GROUPS ARE EASY, FEDERATING IS HARD

Abstract

When Elon Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, many users sought a place of refuge, and Mastodon was seen as an early candidate. Mastodon is part of the Fediverse, a decentralized network of social media services. But people arriving in this network were confused, a problem that many chalked up to a clunky interface and a confusing user experience. Such a reading of the situation misses something much more fundamental. This reaction to Mastodon signals something important about a narrowed network imagination amongst some users, a narrowed imagination that is not shared by all. On Mastodon, users engage in labor-intensive federating practices – they manage both the internal dynamics of their home server and that server’s relations to other servers. Groups are relatively easy to create, but federation can be quite difficult. Federation faces a number of obstacles, but some groups, including far-right political activists, have effectively responded to those obstacles. Researchers should study not only federated social media but also the federating practices used by groups both online and offline, practices that move past the easy labor of group formation into the more difficult work of federation.