Hey, Paloma! I understand you want to include some other folks in the conversation. And did you get a chance to revisit the movie we talked about?

Paloma: Hi Rob, first and foremost, thanks a million for this interview and the conversation we held at the Pub. I actually rewatched Three Days of the Condor, which I do recommend to anyone who likes technology and secretly dreams of becoming Faye Dunaway. I hope you don’t mind that I have invited the coauthors of the article to answer your questions with me. Let me introduce them to you. I believe you already know Professor Dr. Eugenia Siapera from UCD, Ireland. Eugenia was my supervisor and we have continued naturally working together and colaborating. And let me introduce Efrain Foglia. Efrain currently works at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and he is one of the initiators of guifi.net. When I first met Efrain I referred to him as “founder of guifi.net” and quite sweetly he said to me: “It’s illogical to attribute the founding of community networks to specific individuals. Community networks’ potential can’t be attributed to specific individuals who founded them.” Might these words set the tone of this conversation.

Hi, Eugenia, Efrain! Thanks for joining. Let’s start with something simple. For those who aren’t familiar, what are mesh networks?  

Efrain: Mesh networks are network architectures where nodes (the users’ routers or antennas) do not simply receive a signal from a central provider but connect to one another. Each node acts as a relay, forwarding data in a decentralised manner. In the case of guifi.net, this allows the infrastructure to be the community itself: if one node goes down, the information finds another route through neighboring nodes, eliminating dependence on a single central tower.  

Paloma: Beyond the technical architecture Efrain describes, I see mesh networks and community-based networks as an unfinished conversation—one we need to recover. Between 2010 and 2015, the academic literature positioned mesh networks as the solution to the digital divide. They were a societal promise. The discourse centered on sovereignty, free networks, communal responsibility, knowledge development, skills-building, and participatory governance. Importantly, the infrastructure itself was conceived as something to be inhabited, not passively consumed.

But we know what happened: most communities were drawn into the orbit of Big Tech. The language shifted with them: inhabitants became users, agency became interaction. And academia, rather than sustaining this vision, narrowed its focus to critiquing Big Tech so intensely that I think we’ve actually perpetuated its importance rather than moved beyond it. This is precisely what Barbrook and Cameron argued against in the 90s:, that the Californian Ideology was just one option among others. So the suggestion is to revitalise earlier conversation about mesh networks and Community Based Networks.

Tell me more! What’s the history of these sorts of networks?  

Paloma: Have you read Armin Medosch’s latest published book? The Rise of the Networks Commons: A History of Community Infrastructure (2025) – I highly recommend it. It was found on Armin’s computer after he sadly passed. All his work is a legacy that gives us first hand insights into how these networks emerged.

The technology emerged out of curiosity, experimentation, rural areas where private investment did not arrived, and cheap housing. You see, I am currently in conversation with Jürgen Neumann, one of Freifunk’s initiators, and Medosch wrote about him: “After learning about WLAN, -Jürgen- built a wireless bridge to an ISP for his housing association and spread it around the block of the housing project he was living in” (33). In our conversation, Jürgen confirmed this and emphasised how the Berlin of the 2000s made this possible: “accessing the roofs of buildings was very easy back then, that’s where parties were happening, where neighbors got to know each other and where antennas were installed.” So long story short: I think the actual history of these sorts of networks inevitably starts with your neighbors. 

Efrain: The specifics of Guifi.net – it was born in 2004 in rural Catalonia, where major providers refused to invest because it wasn’t “profitable.” Neighbors began installing their own antennas to share connections. What started as a technical patch evolved into a social movement, proving that internet access can be managed as a commons. Bottom line: they emerged as a response to the digital divide and corporate control of telecommunications.

Guifi.net is an interesting case because there’s more than the underlying technology — there is a governance framework. Please tell me more about it.  

Efrain: The most innovative part isn’t the cabling, but the Open, Free, and Neutral Network Commons Agreement (XOLN). This governance framework ensures the network remains collective property. It stipulates that no one can appropriate the infrastructure, everyone has the right to connect, and management must be transparent. It is a “multi-actor” system where volunteers, public administrations, and local companies coexist, all abiding by the same rules of the commons. 

Paloma: And if I might add, it is an incredibly comprehensive document, crafted through the years and to a certain extent collectively. I am currently analysing it to both understand its insights, replicability, but also the extent of its Principle of Reciprocity. I will definitely tell you more when the analysis is done. I am immersed in it.

A question I always get about alternative social media (ASM) is: who is paying for it? How do they make money? Guifi.net must raise similar questions — how is it funded?

Efrain: Guifi.net operates on a collaborative investment model. Instead of paying a subscription to a multinational that extracts profit, users or entities invest in their own stretch of the network. Once the infrastructure is installed, maintenance costs are shared. There are also small local operators that charge for technical services, but a portion of that revenue is reinvested into the common network through a compensation table. It is a circular economy where value stays within the community rather than going to external shareholders. 

Paloma: and who is the community? you might ask, I have learn that in guifi.net the private investor are: your local bar, the bakery or the funeral home at the end of the street. This means we are not talking about a purely anti-capitalist commons network, but a community based network that have addapted to the domination of big tech.  

Paloma, in your presentation, you draw on a concept of persistence, a decolonial idea about generative adaptation to domination. What is the role of pedagogy, teaching, and training in persistence? Are you seeing “older” folks talking to “younger” folks when it comes to things like mesh nets or ASM?  

Paloma: Yes. In media and communications, “Persistence” typically refers to nostalgia—think of the camera shutter sound on your phone. Feminist tech discourse also uses it to mean enduring against tech industry culture. But I’m drawing from postcolonial and archaeological literature instead, basically Lee M. Panich book Narratives of Persistence (2020), where persistence means as you say “generative adaptation to domination.”

A personal example helped me to land what Panich poses as Persistence: My grandfather, David Otero, was a Republican. When Franco rose, my grandfather fought in the Spanish Civil War. He lost, and had to live under Franco’s regime. Though he contributed to scattered pockets of resistance at the very early stages he only resisted here and there, but persistenly continued his republican practices by for instance not stepping into any church in a Spain shaped by Franco’s Catholism and the Church’s population’s control. That is Persistence.

So when I apply this idea of Persistance into media and infrastructures, persistence becomes ”generative adaptation to big tech domination.” I think of it as silently constructing networks that do not serve the big tech gods or attend their churches.

Aditionally, there is also the temporal dimension of persistence. When studing community-based networks under the temporal and continutiy lense of persistence, something fundamental emerges: we remember that these networks exist today precisely because they began before big tech, and they are still operational despite big tech.

Efrain: Yes, Persistence is not just about resisting an attack; it is about enduring over time despite domination. Pedagogy is vital here: if technical knowledge is held by only a few “experts,” the network dies when they burn out. Persistence requires transferring knowledge from “veterans” (who understand the politics of the commons) to younger generations (who bring technical energy).

In guifi.net, “self-installation” workshops are pedagogical acts where people learn that the internet isn’t “magic” falling from the sky, but something you can build and repair yourself.

Eugenia: There is another element in Persistence: community tech and networks persist to the extent to which they serve their communities. I am thinking of Sarantoporo.gr, a community network initiative in a small rural area in Greece: this was set up in 2015, at the height of the debt crisis in Greece, and it is still going strong because it still serves the people in an area where there is no commercial investment or coverage. So here, Persistence involves continuing to serve the community, and in part this is accomplished through pedagogy, teaching others how to maintain and upgrade the network.

In terms of ASM, Paloma and I discussed how people don’t really seem to pay much attention to history. What is the value of a historical understanding of alternatives – including for scholars but also practitioners?  

Paloma:  I began the presentation at Goldsmiths refering to a conversation with Akin Olla, managing editor of Convergence magazine. Akin droped this line once: “in times of crisis people tend to seek catharsis, to start everything new, instead of organising around what already exists.” Well, I am observing an emergent narrative in media and communications field: the insistence that we must “use our imagination,” that “artists will save us.”… Yet this desire for ‘speculative’ newness arrives with an enormous material and environmental cost. And artists are not in any moral obligation to save us, anyway.

My proposal for the future of media and infrastrcture is different: my current proposal is to actually look back. To return to the conversations that were happening before big tech claimed everything—to use Marta G. Franco’s phrasing—stole everything from us. To understand how innvation do actually exist outside big tech. That’s where the value lies. Not in imagining what hasn’t been tried, but in remembering what already works and keep organising and contributing to it.

Efrain: History teaches us that current alternatives do not emerge from a vacuum; they are part of a genealogy of struggles for technological autonomy. Understanding the history of guifi.net allows scholars to see that technology is inherently political and helps practitioners realize that the problems we face today (centralization, surveillance) have been successfully challenged before. History prevents us from “reinventing the wheel” and offers hope by showing that sovereign infrastructures have been viable for decades.

What about “resistance”? Is resistance too much of a burden, while persistence is achievable?  

Eugenia: To me, and connected to the previous discussion of history, persistence is also about nurturing and caring for the community, looking at its needs and trying to meet them, not only technical, but in terms of housing and social needs. Reciprocity and care, as explained by Efrain and Paloma above, are fundamental to community networks and fundamental to how persistence works.

Efrain: Resistance is often reactive: you oppose something (a law, a corporation). This is exhausting. Persistence, on the other hand, is proactive: it is about creating your own worlds and keeping them alive. Instead of spending all its energy fighting Big Tech, guifi.net focuses on persisting by building its own alternative. Persistence is less epic but more effective in the long run because it turns the alternative into something everyday and sustainable.

What sorts of lessons might ASM scholars take from your research and work on Guifi.net?  

Efrain: The main lesson is that the infrastructure is the message. It is not enough to have an alternative social network if it runs on Amazon or Google servers. For an alternative to be real, it must be consistent across all layers: from the cables and antennas to the governance and the economic model. Guifi.net teaches us that success is not just measured by user count, but by the autonomy those users gain over their own digital lives.

Eugenia: I think that it is also important to revive a tradition that feels somewhat neglected (though I hope I am wrong on this!) which I trace back to the work of J.D. Downing on Radical Media, on the prefigurative role of radical media, building the communities that activists want to live in, and the technologies that meet their needs for autonomy and freedom.

Paloma: I am going to share my two lessons. First, the Principle of Reciprocity that is mentioned in the Neutral Network Commons Agreement (XOLN) also apply to academics. Second, Guifi.net teach us that alternatives are durable. We could shake the myth of ephimerality, look at alternatives in their comoslogical, organisational and technological continuities and explore the fact that we might not need to start everything from scrach but that the future of media and communications started 25 years ago. 

In a recent article, Roel Roscam Abbing and I argue that alternative social media are

social media developed in complex relation to mainstream social media. ASM are marked by high interpretive flexibility as they emerge. As dynamic systems, they never totally stabilize. The best approach to their study is for the scholar to be situated.

Here, I want to briefly consider Blacksky along these lines, and I’ll conclude with a note about future research on Blacksky.

Blacksky’s Complex Relation to Corporate Social Media

Blacksky is in a complex relation to the mainstream Bluesky – as well as corporate social media in general. Fundamentally, Blacksky is an alternative: another way of doing social media. As their main website describes,

Most social platforms control what users see, how communities operate, and who gets to feel safe online. Blacksky changes that by providing one-click infrastructure for independent, self-governed digital spaces. Our platform lets communities create safe spaces on their terms, pool resources democratically, and govern collectively—without needing technical expertise to deploy algorithms, moderation tools, or data servers.

Blacksky’s ability to mitigate Bluesky’s banning of accounts is one major indicator of its status as an alternative. Building out alternative infrastructure is a good thing in an environment where people like Trump increasingly interfere with social media corporations. Bluesky PBC is a venture capital-funded corporation. Blacksky is funded through donations on OpenCollective.

To suggest Blacksky is completely oppositional is not quite correct, though. Blacksky’s development feeds into the ATProto development, which can benefit Bluesky PBC. The project is offering a fellowship to support Blackskyers attending the ATPRoto conference in Vancouver later this month. This is not about opposition.

That said, Blacksky is a fulfillment of the idea of “credible exit.” I myself migrated off Bluesky’s infrastructure to Blacksky’s system using PDSMoover. While the ability to leave Bluesky has always been touted as a goal of that company, it has taken community-run projects like Blacksky to make such a possibility real.

Flexibility

Blacksky initially was a moderation algorithm – the Blacksky algorithm surfaced Black folks on Bluesky. It was an early success story for Bluesky’s “algorithmic market” approach.

That alone would have been a very important achievement, particularly as Bluesky has seen racism and whiteness privileged. (The fediverse has not done better, to be clear.)

But Blacksky has done much more than make an algorithm for Bluesky. The project runs Personal Data Servers, a Relay, governance services, and migration services. What’s particularly impressive is how much work Blacksky’s developers have done to reimplement ATProto. Rsky is a reimplementation of ATProto in Rust – an ambitious and exciting project.

These developments are further evidence of the flexibility found in alternative social media – particularly at the early stages of development.

Dynamism

This is not to suggest that contemporary Blacksky is now “complete” or “stabilized.” Like all alternative social media, it will continue to evolve. Indeed, the Blacksky project’s documentation lists several in-progress projects, including hosting of PDS’s for “non-technical” folks, private posting, and mutual aid/donation tools.

Situated Study

I suspect we will see exciting research by alternative social media scholars focusing on Blacksky. If I may, I would suggest that academics studying Blacksky do so in a highly situated fashion – participant observation, interviewing, detailed analysis of underlying code can be key approaches. This of course requires ethical engagement with the Blacksky community, highly attuned to informed consent and participatory research design. On the ASM blog, we recently had a forum on this very topic.

In teaching Mastodon as part of a social media ethics class, I’ve learned that its ethical promises of greater user agency, reduced data exploitation and decentralized governance are inseparable from user labor in practice. This labor includes learning federation norms, building meaningful networks without algorithmic assistance, and participating in governance and moderation activities. Students coming from mainstream social networking sites often notice and sometimes resist or resent the additional labor Mastodon requires.

Over the last few years, I’ve been experimenting with how to include more alternative social media theory and practice into my teaching. My most ambitious attempt at this occurred in a graduate course in Social Media Ethics that I teach for M.S. in Applied Communication with an emphasis in Social Media. Beginning in the summer of 2023, I launched a Mastodon instance specifically created for the class, with lessons and readings surrounding the ethical differences between mainstream social media platforms and Mastodon, including their moderation policies. I’ll share my approach, along with some lessons learned and suggestions for others who may want to incorporate a similar assignment.

Why a Class Instance?

The first three weeks of my 7-week class focused on social media ethics related to platform moderation. I set up a new Mastodon instance specifically for my class. I decided to create a unique instance both because I wanted students to feel ownership of the platform as they wrote their own moderation policy for it (and moderation is always applied locally) and to avoid some of the overhead that would have been required in having students select which instance to use when they signed up. This instance was federated broadly. Because students were required to participate publicly, they had the option to use a pseudonym.

Onboarding

In the first week, students watched a video I recorded showing a step-by-step process of how to sign up for and use our Mastodon instance. I also linked to guides for finding accounts to follow, and a list that included those writing about communication and media studies related topics. Students were required to follow accounts and/or hashtags of their choosing, as well as try out various features like commenting and boosting other posts.

The labor of network building became highly visible in this onboarding step. The lack of an algorithm to help new users connect with people they already followed elsewhere or with like-minded communities has consistently been the most pressing issue raised by students. Despite the resources I shared for building a network, students reported being left with a negative first impression of the platform primarily because they don’t immediately see engaging content. Mastodon shifts this early-stage work from platform to user/community. These critiques made clear that students are accustomed to algorithmic onboarding that reduces the need for intentional community building. In future iterations of this lesson, I plan to explain this difference to students in the first week, more clearly articulating how they might see the slowness of building a community through their own agency as part of the ethics lesson related to using Mastodon. Both the effort of building a community and the lack of an endless scroll can be more clearly framed as potentially beneficial when we think differently about social media and how and why we use it.

Looking back, if I were to run this assignment again, I would include a small “starter pack” for students, with a set list of accounts and hashtags for them to follow that would immediately populate their timeline. I believe this would serve as a compromise that takes some of the stress out of building community, especially in a short 7-week course, while still leaving a significant amount agency for network building to students.

Comparing Moderation Policies

In the second week of the course, students were asked to compare the moderation policies of one mainstream social media site and a Mastodon instance of their choosing, other than our class instance. Most chose mastodon.social because of its size and prominence. They also played a content moderation simulation game which was designed to demonstrate the stress those working on content moderation regularly face.

In comparing platforms, students noted the privacy and moderation features of Mastodon were excellent, and that they were not bombarded with advertisements, which made for less competition for their attention.

Another student compared Mastodon to (then) Twitter, noting that although Twitter’s centralized structure provides consistency in moderation and content curation, they preferred Mastodon’s decentralized nature, which promotes user privacy, data ownership, and unique communities. In short, students seemed to prefer Mastodon’s moderation policies to those of more mainstream sites, including Instagram and Twitter. Centralized platforms outsource governance to the company while Mastodon externalizes more governance to communities/instances, which can feel empowering but also burdensome.

Creating a Moderation Policy

The lesson on Mastodon culminated with having students collaboratively draft a moderation policy for our instance. Students pitched ideas on an interactive site (Kialo) that allowed commenting and voting. We adopted the highest rated policies. These included:

• Spam and Misinformation: Resist posting false content intended to be misleading or harmful.
• Respectful Behavior: Treat each member with respect. Do not engage in personal attacks, dogpiling, threats, or bullying.
• Prohibited Content: Hate speech, violence, discrimination, or hostility based on attributes of race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation are forbidden. Sexually explicit content, content that promotes the sexual exploitation of minors or violates child protection laws, is prohibited.
• Server Rules: The following content is not allowed on this server: 1. posts that contain racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia, 2. posts that contain harassment, dogpiling, or doxxing of other users, 3. posts that incite violence or promote violent ideologies, 4. posts that intentionally share false or misleading information.

There is some overlap in these policies, and another round of fine-tuning the top policies would have been helpful.

Among these top-rated policies, there was some discussion that there were no enforcement mechanisms included. We realized we had norms but not a process that included who receives reports, what actions exist, what timelines apply, and how appeals work. One other policy that didn’t receive full support from the class did have a suggestion for enforcement, which was:

“Reporting and Moderation: We strive to respect the right to free speech but recognize that there are instances that go beyond that. If you would like to report a user who may have violated our server rules, please send an email to [redacted]. Please include the post in question and the reason for the report. Reports are usually processed within 24 hours. For first-time violations, we may decide to delete the offending content. Repeat violators may be suspended.”

If I teach this again, I would add something new. Because we had our own instance, we never had any violations of the governance rules we adopted as we continued to use the platform throughout the rest of the class. In the future, I would consider not only requiring an enforcement section, but also having students analyze pre-created posts that had been “reported” as possible violations using the policies they adopted. Allowing a mechanism to better stress test the governance rules they created would make this assignment even stronger. This would also help them better appreciate the labor that goes into creating and enforcing such policies.

Conclusions

While students reported seeing the theoretical benefits of an alternative platform like Mastodon, they ultimately seemed put off by how much labor it took to participate. In the years since I first ran this assignment, I have begun to see more clearly some parallels in these challenges and those associated with the levels of civic participation needed when living in a democracy. Therefore, I’ve begun to see a larger ethical framing emerge around the importance of participation in the systems we use during the course of our daily lives. In the future, I plan to emphasize this larger ethical point about the agency and labor needed to support those systems we often take for granted, and the ethical challenges that arise when we ignore them.

For Further Reading

Below is the full schedule for the first three weeks of my course, including readings and assignments related to Mastodon. Sharing here for instructors who want to adapt the module.

Week 1

Reading: Ess, “Digital Media Ethics: Overview, Frameworks, Resources” in Digital Media Ethics. Note: All readings are done with collaborative annotations through Perusall.

Lecture Video: I demonstrate how to start using Mastodon.

Links: How do I discover accounts to follow on Mastodon and the Fediverse? and The Commodon List, a list of accounts that post about communication and media studies.

Assignment: For this assignment, you’re going to learn about the social networking experience known as Mastodon. You will first sign up for an account on our class instance of Mastodon (redacted link) and create a profile and introductory post. Your task is then to find and follow accounts on a different server, engaging in conversations. You can do this by commenting on posts, initiating discussions, or posting original content related to the community’s focus. You can also Boost posts (this is similar to retweeting on Twitter). Remember to maintain ethical and respectful behavior during all interactions.

Document your experiences and reflect on them. How does this community engage? How does the federated structure of the Fediverse impact these differences? Examine the ethical implications of federated networks. Discuss how the decentralized nature of the Fediverse might influence privacy, censorship, content moderation, and user behavior. Write a comprehensive series of posts (a thread) on your primary Mastodon account summarizing your experiences and insights using Mastodon. Share the link to that thread here. 

Week 2

Readings:

• Schultze and Mason, “Studying Cyborgs: Re-Examining Internet Studies as Human Subjects Research,” in Journal of Information Technology
• Sylvia, “The Ethical Implications of A/B and Multivariate E-Commerce Optimization Testing,” in Ethical Issues in E-Business: Models and Frameworks
• Bay, “Social Media Ethics: A Rawlsian Approach to Hypertargeting and Psychometrics in Political and Commercial Campaigns,” in ACM Transactions on Social Computing
• Video: “Fixing Social Media with Ethan Zuckerman” by Manning College of Information and Computer Science
• Short case studies:
  • Boka, “Facebook’s Research Ethics Board Needs to Stay Far Away from Facebook,” in Wired
  • Zimmer, “OkCupid Study Reveals the Perils of Big-data Science,” in Wired
  • Ellenberg, “What’s Even Creepier than Target Guessing That You’re Pregnant?” In Slate
  • Play https://moderatormayhem.engine.is/

Assignment: In this assignment, you will use critical thinking to perform an analysis of various social media platforms’ and Mastodon instances’ policies.  First, you’ll need to select 1) a mainstream centralized social media platform (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok) and 2) a Mastodon instance (e.g., mastodon.social, scholar.social). You will then investigate and analyze the community guidelines, content policies, and moderation techniques of each.

Prepare a written report that compares and contrasts the two policies, focusing on the following:

• Goals and objectives of the policies
• User and content restrictions
• Reporting procedures
• Policy enforcement techniques
• Transparency and appeals processes

Consider the effectiveness of these policies and their potential ethical impacts on user behavior, user experience, content diversity, freedom of speech, and online safety. The final document should be 750-1,250 words, follow APA formatting and contain links to both policies. 

Week 3

Readings:

• Pierce, David. “So Where Are We All Supposed to Go Now?” The Verge, July 3, 2023.
• Doctorow, Cory. “The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok.” Wired. January 23, 2023.
• Liebeskind , Sam, “The Summer of Decentralized Social (a Research Deep Dive).” (This was originally a Google Doc, but is now posted on New Republic. 2023
• Doctorow, Cory, “Pluralistic: What the Fediverse (Does/n’t) Solve” December 23, 2022.
• Liu, Miao, Robert W. Gehl, and Diana Zulli. “Rethinking the ‘Social’ in ‘Social Media’: Insights into Topology, Abstraction, and Scale on the Mastodon Social Network.” New Media and Society, 2020.
• Recommended: Rajendra-Nicolucci, Edited Chand, and Ethan Zuckerman. “An Illustrated Field Guide to Social Media,” 2021.

Assignment: You’ll access Kialo below, registering a name when you first access it. Based on your previous analyses of moderation policies and our readings, you’ll use Kialo to write suggestions for moderation polices. You’ll then read what your classmates have suggested and give pros and cons for including those policies. We’ll actually implement the ones that are most popular. You’ll need to check this assignment more than once over the course of the week, to make sure you see everything being posted by classmates.

Along with Roel Roscam Abbing, I have a paper coming out on the history of alternative social media, and in the course of our research, we came across PeerSon.

First discussed in 2008, PeerSon was intended to be an encrypted, peer-to-peer social networking system. According to its website, which is still online, its creators were exploring

a paradigm shift from client-server to a peer-to-peer infrastructure coupled with encryption so that users keep control of their data and can use the social network also locally, without Internet access. This shift gives rise to many research questions intersecting networking, security, distributed systems and social network analysis, leading to a better understanding of how technology can support social interactions.

It was initially described in Doris Schiöberg’s 2008 Master’s thesis (and you can see that document, as well as other PeerSon documents, in the ASM bibliography).

What makes it the first alternative social media? I’m going to hang my argument entirely on the very last sentence of Schiöberg’s thesis:

Depending on the results of the evaluation, it is even possible to bring this project to the real world and offer a privacy saving alternative for Facebook, Orkut, StudiVZ, etc. (44)

This is the earliest document I have found where a maker of what we now call “social media” makes a claim that they are making an alternative to corporate social media.

Caveats

Let’s states some caveats, though.

First of all, I tend to subscribe to Foucauldian genealogical methods, and Foucault famously warns against the hunt for origins – particularly the origin as somehow a pure, unadulturated version of what we currently have. Instead of finding some pure origin, the task is to trace disparate threads forward to create histories of the present. I’m kind of violating that idea here.

Second, I can read Spanish and English, and I do believe I found a very early example of the concept of “alternative social media” in English. But it stands to reason someone somewhere came up with a cognate concept in another language. Or it could have been written in English or Spanish on a long-lost blog.

Third, you might argue that social media and online social networking sites are distinct. I do tend to collapse the two, but keeping a distinction between them can lead to some insights. But I’m just going to call PeerSon social media – since the intersection of social networking among connected people and sharing media has always been blurry, starting at least with Firefly in the mid-1990s.

Finally, the example in question doesn’t really say much about what it means to be “alternative social media” beyond using the word “alternative” and calling the project a “paradigm shift.” The documents about PeerSon just mention of the idea, really. For deeper analysis of “alternatives,” I think that the Unlike Us events, starting 2011, kicked off that line of thinking.

Still, Doris Schiöberg’s thesis is a fascinating early document of the area of study we ASM scholars are exploring.

More about PeerSon

According to Schiöberg’s thesis, sites like Facebook have two key problems: they are centralized, and they violate people’s privacy. That thesis cites problems we have come to see as all too common: behavioral advertising, studies on user data done without consent, and surveillance technologies (such as Facebook Beacon). In addition, Schiöberg also notes that corporate social media users cannot take their social graphs with them if they wish to leave.

“In conclusion,” Schiöberg says, “we note that current social networks have a privacy leak.”

The obvious solution, Schiöberg and her colleagues suggest, is encrypted, peer-to-peer social networking:

Our proposal for tackling the privacy leak is to give the user back the control over his [sic] data by decentralizing the system and using certain encryption mechanisms to make the data accessible only to authorized people. We do so by replacing the server in an online social network with a distributed system of a peer-to-peer network.

PeerSon thus inaugurates a major strand of alternative social media: distributed, encrypted systems that shift data to end clients. The logic is very legible with we think about this period’s focus on “the social graph”: if the social graph is meant to be friend-to-friend-to-family member, then why is there a server at the center? This reminds me of Aral Balkan’s “man in the middle” critique. PeerSon – and many projects that follow it – tried to replace that server with a peer-to-peer network, where a client/device acts as an agent for the user.

But, as Schiöberg observes, such a system must also provide most of Facebook et al’s features. “The challenge is to develop an infrastructure that gives us the possibility to keep as many of the features of existing OSNs, such as Facebook, while eliminating all privacy problems.” This is a perspective that is decidedly linked with alternative social media: it’s about making something that is legible as social media, while trying to stave off the problems of corporate social media.

So, where is PeerSon now?

Building a fully distributed, end-to-end encrypted alternative to Facebook is no easy task. I see no evidence PeerSon achieved much more than some experimental prototypes. Later projects, like Twister, would get closer, and current projects like Secure Scuttlebutt are working on the problem.

Ultimately, I find projects like PeerSon fasciating – whether or not they ever were built. As I always tell people, you can learn a great deal about social media if you look at alternatives, including defunct ones.

In your recent article, you discuss social media migration (SMM). What is it?

Thanks for the chance to discuss our new article. It was a long time coming and we’re happy to see it out in the world!

There are two ways to answer your first question – one easy, one hard! In simple terms, social media migration refers to populations of users who move from one site, platform or service to another. But once you get into the details, things can get messy. The existing literature has quite a lot to say about this, for example, by differentiating between “account migration” and “attention migration,” or by describing migration as something a user might attempt multiple times as an ongoing process.

So we can ask, what counts as “moving”? Or we can ask, how many users need to migrate for there to be “a migration”? What we were interested in thinking through was a slightly meta question: What is happening when a migration is happening? Specific migrations can teach us many things about a particular platform as they are a kind of rupture from the everyday of social media - they are a bit like a breaching experiment in that regard. New things become visible. Although we focus on one migration, it really made us think about this more general question of SMM. 

What can these migrations teach us about digital cultures?

I think there are a few takeaways. First, is that we perhaps place too much attention on the power of platforms and platform companies without recognising its contingency and constitution. Migration brings into existence a semi-coherent user collective with the capacity to make or break platforms and their “platform power.” Users are not often thought about explicitly in terms of politics - since the term connotes a technical figure using a product or service - but we need to think about them more in this way. What kind of political formation is a migration of users? How is it brought into being? These are some of things we were interested in and wanted to explore.  

You develop a theory of “eventful” migration. How does this relate to prior ways of studying social media migration? 

In the article, we offer a brief historical discussion of what is often call “push-pull factors” research. It comes from historical migration studies, that is, from geographical migration studies rather than digital/platform studies. I won’t rehash the discussion, but one of the things we wanted to do was to get beyond that framework for understanding migration.

The inspiration for our research was the Twitter-Mastodon migration, which forced us to think about migration in terms of events. Migrations have typically been analysed in terms of their spatiality; they are mapped, and then people try to understand how or why a movement A went to B, for example. Thinking in terms of events adds a strong temporal dimension to the analysis. There is still a spatial movement to consider, of course, but adding the temporal unfolding of an event helps us to understand different things about how migrations happen and how we might see them beyond their spatiality.

You focus on the migration from Twitter to Mastodon in late 2022 and early 2023 and bring together a really interesting mix of evidence in your analysis, including survey responses, trace data, and public commentary. How did you go about researching this migration and how did the different sources of data shape your understanding of the event?

This is a great question! The truth is, as with much research, we didn’t really know what we were looking at when we started out. We were following the developments at Twitter and we were doing a few things with our Masters students to study what we were calling Twitter’s “dynamics of decline.” When the migration started to become highly visible, we knew we wanted to study it.

Carlos [Cámara-Menoyo], who’s the Mastodon enthusiast, was really interested in studying how the migration might alter the social dynamics on Mastodon. He wanted to know more about who was migrating and how the new folks compared to existing users. I was a bit more interested in the disaster unfolding at Twitter and what the repercussions of that might be for the wider social media sphere.

Carlos put together a survey, focusing on Mastodon users. The questions were exploratory and more wide ranging than we ended up using in the actual article, but they helped us narrow our focus. For example, one question was very much in the tradition of “motivations” research (as in, “what motivated you to migrate?”). I was looking at the results and thinking, this is obviously all about the same thing! We needed to think them together, and this pushed us away from that kind of approach and more in the direction of a single event. 

The account analysis was our way of empirically mapping the migration. Other people were also doing this, but at the time it was important for us to get our own sense of the reality of it. This allowed us to give a small snapshot of the migration, with really specific dates of people signing up to Mastodon, and we then mapped that onto the Musk takeover. This helped us to explore the migration’s eventfulness and its temporal dynamics. It also helped us to get a sense of what users were doing on both Twitter and Mastodon post-migration. We used the public commentaries and high-profile tweets to flesh out other aspects of our eventful theory, such as the “critical voice” section. We decided not to use any posted content from the users who migrated, so using celebrity accounts and relying on secondary sources was our alternative.

Given the blog’s focus on alternative social media (ASM), what does the case of the Twitter-Mastodon migration mean for our understanding of the role of alternative social media in the broader platform ecology?

For one, ASM is bound up with the fate of larger commercial platforms. You used the word “ecology” – we can draw on the biological definition of this term a bit more strongly than we might otherwise. We saw how the spectacular demise of Twitter had a huge impact on Mastodon. It also helped give rise to new actors or “species” (Bluesky, Threads) which has further altered the ecology and posed different sets of challenges (often to do with protocols). We tried to get at some of this in our discussion of “terrain transformation.” It’s our way of thinking about the effects of a migration beyond the movement of users. 

But we’ve also seen that the fate of other platforms doesn’t determine the fate of ASM. With the hindsight of a few years, we can see that Mastodon’s numbers grew but not exponentially, and they have since settled. One could interpret the existence of Mastodon and other fediverse applications as a kind of “pressure valve” or as a “back up,” but this is a bit unfair. It’s a perspective that places the commercial platforms as the main actors, which might be true in a broader sense, but not for the fediverse and its communities of users.

I’ve seen several decades of web cultures grappling with the question of alternatives, from indymedia to peer production. One thing about Mastodon is that it doesn’t need to serve a greater purpose. We don’t need it to speak “truth to power,” as news alternatives might. If the users across their instances find it enjoyable and worthwhile, maybe that’s enough. On the other hand, maybe the fediverse can continue to show that another digital world is possible and there are many ways of organising sociality.

In the conclusion, which I would have happily read more of if journal word counts weren’t so strict, you introduce the idea of “user power.” What does it mean to think of social media migration as user power and what other forms might user power take in the present moment? 

Thanks for bringing this up. We had to work very hard to get this article down to a submittable length and it meant that we couldn’t fully explore the notion of “user power.” I’ve been fascinated by the figure of the user for some years. Users are written about exhaustively in some fields - mostly around design, UI, UX, and some STS - but are barely mentioned in areas where I think they should be front and centre, such as cultural studies, or in politics.

In the current article, we suggest that SMM is a form of user power; that it makes visible this sleeping giant of users, who could easily end a platform’s existence if they chose to, or if they were pushed too far. We are very good at identifying the latest forms of “power of the powerful” - from algorithmic power to surveillance capitalism - but we’re perhaps not as good at thinking about new manifestation of counter-power. A lot of work still focuses on everyday resistances, novel use, and so on, in the tradition of De Certeau. And I have to say I’m a fan of this work and see myself as part of this tradition. But I think we also need to think about our new social arrangements, and the capacities of where and how we dwell. To flip Raymond William’s phrase, we could say “there are users, we just need new ways of seeing them.”

Do you have plans for any future social media migration studies? Or are there any threads you would like to see other researchers pick up? 

I suspect this is a “one and done” scenario in terms of migration studies! Fangzhou [Zhang] is busy researching superapps and Carlos has a new project on Open Street Map. I have just finished an article with Rob Gehl, called “After Twitter,” which is in some ways a follow-on piece.

In terms of threads to pick up, my interest is not directly with migration, and so I wouldn’t necessarily encourage everyone to start studying them. I’m always looking for things that will help us understand aspects of digital culture that aren’t immediately apparent or are becoming newly visible and interpretable. What I’m really interested in is how the fediverse and open-source productivity tools are being used in relation to the question of digital sovereignty.

If anyone else in the ASM network is also interested in this, feel free to reach out! And thanks so much for reading the article closely and engaging with it.

Every other summer since 1994, hackers, activists, artists, and technologists descend on New York for Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE). Organized by the security hacker journal 2600, this three-day conference blends talks and workshops with performances, films, villages, art installations, and vintage computer displays. Along with Las Vegas’ Defcon, HOPE stands as one of North America’s most known hacker conferences.

As a first-year attendee, my biggest concern was entering the space and immediately feeling (for lack of a better word) like a poser. Aside from my middle school self using an anonymous AIM username, “Hack3rspy,” to anonymously send esoteric messages to my schoolmates, I’d never had much of a relationship to hacking culture growing up. It wasn’t until my mid-20s that I developed both an inquisitive appreciation (and a simultaneous nagging disdain!) for digital technology.

I quickly learned, however, that HOPE isn’t siloed just for self-described cybersecurity experts. Journalists, activists, artists, academics, media makers, radio hobbyists, lock-picking enthusiasts, and radical activists concerned with rising technofascism were all present. Combined with the friendliness of almost everyone I interacted with, my imposter syndrome was thankfully squashed. Now, over two weeks later, I’m reflecting on what a hacker conference like HOPE can offer the field of alternative social media studies.

Key Connections

The most obvious overlap with Alternative Social Media research and HOPE was Activity Pub co-author Evan Prodromou leading an introductory talk on the Fediverse as well as hosting an ActivityPub table where you could pick up stickers and literature on the Fediverse. But even without this direct presence, HOPE’s historical relevance to alternative social media is undeniable. Alternative social media such as the Fediverse’s development is predicated on hacker cultures, their values (including their divisive tensions), and the fundamental technological elements of free and open-software and decentralization.

However, what I found the most valuable at HOPE were other, less-obvious connections that would add valuable depth to alternative social media research. The various talks and tables made me think about how alternative social media research could benefit from broader conversations with the related research subjects of alternative media and alternative computing. Discussions and workshops related to free and open-source software and hardware reminded me that alternative social media platforms don’t exist in isolation; they rely on material infrastructures, from servers to personal devices. This raises questions about how the materiality of computing shapes alternative social media experiences or how communication tools used by FOSS developers might inform platform design.

At HOPE, several talks that had nothing to do with alternative social media nonetheless raised crucial questions that alternative social media researchers should be asking. Alex Muentz’s “Activism, Hactivism and the Law,” Joseph Cox’s “How Law Enforcement Agencies Compromise Entire Encrypted Chat Platforms,” and the informal Anarchist Assembly all loosely revolved around how political actors navigate platforms under surveillance and repression. These greatly informative sessions made me wonder: How do these same dynamics play out on decentralized platforms? Do activists change their behavior differently on Mastodon versus X when law enforcement is monitoring? How does the distributed nature of the Fediverse alter activists’ threat models?

Activists and hackers are just one of many other users that could be analyzed in relation to alternative social media. Laura Sang Hee Scherling and Josefina Piddo’s “Aging Cyber Safety” talk, for example, examined how elders navigate social media and internet security, addressing the real issues of technical literacy existing today. To my knowledge, no research has examined age or technological literacy in regards to alternative social media platforms, despite the fact that concepts like user-friendliness, barriers to entry, and accessibility are central to debates about the Fediverse’s mainstream adoption potential.

While none of these talks specifically addressed alternative social media, they illuminated how different user constituencies, activists, elders, law enforcement, hackers, bring distinct needs, vulnerabilities, and practices to their platform use. Taking seriously issues of user practices has the potential to be incredibly generate for for alternative social media research and what exactly makes a platform truly “alternative.”

Conference Joys

Finally, I want to highlight the value (and enjoyment) that can come from academics attending non-academic conferences! I hope that academics can continue to practice the things we teach and learn to stumble along with those who build alternative cultures and worlds – just as much as we study the infrastructures, people, and technologies that comprise them.

Conferences like HOPE offer starting places to bridge that gap between observation and participation and between theory and practice.

The paranoid infrastructural imaginary of alttech: understanding how the reactionary mind fuels digital fascism

In this article in the Journal of Information Technology & Politics, Corrina Laughlin draws on a year-long ethnography of Gab, the far-right, white Christian nationalist social media site. She contrasts the rhetoric of Gab founder Andrew Torba with the actual experience of using Gab. “In my analysis,” Laughlin writes, :I chart Torba and his users’ shifting understanding of their place on the internet and track three central concepts that Torba continually returns to as he writes about internet governance. I find that as Torba constructs his understanding of and for ‘digital sovereignty,’ ‘the regime,’ and ‘the parallel economy,’ he displays and promotes what I call a ‘paranoid infrastructural imaginary’–– a concept that I argue is central to the alt-tech movement and crucial for understanding an aspect of the ‘reactionary mind’ that is fueling what Christian Fuchs (2022) has called ‘digital fascism’ or ‘Fascism 2.0.’”

Priorities and exclusions within Trust and Safety industry standards

This New Media & Society article, from the ASM Networks’s own Blake Hallinan and co-authors, compares the schema of content abuse from the Trust & Safety Professional Association (an emerging professional group) with the actual practices of a variety of streaming platforms. Notable for ASM scholars, Hallinan et al consider “alt-tech” platforms – the sort of sites that tend to promise free speech absolutism. Alt-tech platforms have gained noteriety by leverage a discourse of openness and free speech absolutism (which in turn often get coded as right-wing platforming). As Hallinan et al find, however, alt-tech’s “rebellious ethos generates further tension when, for example, a platform is publicly traded, as the case of Rumble illustrates. What Rumble users want does not necessarily align with what Rumble investors want, leaving the platform to perform a balancing act of signaling regulatory compliance and risk management to investors without alienating their users.” Sex work, for example, is beyond the pale for much of alt-tech. It turns out that alt-tech systems also engage in a variation of trust and safety. It’s intriguing considering this article alongside the Laughlin article described above.

A media ecology of ecological media? Conceptualizing environment-oriented communication and its digital footprint in climate change activism

In this New Media & Society article, Bussoletti et al focus on the relationship between climate activists and social media platforms. They focus on FridaysForFuture (FFF) Rome. Their analysis demonstrates the double-bind of contemporary activism – particularly environmental activism. There are “two fundamental conflicts that imbue FFF-Rome’s practices but are relevant to all actors of social change involved in climate activism: (1) the tension between addressing the climate crisis via digital tools, which contribute to environmental harm, and (2) advocating for systemic change rooted in anti-capitalism and anti-corporatism while utilizing platforms whose logic aligns with these models.” Speaking personally, this will be required reading when I next teach about social movements and media.

Straddling Two Platforms: From Twitter to Mastodon, an Analysis of the Evolution of an Unfinished Social Media Migration

In this article in Social Sciences, Peña-Fernández et al consider the incomplete migration from Twitter/X to Mastodon. The authors examine 19K accounts of “users who identified themselves as supporters of the switch.” As they write, “the results show that the migration campaign was a reactive response to Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and was led by a group of highly active academics, scientists, and journalists. However, a complete transition was not realised, as users preferred to straddle their presence on both platforms. Mastodon’s decentralisation made it difficult to exactly replicate Twitter’s communities, resulting in a partial loss of these users’ social capital and greater fragmentation of these user communities, which highlights the intrinsic differences between both platforms.” Given the later growth of Bluesky, a follow-up to a study like this might examine how people spread their microblogging practices across X, Bluesky, and federated social media.

Decentralized Social Media

This “catchword” article in Business & Information Systems Engineering examines decentralized social media in comparison to centralized social media. As such, the authors Ciriello et al take a broad view of the field, considering a wide variety of examples (e.g., federated, blockchain, peer-to-peer). One area of emphasis in the article is governance. As they conclude, “social media governance operates on a spectrum, enabling hybrid models that combine decentralization with centralized elements. While DSM enhances user stewardship and transparency, adoption remains constrained by governance inefficiencies, financial instability, and usability challenges.”

For those of us not in your field, what does it mean to study the social epistemology of the internet? What excites you about this area of study?

Since social epistemology is the study of the social dynamics of knowledge, social epistemologists study how social practices, habits, institutions, and structures shape what we know (and what we don’t), and they develop theories for what should be done to produce reliable, unbiased, and just knowledge.

I find using social epistemology to study the internet exciting because there are so many pressing challenges and exciting possibilities for producing knowledge together online. For example, how should online spaces be moderated? How can we use the internet to unlearn our biases and prejudices? What kinds of practices and sociotechnical designs discourage the spread of harmful disinformation? Social epistemology can be a really interdisciplinary approach to addressing these questions.

What brought your attention to federated social media as a site of inquiry into social epistemology?

I first heard about federated social media from Sarah Jeong’s 2017 Vice piece about Mastodon, and I got an account. I was really excited about the possibilities of federated social media, but I couldn’t find any philosophers thinking about it, and I was very disconnected from researchers in other fields thinking about alternative social media. So I just couldn’t figure out how to connect ASM to my research.

Five years later, I was learning a lot about epistemic decolonization (the process of removing the influences of colonization on knowledge production and recentering knowledge production in the hands of the previously colonized) from amazing scholars like Veli Mitova and Abraham Tobi at the University of Johannesburg. This got me thinking about ways that online knowledge infrastructure needs to be in the hands of the people, rather than Global North tech companies, and I really started digging into work on ASM.

The ASM meetup at the 2022 Association of Internet Researchers conference and the Social Media Alternatives library were super helpful for me to find work that others were doing in this area.

One thing that struck me about your paper is that your social epistemology approach could be used as a tool when folks start their own fediverse instances. How might your approach guide things like making a code of conduct and making decisions about federation and defederation?

I love this question! There’s so much to say.

Basically, I think current social epistemology gives us a useful toolbox for thinking about how to produce knowledge well. For example, feminist accounts of objectivity recognize that each of us have our own biases, and that bias can be managed, even though it may never be fully erased. Feminist epistemologists suggest two ways we can manage bias: 1) discussing decisions within a diverse community, and 2) starting inquiry by centering the knowledge and lived experiences of the oppressed and marginalized.

So when folks are making decisions about what a code of conduct should be, or whether to federate or defederate with another instance, they should first ensure that these decisions are not made just by one person, who is likely to have their own biases. Instead, the decisions need to be debated within a group of folks from different backgrounds. Second, that discussion needs to center the experiences of marginalized people, who are most likely to be aware of the kinds of harmful online behavior that a code of conduct should prohibit to make the instance a thriving community.

This means asking questions such as: who in our community experiences oppression, and what kinds of misconduct are most likely to prevent their full participation in the instance? What kinds of policies are marginalized people asking for in a code of conduct?

Additionally, the “epistemologies of ignorance” literature provides tools for identifying ways that the knowledge of marginalized people is suppressed and how policies are often misused to silence them. So folks starting an instance need to be attentive to how privileged people may try to enforce (or call for enforcement of) a code of conduct in ways that make them comfortable, but which silence those with less power.

For example, when people of color call out racism in online spaces, they are often perceived by white people as attacking or harassing the racist users. White folks may try to appeal to codes of conduct to censor people of color simply for objecting to racism. This means that thinking through issues of power in moderation needs to happen not just at the stage of creating policies for codes of conduct or defederation; instead, folks need to attend to power dynamics at every point in the moderation process.

Zooming out a bit from your paper, how do you conceptualize the relationship between social epistemology on the internet and broader historical contexts? In other words, how much of what is knowable is conditioned by history, and how might we use the internet to imagine something better than structural racism?

First, I should mention that a lot of traditional social epistemology does a terrible job of recognizing the ways that history shapes what is knowable. Unfortunately, a lot of the work in my field attempts to be apolitical in a way that makes it also ahistorical.

But my work is influenced by feminist epistemologists, philosophers of race, queer epistemologists and others who reject that approach. The truth is that much of what I, as an individual, can know is conditioned by my social location (my race, gender, class, etc.) and much of what kinds of knowledge circulate in a community (and which kinds of knowledge get uptake in that community) is shaped by the power relations at play in a particular historical moment.

So that means that we can’t imagine the internet to be a level playing ground where it’s possible for everyone to have a free exchange in the marketplace of ideas. Power shapes all of our online spaces.

What excites me about alternative social media is that so many of its proponents are people who recognize this. ASM folks want to create online spaces that are owned by the people, rather than powerful corporations.

Of course, this alone doesn’t guarantee justice in federated social media (Johnathan Flowers’ work on the whiteness of Mastodon illustrates this, as does the example of Gab). But at least there’s the possibility for people to create just and inclusive online spaces where we can have conversations that challenge the dominant forms of knowledge that prop up white supremacy and other forms of injustice.

One of the main themes in social epistemology is that privilege has a tendency to hide itself so that privileged people are often ignorant of their own advantages whereas oppressed people are often more aware of the gaps, biases, and ignorance of dominant knowers and dominant knowledge systems. ASM gives marginalized people tools to create their own spaces and to advocate for practices that center their voices. And it can give privileged people a space to unlearn their own ignorance by listening.

Big tech companies just do not have a profit incentive to center the needs of marginalized people in their policies and practices. So I’m excited by opportunities federated social media provide for us to imagine new, more just worlds together online.

Where do you think ASM research should go from here?

I’m still learning and growing in this field, so I hesitate to say I know where the field should go. But I just finished Michael Kwet’s book Digital Degrowth, and I’m really interested in exploring how ASM might help us collectively work towards a decolonial, sustainable internet.

The Global North simply has too much power in our digital lives, and we are facing looming ecological disaster that tech companies are supporting. I’m interested in collaborating with folks who want to explore how ASM might be part of building an internet owned by (and managed for) the global majority rather than tech elites.

Rather than recapitulate the criticism of the University of Zurich AI persuasion experiment on Reddit, here on the Network of Alternative Social Media Researchers blog, we’re going to hold a forum-style conversation. The topic? Lessons we alternative social media researchers can draw from the Zurich experiment on Reddit. Several members of the ASM email list have agreed to take turns addressing this topic. Each person will both respond to the broad question of ASM research ethics as well as to previous parts of the conversation.

The posts:

• Robert W. Gehl: Pay Up
• Marc Damie: We Need a Fediverse Research API
• Mareike Lisker: Pay Attention to Instance Norms
• Jessa Lingel: Alternative to What? Thinking Through the Ethics of a Slippery Category
• J.J. Sylvia: Relational Data Ethics
• Kat Tiidenberg: We Need an ASM Ethics Oversight Board

Robert W. Gehl: Pay Up

When I heard about this experiment, my first thought was that this is merely a peek through the curtain. For all their faults, the Zurich researchers at least revealed what they did. No doubt the researchers thought that the value of their work would outweigh the discomfort of the Redditors under study – that after a bit of shock, the Redditors would agree that the experiment was noble and of course could not have been done with informed consent, so that basic tenet of research was unneccessary. The researchers probably believed their findings would ultimately be welcomed by the Change My View users – and possibly by the rest of us.

The researchers were very, very wrong, of course. But they at least revealed their work.

I’m afraid that for every Zurich team that admits they’ve experimented on social media users, there are ten thousand experiments conducted by marketers, governments, and the social media companies themselves: attempts to see what types of posts get the most interaction, what keywords work best, the best photos and videos to attach, the best ways to customize posts based on psychographics. Few of us are privy to them – they are veiled, locked behind trade secrets and non-disclosure agreements, in service to the predominant political economy of corporate social media: surveillance capitalism (or, as Aral Balkan calls it, “people farming.”) The people doing these research projects learned their lesson from the fallout of the 2015 “emotional contagion” study on Facebook: it’s best to not reveal what you’re up to.

These forms of manipulation are a big reason why activists developed non-corporate alternative social media, and why people have shifted to posting to places such as the fediverse. This obviously has major implications for how we conduct research on alternative social media.

No doubt others in this forum will point to many ways to ethically engage in social research in alternative social media. For my part, I will argue that an examination of the political economy of non-corporate social media – particularly the fediverse – suggests an ethical principle that may not be obvious at first: we need to pay up.

Here’s why. Most of the instances on the fediverse are run on a not-for-profit basis. As I found in my research, the models vary, from informal, “toss me a few dollars to help out” approaches to formally organized non-profits. In all of these cases, people are paying for hosting and bandwidth out-of-pocket – they aren’t funding them by selling ads or selling user data.

In light of that, I would argue that ethical alternative social media research often should include funding or material support provided to the communities under study. For example, if someone has a large grant to study ASM, part of the grant budget should include direct payments to the affected instances. This is especially the case when the research involves bandwidth-heavy tools, like extensive use of APIs. Other forms of support could be help with moderation or co-designed research to solve specific problems faced by ASM admins and members.

Indeed, to circle back to the Zurich Reddit manipulation study, the apology from the researchers to the community included an offer of help to detect AI-generated content. Imagine if the researchers had offered that from the outset. What might have been different?

There’s much more to say, so I will turn things over to our next forum participant, Marc Damie, who is mapping relations between fediverse instances.

Marc Damie: We Need a Fediverse Research API

To understand my answer, you should know a few things about my work. As a PhD student designing privacy-preserving technologies, I want to develop protocols for the Fediverse, which requires understanding its structure. To achieve this, I created simple crawlers to “take pictures” of the Fediverse; i.e., graphs representing interactions between servers. The resulting dataset is already available online, and a paper is on its way.

This Reddit controversy naturally attracted my attention as it shows us what we should not do. However, this controversy is also an extreme example: the researchers actively interferred with real-world human-beings, while most research on social media (like mine) consists in passive data gathering. For example, some researchers have created the “Webis Mastodon corpus”: a corpus of 700M Mastodon posts to foster research in information retrieval. Many Mastodon users were unhappy to learn their posts (potentially containing sensitive information) had been included in a dataset without their approval.

While the Reddit case is a useful starting point, the Webis corpus is more relevant to our discussion. Unlike the clearly unethical study on the “Change My View” subreddit, the Webis corpus occupies a gray area, and it involves alternative social media. This raised a question that has troubled me since beginning my research: Is my work fully ethical?

Before I starting crawling, I spent a year consulting legal teams from my two research institutes. We adopted strict ethical practices: querying only public APIs, slow data scraping, respecting crawler policies, open-sourcing code, and publishing only aggregated data (no personal information). After three months of crawling, I’ve received no complaints; a Mastodon developer even “starred” my crawler’s GitHub repo!

Despite my precautions, ethical ambiguity remains because academia lacks clear guidelines for research on ASM. Existing frameworks for centralized platforms don’t easily apply.

Robert’s point about payment is interesting. While I understand the motivation, I wouldn’t prioritize it yet. Practical implementation seems challenging: should developers be compensated? How to split the payment between instances? Should we pay instances a fixed price independently of their location?

However, it leads me to two follow-up considerations:

• What do researchers bring to the Fediverse? Funding is one possible contribution, but Fediverse actors might also value the research outcomes. For example, my work could improve the spam detection. This aligns with Robert’s proposal on “co-designed research”. Promoting the potential research output is common for research in collaboration with companies, and it could be imported to research in collaboration with ASM entities.
• How should we handle research requiring intensive API usage? Some of my crawlers need (moderately) intensive API calls to gather the necessary data. Usually, they gather some data and aggregate them. However, if I had a dedicated API point providing directly the aggregated data, the computation would take a second on the server and a single API call. Research API have (historically) existed on Twitter and were vital for scientific research. I believe the Fediverse may need a research API. I hope that my research may partially demonstrate the interest of such API.

While creating a research API is straightforward on centralized social media, the decentralized nature of ASM introduces technical challenges (that we can reasonably overcome). For such an API to succeed, academic institutions must contribute both financially and technically. This development would also present an opportunity to establish a code of conduct for ASM research.

For example, a Fediverse research API could formally gather consent from Fediverse instances. Currently, researchers rely on public APIs, assuming by default that instances consent to data processing. A dedicated research API would allow instances to actively opt in (or out) of research studies, finally moving ASM researchers out of the ethical “gray area.”

Mareike Lisker: Pay Attention to Instance Norms

Like Marc Damie, I am also interested in the “gray areas.” And, like Marc, I am researching alternative social media as part of my PhD studies, so the question of how to ethically research and collect data in the Fediverse (specifically Mastodon) also applies to me.

Recently, I co-authored a review of the data practices of 29 studies that collected data from Mastodon. The starting point for this review was the fact that several instances explicitly prohibit data gathering in their rules and policies, which is barely reflected in current research. Only a few studies acknowledge, let alone adhere to, the instances’ rules on data gathering.

Although Marc very likely used the term “passive” to contrast it with the intrusive Zurich experiment and express that gathering data on social media does not involve any intervention, I want to challenge the notion that gathering social media data is passive, as this conceals the fact that using an API to gather data is a very active action. The idea of passivity can contribute to the perception that researchers are uninvolved in and unaccountable to the communities they study, in the same manner that using the Mastodon API can flatten the social complexity of networks and alienate researchers from the communities they study.

Another distinction that I would like to bring into the discussion is between legal and ethical considerations. Legally, besides the GDPR that applies to anybody working with data in the EU, the rules and policies of a Mastodon instance are binding only for its registered users. Unregistered users and users from other instances do not have to commit to them. Unless a researcher is by chance registered on an instance from which they gather data, and that instance prohibited it in their policy documents, there is no legal violation. The federated nature of Mastodon only adds complexity to this affair, since when a toot is boosted on another instance, the originating instance’s rules no longer apply.

Ethically, however, researchers—or as a matter of fact the institutional ethics boards overseeing the research—could still feel obliged to individually review the terms and policies of each instance from which they intend to collect data.

Finally, to shift the focus from the philosophical to a more hands-on perspective: I find Rob’s proposal to include financial, material, time or knowledge/co-design support promising, and I will consider how it could be implemented in my project. It might be a worthwhile endeavor to formulate recommendations that take various aspects, such as who and how to “compensate” (developers, admins, moderators, users), possibly dependent on location or size of the server, into consideration.

I support Marc’s idea of a Research API. In our paper, we proposed the technical idea of formalizing instance rules and policies to make them machine-readable and versioned, so that they can be referred to in research. This could be incorporated into a Research API.

What most research on (alternative) social media seem to have in common is that it can happen entirely covertly by default. Once research is published, it has already been conducted and the data gathered. This inherent covertness is something we as researchers need to account for.

Jessa Lingel: Alternative to What? Thinking Through the Ethics of a Slippery Category

When I first started thinking about alternative social media, it felt pretty easy to draw the lines. In the 2010s, a couple key platforms dominated the digital landscape. Anything that wasn’t Facebook or Twitter was, essentially, alternative.

A lot has changed since then. The digital culture landscape is increasingly fragmented and hard to access. Platforms have made it harder to scrape data, which is bad for research, and ultimately bad for making better policy. Yet there’s an upside to the loss of APIs: for a long time, researchers turned to Twitter not because it was the best platform for answering their questions, but because it was the easiest platform to scrape. While the best scenario is that all platforms open themselves up to inquiry, the worst scenario is that platforms are investigated not because they’re interesting or important but because they’re accessible.

Setting aside questions of facilitating access, I want to consider a broader question about ethics of studying alternative social media. What does alternative mean today? Facebook (and its cohort of Instagram and WhatsApp) continues to dominate the landscape, but not with the totality of a decade prior. I think that’s a good thing, but it’s less clear to me what alternative means now. Alternative to what?

In an article with Rosemary Clark-Parsons, we worked through some of the ethical implications around studying alterity. Our starting premise was about the consequences of labeling a community, platform or practice as alternative:

“To approach the study of marginalized or activist media as forms of counterconduct is to position the work of resistance as fundamentally disempowered, and by extension, less legitimate or necessary than the institutions against which resistance works.”

One of the arguments we made is about letting constructs of otherness surface from participants, rather than being imposed as a label. So part of the answer to what makes a platform alternative is whether the users and communities anchoring that platform identify themselves that way. A note of caution that I’m offering here is for researchers to ask whether they’re imposing a label of alterity on what they’re studying, or letting that label surface from that community, because research ethics can change based on the answer.

When I first started writing about alternative social media, I looked to countercultural communities to think about how platforms can be made to fit the needs of those on the margins. My hope was that communities would develop platforms, tools and policies that would better reflect their politics. At times, it feels like the communities that have best exemplified these calls are those with politics I find troubling: Truth Social, Telegram, Gab. Our ethical responsibilities don’t go out the window when writing about views we dislike or even find repugnant. I think Rob makes a fantastic suggestion in terms of compensating instances or providing moderating support. But what does it mean to offer compensation to instances that are anti-feminist, transphobic, or white supremacist?

We need a framework that’s flexible enough to account for multiple forms of alterity. Such a framework needs to start from Mareike’s premise of conceptualizing APIs as passive data collection. The history of social media research is littered with problematic studies that sailed through IRB approvals (or weren’t submitted for IRB at all) in part because the data collection was viewed as passive or publicly available. IRBs are too varied to be reliable in developing guidelines that can be followed across the academy, and they’re also too US-centric. The AOIR ethics guidelines have been a vital document for researchers looking for best practices. As a very practical suggestion, perhaps we can work to have some of these conversations reflected in the next round of guideline revisions? In the meantime, it’s incredibly encouraging for me to see folks working through these questions in the communities they’re studying, with the expertise they’ve developed in a fast-moving digital landscape.

Looking forward to seeing where these conversations take us.

J.J. Sylvia IV: Relational Data Ethics

When a Hugging Face contributor released one-million-bluesky-posts last November, the file was removed within twenty-four hours after backlash erupted — yet a clone with additional data called two-million-bluesky-posts re-appeared on the same service. Less than a week ago, researchers scraped and published two billion Discord messages from 3,167 servers. These examples add to those Marc Damie and others and have discussed thus far.

These episodes, taken together, should worry us, considering Casey Fiesler’s 2018 survey result, which found that 61 % of Twitter users “had no idea” their tweets might be studied and 47 % believed researchers needed permission in order to do so. They also replay the older Tastes, Ties & Time saga: a supposedly anonymized Harvard-Facebook dataset that Michael Zimmer re-identified in days, exposing students who never agreed to participate in research. Put simply, once social data escapes, “removal” is performative. Harvesting data at scale or intervening with bots requires an additional layer of care in our research methods.

Approaching this through a relational research lens would flip the dynamic. Rosi Braidotti’s post-human relational ethics gives us a vocabulary for creating this approach. In her framework, agency is distributed across what she calls transversal alliances of human and non-human actants. Ulrike Schultze and Richard Mason apply a similar insight to internet research, arguing that “the person whose online actions generated the content is inseparable from this digital material.” Our forum has already mapped the terrain for how we might put this theory into practice. Robert Gehl’s “Pay Up” insists researchers owe material support. Marc Damie wants a Fediverse research-API. Mareike Lisker reminds us that scraping is an intervention, not “passive.” Jessa Lingel asks, alternative to what?

A relational approach weaves those threads into a different methodology. Researchers begin as genuine participants in the networks they study—moderating queues, patching code, joining governance calls—so questions arise organically from inside the community rather than parachuting in with a harvest script. Platforms, instances, and individual users can all be given the opportunity to opt in and out of all, or even particular, research projects. Reciprocity becomes ongoing, not transactional. Bandwidth micro-payments could be set up to flow automatically with each API call, mirroring Gehl’s demand, yet expressed as infrastructure rather than charity. Damie’s API vision becomes a community-controlled gateway that issues time-limited tokens; consent isn’t just a static signature. Lisker’s critique of “passivity” evaporates because the crawler now checks a well-known policy file before proceeding and pauses if consent lapses. The participants become co-authors of the research agenda.

This framework offers more than a moral upgrade to Zurich’s rogue persuasion study on Reddit. It proposes a concrete alternative ethos: don’t hide bots to manipulate strangers. Show up with your human account. Shoulder some moderation tickets. Discuss the study plan in the open channel. Let the community decide whether large-scale data pulls are worth the bandwidth or if bot intervention is acceptable. Such a relational practice means slower timelines. Yet the Bluesky, Discord, and Mastodon ethical breaches we’ve considered show the price of speed: ethical debt that keeps accruing in the data mirrors that Fiesler warns about.

Kat Tiidenberg: We Need an ASM Ethics Oversight Board

What an exciting thread to be part of! I’ve tried to braid my thoughts into a couple of points that, I hope, integrate commenting on University of Zurich’s r/changemyview situation, reacting to the others’ thoughts in this thread, and thinking towards ASM research ethics more broadly.

For me, what happened in the case of r/changemyview is a problem that stems from the mainstreaming of procedural ethics (e.g. the ethics of review boards, approvals, etc). The critiques of procedural ethics are well documented – standardization, universalization, bureaucratization, claiming to be able to predict the unpredictable. I am pro ethics oversight, but it does intensely frustrate me, when that becomes – because of how researchers are taught, or because of how oversight boards are framed – the extent of engagement with research ethics.

Mary Midgley, my favorite moral philosopher, has a quote about our (human) “idiotic optimism about choice,” which I think is appropriate here. It signals our penchant to think that we can always choose between a good option and a bad option, where often our choices are between bad and worse. When ethics training and oversight doesn’t factor that in, when we are fed an idea of ethically unambiguous ways of doing research, we get sort of an ethics paralysis in early career researchers, and sort of a semi-belligerent ethics nihilism in some communities of scholars, for whom ethics becomes a hurdle to elegantly hack. This is also how we get gestural ethics that functions with a vocabulary of ‘adhering to standards’ and ‘complying with criteria,’ in ways that are disingenuous in that they are disconnected from what research ethics is all about – beneficence. Informed consent, confidentiality, deidentification are just tools to achieve what we actually want, which is answering our research questions without doing harm; if possible, by doing good.

A fairly popular alternative to procedural ethics (also recommended by the the AoIR ethics guidelines already mentioned in this thread) is ethics of practice or situated ethics. This approach invites us to continually consider the ethical implications of our choices. Being ethical, in this view, is a matter of switched on deliberation about what can be harmful to whom, when and why, and what can be done to minimize harm.

Now, procedural ethics paperwork usually includes questions about possible harm and plans for its mitigation. But, arguably, considerable situational awareness is needed to be able to sincerely fill out those parts of the paperwork. We can’t understand potential harm without understanding what the people in the space we’re about to reimagine as a research site think they are doing. What does it mean for them? How does it relate to who they think they are? This is how we know what they might find disrespectful, creepy, violating and what might harm them and their communities. This idea is, I think, the foundation for JJ’s practical point made earlier in this thread, of researchers needing to begin as genuine participants in the networks they study, instead of parachuting in.

Yet, harm can be an unhelpfully vague category. How much discomfort, unpleasantness, sense of violation qualifies as harm? Here, Annette Markham has suggested the useful heuristic of creepiness. It seems unlikely that the U of Zurich researchers would have answered “no,” to a question like: “do you think redditors might find it creepy when a bot pretending to be a Black person tries to convince them that BLM is bad?” One must assume they didn’t ask. And this, I think, is a product of what can be, with a hat tip to Donna Haraway, called ethics as a ‘gaze from nowhere.’

Harm and/or creepiness as the parameter of research ethics throws up another complication though, which is perhaps particularly relevant to ethics in alternative social media research. Harm to whom? Definition of alternative social media often relates to who owns and develops (and how) the platforms. We can absolutely talk about harm and beneficence to owners or developers – Rob’s very concrete idea of paying up in the first entry of this thread falls into this category; plausibly, Zurich researchers’ offer in their apology letter does that as well. In a way, it can be argued that internet researchers tend to, at least at the level of discourse, want to avoid harm to developers and owners of ASM. However, as Mareike’s review showed, researchers seem to be ignoring the data gathering rules of Mastodon instances in practice. And as Jessa pointed out, it’s muddy here too, because what if they’re alternative, but evil?, In contrast, researchers are much more ambivalent when it comes to dominant mainstream platforms. I am alluding to the researchers building strong critical arguments, legal cases and activist interventions against and tools for getting around the restricted access created by the so called APIcalypse, which indicates the research community’s acceptance of a sort of a pirate ethics in when it comes to dominant mainstream platforms.

But more conventionally, concerns of harm focus on research participants, data subjects, or users in the case of social media. This makes delineating alternative social media research ethics even harder. Does a Facebook user deserve less protection from harm because they’re not enlightened enough to be using Mastodon? Do my selfies, utterances and trace data deserve to be treated differently on one of the platforms I use and not the other? Are we going to convert everyone to ASM by being unethical to them on mainstream platforms? ☺

What then, could I contribute towards our collective ideation of ASM research ethics? First, I think what we’re doing is a great start (thank you Rob), and I wholeheartedly support Jessa’s idea that the next update of AoIR ethics guidelines could include best practices and good ideas for ethically engaging with ASM.

Second (and this might be a bit naïve, but let’s call it speculative future making) expanding on others’ thoughts on more direct collaboration with ASM entities – maybe the checkpoint does not need to sit (only) with university ethics review boards, but with ASM organizations and communities. Perhaps they need ‘ethics ombudsmen’ or some other forms of research liaisons; people who are members of both the ASM and research communities, or have good enough access to both, who can help with creepiness audits. Obviously, the costs (time, skill, money) should be covered by research institutions/projects. While instituting some sort of an overhead system seems bureaucratically cumbersome, and hoping that mainstream platforms become taxable with a social responsibility tax, some of which can be directed into an ethics pot seems overly optimistic, there’s a project specific idea which is inspired by Hanne Stegeman’s brilliant PhD dissertation “Behind the webcam: Contested visibility in online sex work in the Netherlands, Romania and the UK.” Hanne set up a paid sex-worker advisory board for her project.

Could we have platform-native (and project specific?) ethics advisors or boards for ASM?

You’ve got some exciting news, I understand. Tell us about it!

Yes, I do have some exciting news to share!

My project ‘Trust in the Fediverse: Leveraging Community Protocols and Automation to Combat Online Harms’ has been selected for the AXA Research Fund Postdoctoral fellowship. The project will investigate the strengths and weaknesses of fediverse or decentralized platforms in promoting prosocial practices and governance (therefore reducing online harm and misinformation).

I have always been interested in emerging technologies and the evolving digital media landscape. When the AXA Fellowship opened for applications last year, it felt like the right moment to develop a project focused on non-mainstream platforms — especially those designed to promote pro-social values. With the support of this fellowship, I now have the opportunity to examine transformations in alternative social media (ASM) over time, with a particular focus on the current momentum around fediverse platforms.

The project involves a close analysis of policy and governance documents across a wide range of platforms — both major and minor — and conversations with platform developers, community participants, and scholars working in this space. One of the key outcomes will be a concept map for policy discussions around trust and safety, identifying what works and what doesn’t in decentralized or alternative environments. I see this work as a chance to generate nuanced insights that can inform the development of future platform frameworks — ones that promote pro-social values and support sustainable systems not driven by commercial or advertising imperatives.

The project begins in May 2025 and will run for approximately two years. I’ll be sharing regular updates with this group as the work progresses, and I’d really value the support and insights of this amazing community of scholars.

Your doctoral work was on DTube. What’s DTube, and what prompted you to study it?

To answer this question, I’d like to briefly outline my career journey. I completed my undergraduate degree in Computer Science Engineering and then worked for an IT company for five years, where I analyzed large datasets, fixed code, and supported technical operations. Over time, however, I found that the work no longer excited me. Seeking a more creative and critical direction, I pursued a Master’s in Media and Cultural Studies, where I was introduced to critical thinking and research methodologies. This is where I was exploring the relationship between digital technology, society, and the self.

After my master’s, I briefly worked in educational technology research, contributing to platform development projects. This was a period when major platforms were relatively stable, and alternative platforms were not widely discussed — yet there was a growing awareness of increasing polarization and the rise of right-wing governments. Important questions were emerging about the relationship between big data and these social shifts.

I remained curious about how technologies originate and evolve over time. Around 2017, Bitcoin had already gained significant momentum, and cryptocurrencies were beginning to find their way into everyday life. Observing the integration of cryptocurrency models into emerging social media platforms, I began following a few projects that were developing from the ground up. Since 2017, I have closely observed video streaming platforms like DTube and LBRY, both of which made utopian promises of user-governed, advertising-free video sharing backed by cryptocurrency. These platforms introduced a radically new model of social media, decentralized both in infrastructure and governance.

As I developed my proposal for doctoral research, it became clear that I wanted to study one of these platforms in depth. I was accepted into the PhD program at QUT under the supervision of Prof. Jean Burgess, who had just co-authored Twitter: A Biography with Prof. Nancy Baym. Inspired by their platform biography approach, I adopted it as the methodological foundation for my research.

Studying the lifespan of DTube — an obscure but revealing platform — offered important insights into how individuals and communities imagine socio-technical systems, propose governance models, and respond to challenges. Although blockchain-based platforms have generally struggled to achieve large-scale adoption (with a few exceptions among far-right communities), DTube’s story demonstrates that there is no straightforward solution for financial sustainability in social communication platforms. I was particularly influenced by scholars like Lana Swartz, Rachel O’Dwyer, and Koray Caliskan, who have explored the intersections of data, money, and communication. DTube’s trajectory suggests that when monetary systems are deeply integrated into social platforms, they can render communication increasingly transactional — more so than what we currently experience on major platforms.

Although my initial PhD interests were different, working on DTube gradually shifted my focus towards internet and web history. My research now reflects not only on a platform’s life cycle but also captures a historical moment when cryptocurrency promised radical change — while also revealing how those promises were gradually co-opted and reshaped.

Given your doctoral work, do you see any role for cryptocurrencies in alternative social media?

I’m not sure that cryptocurrencies are a good fit for alternative social media (ASM). At the end of the day, cryptocurrency is a form of money, and like all financial systems created by humans, it carries inherent biases and structural inequalities. While blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies were initially imagined as a way to resist the dominance of big banks and corporations, the reality is that the system itself is flawed. Access to technology and infrastructure still determines who holds power, and distribution remains uneven.

Looking at current examples, Twitter (now X) is owned by Elon Musk, who has major investments in various cryptocurrencies. Similarly, Trump owns Truth Social and is linked to the development of TrumpCoin. If figures like these integrate cryptocurrencies deeply into their platforms, it’s unlikely that participation will remain open or equitable — those who are already socially and financially marginalized could find themselves further excluded.

The financial sustainability of ASM remains an open and important question. Cryptocurrencies may not offer the solution we need. There is still important work to be done to imagine and build sustainable financial models — perhaps something closer to Wikipedia’s approach — that are not driven purely by profit motives, and that can genuinely support broader, more inclusive participation.

You’ve also published work on Gab, the alt-right social media site. What did you find when you studied that site?

The research on Gab was a side project I pursued during my PhD, in collaboration with my colleague Dr. Ehsan Dehghan. We carried out this work in 2021, at a time when COVID-19 was a critical global issue, travel restrictions were still in place, and debates around vaccination were intensifying. This project brought together my interest in alternative and minor platforms and Ehsan’s focus on online radicalization. While Gab openly positioned itself with conservative ideologies, we were particularly interested in examining the processes of radicalization taking shape on the platform.

We collected data on vaccination discourse on Gab from 2018 to 2021, aiming to understand how Gab users perceived vaccination and how radicalization around the topic unfolded over time. In our paper, we found that antagonistic and conspiratorial thinking was already present in vaccination discussions on Gab even before the pandemic. However, during the pandemic, these conversations became increasingly politicized, expanding well beyond medical discourse into broader debates about organizational and institutional politics.

We also observed that Gab was just one node within a larger ecosystem of platforms that these communities used both to stay informed and, in some cases, to propagate particular ideologies, including hate and misinformation. We define this as “alt-platformization”, the systemic and systematic process of creating a self-sufficient, viable alternative to the platformized web, entailing the necessary infrastructure, production, circulation, consumption, and reproduction of discourses. We have developed this discussion further to look at other platforms as well. The book chapter is due to be published in 2026.

I’ve spent a great deal of time examining Gab. It’s not easy to look — at there are literal Nazis there. What sort of methodological tools do you recommend to folks who want to study such sites?

I completely agree. Platforms like Gab are incredibly challenging to study, given the nature of discussions that take place there. They starkly reveal the lack of moderation and the platform’s affordances that enable the spread of false and hateful content.

It’s not easy to apply qualitative approaches to observe or manually dive deep into these discussions. Doing so can pose serious risks to the mental health of researchers and users, especially those who are not familiar with encountering such content. This is where AI tools and computational methods become particularly valuable (one of the best ways to put AI to use, I believe). In our study of Gab, we used automated scraping techniques and tools like Tableau and Gephi for analysis. We didn’t engage directly with full posts; instead, we worked with metadata elements such as hashtags and user participation patterns.

Although I’m not currently researching alternative platforms, I’m aware of colleagues in Australia and internationally who are using AI-based approaches to automate content coding from alt-right platforms and to generate topic models that help map broader discourses. I also found it helpful to share parts of my analysis with trusted colleagues — as a sounding board and a way to recognize when to pause, especially when the material became confusing or caused discomfort.

Where do you think ASM research should go from here?

We are at a fascinating moment in history, where disruptive technologies are transforming the very foundations of communication. At the same time, we are witnessing the rise of hate speech and misinformation, set against a backdrop of economic instability and geopolitical tensions.

ASM research has been critical in shedding light on areas that often receive less attention compared to major platforms and mainstream issues. Moving forward, ASM research can play an important role in developing frameworks for interdisciplinary work — work that focuses on technologies, communities, and practices at the margins.

At the same time, it is worth taking up the challenge of defining what we mean by “alternative.” Is it an alternative to corporate systems? To hegemonic socio-political conditions? Or something else entirely?

I want to reiterate your important point about moving slowly and building bridges. There is much to learn from the peripheries, where more meaningful and sustainable models of prosocial communication are often being developed.