be a fork (or simply CTRL+F and replace) of Mastodon’s code. That in itself is not the issue – after all, Mastodon is FOSS, and people can therefore take it and use it. The issue is that Trump is claiming to own the code.
To my mind, this is like a powerful force hitting a very stupid object. It seems obvious that Trump will have to relinquish his claims that the code is proprietary.
Then again, Trump is notorious for doing things and then daring people to lawyer up, dragging his feet by using the courts. It’s clearly what he’s hoping to do with the January 6 investigation, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he does the same with Mastodon and the SFC.
But those are Trump’s flaws. Again, I come to praise Mastodon, once again, for showing nerve and a steel spine where corporations with a great deal more revenue, lobbying power, and users didn’t do in the first place: call Trump out on his bullshit.
As a professor, I keep office hours and encourage students to meet with me. And, I also need to advise graduate students at various institutions around the world. And this is not to mention meeting with other professors I’m collaborating with – again, from around the world.
In the past, setting up meetings went a bit like this:
Them: Hey, can we meet?
Me: Sure! When do you want to meet?
Them: I’m free Mondays and Fridays.
Me: How about noon on Monday?
Them: Actually, I have an appointment them. What day of the week works for you?
Me: Wednesdays and Fridays.
Them: Great! What about 1 on Wednesday?
Me: Sure!
Them: What timezone are you in?
Me: Central.
Them: Oh! Then 1 pm for you is 9 pm for me.
Etc, etc. Each of these being an email, of course, and usually with a delay of several hours between them.
As they used to say in the commercials, “there’s got to be a better way!”
I took a bit more time off, at least from this blog, but it’s late September and I really should be back in school. And I am. Classes just started up at LaTech, and with them my attention turns to reading and writing about FOSS.
One thing I have done in the intervening past few weeks is publish another post to The Reboot, this time focusing on the state of FOSS phones. I had the pleasure of talking to Ioana Luncheon of Fairphone, Lukasz Erecinski of PINE64, and Félim Whiteley of Late Night Linux.
I’ve also been digging into the Ethical Source movement, which is producing a new version of the Hippocratic License for software projects.
And, I’ve been steadily working on a co-authored paper on Mastodon, the federated social networking site.
So, a lot going on, and a lot more to come!
In fact, I’m getting ever closer to revealing my Goal 2: Book Project on the blog. I want to blog out my progress openly. To do that, of course, I’ll have to clarify my project!
Oh, and other stuff on the to-do list includes figuring out a new commenting system, since Staticman is no longer working.
Big news on the search front! The Brave Browser is now offering a search engine. According to their announcment, Brave Search promises “independent option for search which gives them unmatched privacy” and will use an independent index, rather than rely on Google or Microsoft. I’ve already started playing with Brave Search and am curious to see how it develops.
However, any time someone offers a search engine and their corporate parent isn’t named Alphabet, there’s a pretty predictable reaction: “Good on them for trying, but you just can’t beat Google.” I’ve also heard academics say the same thing: “I can’t find anything without Google.”
Search is, of course, a very common approach to conducting research, and it’s especially important to my work on Internet cultures. One key way to study the Internet is by searching it. And it seems as though that means all my work ought to flow through Google.
The book is the result of four years of research on hacker social engineering practices as well as early 20th century propaganda and public relations (a field that also referred to its activity as “social engineering”). After finishing this latest book, I realized I’m a living testament to the fact that yes, you can de-Google your search and still conduct research. Because that’s what I did.
I’ve not posted for a while. And that’s ok. Why? Because we all need a break. A vacation.
You. You there. You should take a break.
I did. It’s ok. The work will be there later.
While traveling with family and seeing my friends, I once again relied heavily on a device I begrudgingly have: a mobile phone, in this case a Google Android device. While I work really hard to avoid apps or limit their permissions, I just don’t like having Google anything in my pocket.
And while I have a PinePhone Braveheart edition, it’s just not ready to be my main phone.
So, in the interim, I’m doing something I should have done a while ago: trying out F-Droid, the FOSS collection of Android apps.
I was inspired in part by an interview I had with Félim Whiteley of the Late Night Linux podcast. Whiteley is a well-known de-Googler. The interview will be used as a part of the research for a forthcoming Reboot article I’m working on.
So I guess the vacation wasn’t all vacation, because I found myself mucking about with FOSS, once again. This time on my phone. But, hey, that’s the FOSS Academic Lifestyle Dream for you. I can’t turn it off easily.
I’ve been messin’ about with Wireguard and – after some hiccups – I have a small network of peers connected. I now have a couple laptops, a desktop, a phone, and a Raspberry Pi all networked, with the connection remaining persistent even as the mobile devices move across wi-fi networks.
Just a short post to note I have succumbed to the dark side.
This whole pandemic has increased the amount of screen time we all endure, and I’ve increasingly recognized that dark modes feel better on my eyes. I started using the Dark Reader extension in Firefox to invert colors, and I set Mate to a dark theme on all my devices. After a few weeks of this, I realized that I liked the look of FOSS Academic when it was rendered using Dark Reader.
So, using the magic of SASS – I am loving SASS! – I changed a couple variables and BOOM! We’re doing FOSS after dark like were Joe, Félim, Graham, and Will.
If you see any issues with the styling, let me know in the comments. I still have to style the comments – I’ll get to it someday – but in the meantime, enjoy the dark.
UPDATE in 2022: I’ve added the ability to comment via Mastodon on this post (see below) since this post is one of the more popular ones on the blog.
Zotero recently announced two major new features: an internal PDF reader and tab-based navigation. These are scheduled to be a part of the Zotero 6 release later this year, but when I heard about them, I installed the Zotero 5 developer version to give them a whirl.
My quick take on the new features? They are now a key part of the FOSS Academic Lifestyle Dream.
At the time, I thought of Stallman as largely in the background of the world of FOSS, since of course he resigned from the Free Software Foundation back in 2019. I knew that he was called out for some comments about Marvin Minsky and the Jeffrey Epstein case – comments that were, at best, tone-deaf and, at worst, apologies for the sexual predation of children. I also knew of increasing numbers of women who reported Stallman’s behavior made them uncomfortable and even unsafe.
The Cover of Williams's book Free as in Freedom, a biography of Richard Stallman
But since I’m putting together Goal 2 – a book-length research project about FOSS – I figured that I need to engage with Stallman in some form, even if he was fading into the background.
So Williams’s book caught my eye. As I read, I came across curious moments that may have appeared differently in 2002 than they do to this reader in 2021.
My intention was to read the book and post a bit about it here, as I did with Dreaming In Code as part of my larger research project into FOSS.
But it turns out that I also finished the book in time for RM Mess 2.0. So this is changing from a book review into a post that connect Williams’s now two-decades old biography with a current event.
Content warnings: this post discusses sexual assault, child exploitation, and harassment. You might want to skip it on those grounds. Moreover, if you’re tired of discussions of Stallman, you also might want to skip this post.
For anyone living the FOSS Academic Lifestyle Dream, this is huge news.
The Zotero logo is in the public domain.
They plan on releasing these features to the public in Version 6, but anyone itching to try it can use the development version of Zotero. This post will discuss how to install Zotero’s beta in Ubuntu Mate 18.04, though the approach should be similar for other Linux distros.
NB: Note, I would have found this sooner or later, but credit to Sean Lawson for alerting me!
A quick note to any readers in GDPR regulated areas: I’m in the USA, and I don’t really do business in Europe. I don’t really do business anywhere, to be honest. Anyway, I also really respect privacy concerns. So, in the interest of transparency, I want to note that I use a Statcounter script to help track traffic to this blog.
You can see the Javascript in the page source for the blog, and I’ve also made the stats public (marvel at my traffic!).
If you block Javascript, I not only don’t mind, nothing should change for you. The site will function just fine with Javascript blocked.
Edit on March 20: Oops! I forgot about Javascript from Heroku, enabling Staticman comments. I was reminded of this when I got a comment from a reader. If you block Javascript, you may have trouble commenting on posts. Those of you using the Noscript extension for Firefox (an extension I really love, by the way), you can give temporary permission to a script from fossacademic.herokuapp.com if you want to comment.
My call is still out: if you have a better way to get basic traffic data for a Github.io-hosted static Jekyll blog, let me know in the comments or via Mastodon (@robertwgehl@scholar.social).
Why in the year 2021 is it hard to edit PDFs in Linux?
This is an image of a PDF of sheet music for AC/DC's "Highway to Hell." Please enjoy the music, but don't ask me to edit the PDF.
Please don’t tell me to use Okular.
Please don’t tell me to use LaTex.
I’m barely keeping things together using Atril and pdfunite in the command line.
I popped over to It’s FOSS to see their list of top applications. When your list starts with LibreOffice Draw… I don’t know what to say. It gets worse from there, going to a bunch of commercial, proprietary solutions.
I now work for an organization that makes heavy use of PDF forms. I lament the lost hours.
Printing and scanning seems like the most efficient thing to do.
At this point, feel free to tell me to switch to Windows.
Sometimes, the FOSS Academic Lifestyle Dream can hurt you.
I spent the weekend installing Manjaro on a laptop. I’m starting to really like Manjaro after years of using Debian-based things like Ubuntu and Mint. I know using Manjaro doesn’t really allow me to say “I use Arch btw” but it’s really fun, nonetheless.
I used my Manjaro box to write up a post for the blog, but then I had the bright idea of trying to install a second OS on it, I borked it, and then re-installed… losing the post I wrote. Ah, well. Such is FALD life.
I have Manjaro up and running (with MATE, of course), though – I’m starting to think it could be my next working distro.
Yes, David, there's Linux on Mars. Made with Glimpse.
According to IEEE Spectrum and PC Magazine, Linux is now on Mars. Specifically, the drone copter is running the Linux kernel on an off-the-shelf Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. Perhaps this marks the beginning of the end of proprietary operating systems on the Red Planet?
Good to see the people of NASA are living the FOSS Academic Lifestyle Dream.
A quick note: I’m conducting a survey with a colleague of mine, Dr. Diana Zulli. We’re interested in learning from Mastodon developers, admins, and users about “freedom of expression.”
I will post the link to the survey in Mastodon, rather than here. If you use Mastodon, I hope you see it there.
I wanted to note one thing about the survey: we’re offering a small bit of compensation for people’s time (at least, the first 75 or so people – after that, the funding runs out.) Because of where we work, we are using Qualtrics for the survey, and the only real way to compensate people and protect people’s private information is by using Amazon gift cards. We realize you may not share the same values as Amazon. We talked about this problem at length and decided to go ahead with the incentives. If you have interest in doing the survey but no interes in Amazon, you can skip the final questions of the survey.
If you have questions about this survey, hit me up on Mastodon (@robertwgehl@scholar.social) or via the email address listed here.
Ok! If you had a good budget to build a cloud infrastructure to support small teams (2-5 people) collaborating on projects, with a special focus on academic writing projects, what would you recommend?
I’m thinking Linux-based cloud stuff, so I have in mind:
Nextcloud
Jitsi
Matrix
and…? Any recommendations?
I asked this question in all seriousness. I am lucky enough to have a small amount of research funding, I want to promote the world of software beyond Google and Microsoft, and so I’m really keen on building a FOSS Academic Laboratory in the cloud and using to for any collaborative projects I’m a part of. After all, it’s my Goal #1: to use FOSS for as much of my academic work as is possible.
This penguin's got questions.
The response I got to the questions was freakin’ awesome!
I thought it would be a good idea to catalog it here. I’ll start with the least-recommended things and work my way up to the most-recommended. That’s not to say this is a ranking – things mentioned only once might be really valuable. I’m really just noting what was mentioned most.
I’ll also note which ones I am considering deploying – again, this is not a commentary on the quality of any of these systems. It’s more related to my own specific use cases forged in the past decade of academic collaborations.
This post is to test Staticman comments. I’ll edit this post later to update my progress. For now, if anyone stumbles across this and wants to add a “test” comment or something helpful, feel free!
The Staticman Logo
I’m basing this process of this helpful blog post from Travis Downs of Performance Matters. Thank you!
Wikipedia is 20 years old this year. Congratulations! Celebrations abound across the Internet.
As a scholar of Wikipedia and a FOSS Academic, I wanted to weigh in on the birthday and provide a short history lesson. (This is, therefore, a Goal 2 post).
In a previous post, I disparaged 2020. But hey, just wait: 2021 has already become pretty bad. As you probably have seen, pro-Trump supporters decided to invade the U.S. Capitol on January 6.
I am not a tech determinist, which means that I do not seek to explain complexity by only considering changes in technology. So I am not going to say that corporate social media – including Facebook and Twitter – caused what happened yesterday. In other words, I am not going to say that the spread of misinformation was the reason for people to blithely walk past the cops and into the Rotunda. To do so would ignore a host of other factors, such as the history of racism in the United States and the desire for politicians to aggrandize themselves.
So I’m not saying Facebook and Twitter are to blame. What I will say, however, is that one contributing factor to the events of January 6, 2021 – not the sole determining factor – is corporate social media.
A minor update: I have a new publication about alternative social media in The Reboot. The piece discusses two FOSS alternatives to Twitter: the amazing, and yet likely soon-to-be-defunct Twister, which is a P2P, distributed microblog. I also discuss my favorite project, Mastodon.
The Reboot logo
The Reboot looks really promising – it’s a magazine dedicated to Internet criticism. I’ve been known to do a bit of that.
Another little update: I installed the Hyvor comment system but then removed it. It worked, which is great, but I missed the free window and I don’t know if I have the traffic to justify using a paid plan. I may go back to it, but I want to explore other options first. Next up: StaticMan.
Finally, I am teaching my child how to use Linux and want to make a recommendation: BashCrawl! It’s a text-based game for the Bash terminal that teaches how to use bash commands. Within half an hour, my kid was showing me some cool bash techniques. Just download an archive, unzip it, and dive in.
EDIT: Credit where credit is due: I stole many of these ideas from Sean Lawson. Except they are better with FOSS.
The year 2020. Damn. Damn, damn, damn, damn.
Put it in the dumpster, man.
But the end of the worst year ever is also the end of the 2010s, so maybe now’s a good time to reflect on my past decade as a FOSS Academic. As I mentioned in the Introduction, I’ve been using FOSS tools to do my job as a university professor for over a decade. Now, I’m looking ahead to the next decade.
Here, I want to document my workflow. It’s a combination of desktop environments, workspace management, weekly planning and long-term goals. I’ve been developing it over the past decade, and I think it’s time I formally document just how I do what I do.
Zotero open in Workspace 1 of my MATE desktop environment.
A minor update: I’m still learning how to use Jekyll, and one goal I had was a usable tagging system. I think I’ve achieved it! I want to study the problem more and see if I can’t automate more parts of it, but so far, so good. If you have feedback, leave it in the comments!
A recent Destination Linux podcast interviewed Neal Gompa, a Fedora contributor, and their first question was: how did you start using Linux? I won’t recap Gompa’s story – I’d recommend listening to the show – but suffice it to say it involves an old copy of Red Hat he randomly found.
I thought about Gompa’s story and the question of getting started with FOSS and started reflecting on my own FOSS journey. As an academic – and a non-computer science academic, at that – I think my story is pretty unique.
Windows Vista, with Aero. I didn't have Aero, though. This image is from Wikipedia.
I thought it might be good to nominate things from the FOSS Academic point of view, celebrating projects that help me do my academic work. So, here are the votes I cast.
There have been a lot of books that have influenced my career: Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Gabriella Coleman’s Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy, Karl Marx’s Grundrisse, John Law’s Aircraft Stories, and Patricia Hill Collin’s Black Feminist Thought. These works are a kind of well to return to, again and again, to quench intellectual thirsts: thinking historically about communication technologies, and thinking about heterogeneity in the cultures of communication technologies.
But perhaps the closest to my heart, one of the books that came along at just the right moment in my career – a bubbling spring of the well – is Scott Rosenberg’s Dreaming In Code.
Dreaming in Code -- image used as fair use
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"Tux the penguin papercraft" by Siobhan Rohlwink-Coutts is licensed with CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
As a university professor, I do a lot of different things, many of them having to do with technologies. I engage in research, write articles and books, put together syllabi, work with students, and collaborate with colleagues. All of these require the use of networked computers. But I don’t use Windows and I don’t use Apple.
