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By Mallory Knodel —

Digital cooperation is the antidote to fragmentation

Last month I was privileged to join a panel discussion in Canberra on, "Why Digital Cooperation is the Antidote to Tech Fragmentation." You can watch the panel on YouTube:

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A whole week of links

Actionable Guidance for Media and the Social Web

Originally filed by the Social Web Foundation to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s Office on Freedom of the Media (RFoM) and the Forum on Information and Democracy on the ways that media and journalism benefit from a competitive social web underpinned by the global and interoperable ActivityPub standard.

Interoperability mandates promote a healthy online ecosystem

The EU Digital Markets Act (DMA) and its interoperability requirements for digital “gatekeepers,” brings massive benefits to users, user choice and user agency in social media. Privacy, security, and technical challenges are surmountable, as they are in email and messaging. There exist both vertical (across services) and horizontal (within similar services) interoperability, that could be innovated and implemented in the social media space, especially underpinned with ActivityPub, an open-standard protocol that has been specified in the World Wide Web Consortium. Beyond regulator and  technical considerations are the oversight, risk assessments, and additional norms setting that are best stewarded by multistakeholder governance and processes (Global Partners Digital, 2022).

There is growing interoperability between Mastodon, Bluesky, and other decentralized social networks, driven by tools like Openvibe, Bridgy.Fed, and Meta’s connection to the Fediverse and which rest upon ActivityPub. These tools help users share and engage across platforms in a disintermediated way, addressing challenges like multi-homing and network effects. These efforts are encouraging but not sufficient for human rights concerns such as balancing user control and content moderation, especially with growing concerns over illegal content. The DMA could push major networks to adopt similar interoperability, which brings industry experience to bear on these issues and rests the capacity to deal with them at scale on gatekeepers, while the larger ecosystem benefits (Ian Brown, 2024).

Most definitively is the report, “Exploring Mandatory Interoperability across Social Media Platforms in the EU” that notes the ActivityPub standard’s decentralised nature, meaning there is no single (or central) entity handling all of the activity on the platform. Instead, users are empowered with choice and agency and can communicate without a central intermediary. While the authors take issue with decentralization as an architecture because of the high-cost to incumbent gatekeepers, we argue that this does not in fact require such deeply disruptive redesigns and that the redesign that is required is in line with longevity, scalability and other benefits that centre long-term user agency as well as ecosystem-wide evolution, much like the internet and the web themselves.

Block and report accounts and keywords in ActivityPub

One major and immediate benefit to marginalized and at-risk communities online is the potential to innovate trust and safety guidance, tools and best practice. Finally reaching widespread adoption now are end-user controls in direct messaging that allow blocking and reporting of abusive user accounts, as well as filtering by keyword. However those tools were first innovated by women, journalists and others who faced online harassment that were implemented with third-party app integrations, which are largely disabled on major platforms today, though their ideas have been adopted (Mijatović, 2016). Examples like Block Party, Tattle and others have led to composable timelines, trust and safety block lists and innovations that are fostered by an open social web (Twitter, 2016).

Interoperability mandates for social networks would support an ecosystem in which “one-size” no longer “fits-all.” For example, to facilitate the growth of smaller platforms in non-English languages that can improve content moderation tools, which can still interoperate with large platforms where those languages are not as prevalent. (Bhatiya et al, 2023).

Proactive user choice and curation on the social web

In contrast to the largest gatekeepers of social networks today, the decentralized and interoperable social web fosters proactive user choice over the content that they see. The algorithm, including targeted advertising, no longer decides for them. Furthermore a decentralized approach fosters intermediary innovation and function, and in the case of content, this shows up as curation. The central role of user agency in federated communities combined with curation has the potential to boost publications and online publishing, in an era where it wanes under algorithmic and ad-driven social media.

The fediverse can boost quality journalism

The federation enabled by ActivityPub means that media outlets, publications and journalists can publish from their own domains while still interacting with the rest of the social web. (Ferne, 2023) Sorting, filtering and other content moderation controls are enabled in a decentralized fashion both for media accounts and for other users. (Rozenshtein, 2024) Furthermore the role of content analysis and information curation– the essence of media– becomes crucially important in a wider, more horizontal social landscape.

In conclusion, a growing number of platforms like Ghost, WordPress and Flipboard have all implemented ActivityPub for the benefits afforded by truly decentralized social media. It’s not impossible to imagine a regulatory environment that facilitates even more adoption.

References

Brown, Ian. “Mastodon and Bluesky Show Interoperability in Action,” October 9, 2024. https://www.ianbrown.tech/2024/10/09/mastodon-and-bluesky-show-interoperability-in-action/.

Mijatović, Dunja. “Countering Online Abuse of Female Journalists.” Accessed November 27, 2024. https://www.osce.org/fom/220411.

Twitter. “New Ways to Control Your Experience on Twitter.” Accessed November 27, 2024. https://blog.x.com/en_us/a/2016/new-ways-to-control-your-experience-on-twitter.

Bhatia, Aliya and Gabriel Nicholas. “Lost in Translation: Large Language Models in Non-English Content Analysis.” arXiv, June 12, 2023. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2306.07377.

Global Partners Digital. “The EU Digital Markets Act: Is Interoperability the Way Forward?” Accessed November 27, 2024. https://www.gp-digital.org/the-eu-digital-markets-act-is-interoperability-the-way-forward/

Rozenshtein, Alan Z. “Moderating the Fediverse: Content Moderation on Distributed Social Media.” In Media and Society After Technological Disruption, edited by Justin (Gus) Hurwitz and Kyle Langvardt, 177–92. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009174411.019.

Ferne, Tristan. “The BBC on Mastodon: Experimenting with Distributed and Decentralised Social Media.” BBC, July 31, 2023. https://www.bbc.com/rd/articles/2023-07-mastodon-distributed-decentralised-fediverse-activitypub.

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