It’s been a while since I blogged about how I do all my academic work using free and open source software – otherwise known as the “FOSS Academic Lifestyle Dream.” In fact, the last time I wrote about this was 2020!
While I was not surprised by the announcement, it was still sad to read the news that IFTAS is shutting down several of its services for lack of funding. It is hard for me not to see this as another aspect of a potential “standards war” between ActivityPub and ATProto.
I’ve been mulling over Janus Rose’s recent 404 Media article, “You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism.”. In many ways, she’s not wrong. But once again people are ignoring an entirely other way of doing social media that can, in fact, fight fascism.
In this week’s Alternative Social Media Update, I want to share two things that happened this week and have a fundamental connection: they both indicate the challenges alternative social media developers face when they make ASM in a corporate social media world.
This weekly Alternative Social Media update – the first of 2025! – is about getting caught back up with some things that have happened in the past month. First up, I’ll relate the latest changes at Meta to a specific interest of mine, Threads’s fediverse blocklist. Then, I’ll point you to a very fascinating back-and-forth discussion about Bluesky’s ATProto and ActivityPub (as well as OCapN). Finally, I’ll let you know the latest in ActivityPub Trust and Safety.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.”
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just a quick update: I am now set up in my office at the University of Calgary in Alberta. I’ve come here on a Fulbright Canada Fellowship, and one of my goals is to study Canadian alternative social media. On this first full day of basic research, I’m already seeing a great deal of activity, particularly in terms of Indigenous social networking.
NB: This is an introductory statement for the Contemporary Social Media Platforms and Creative Practice 2018, an online discussion I’m participating in. Thanks to Judy Malloy, a Visiting Faculty Member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, for inviting me to join in!
There’s furor over the latest revelation that the world’s largest corporate social media site, Facebook, sells personal data to those who want to manipulate its users. The story – this time – is about Cambridge Analytica, a psychographic analysis organization which claims to be able to drive voter behavior. Many people have weighed in, so I won’t say much here. But I want to pick up on a point made by Adrian Chen inThe New Yorker:
Tried logging onto Galaxy2, a Tor-based social networking site I’ve participated in since its inception in early 2015. It’s been down for a while, and like many Dark Web sites, it looks like it’s gone for good. We get a rare note about its closure, though, with a note from its founder, Lameth (see below).
Chitra Nagarajan’s piece in the Guardian, “What Does a Feminist Internet Look Like?”, is an excellent call to action for taking feminist principles and applying them to technology usage and governance. I won’t recap it here; you ought to read the original. But I will highlight two key passages. This:
As readers of my scholarly work know, I’ve been arguing that corporate social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter present activists with a sort of double-bind: on the one hand these sites have powerful network effects, which basically means that any activist can use them to get their messages to many, many other people. On the other hand, these are for-profit corporations which are largely built to drive our attention towards brand and marketing messages.
