Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media

Paper Title

Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media

Publication Info

• Topic area: Decentralized social media governance and inter-community coordination.
• Keywords: Community governance, decentralized social media, inter-community governance, Fediverse, modularity, forkability, polycentricity, governance frictions, trust bubbles, ecosystem design.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Current social computing systems lack mechanisms to support inter-community governance, which is crucial for addressing shared challenges and sustaining community-run social media.
• Significance: Inter-community governance can empower communities to collaborate, reduce governance frictions, and sustain decentralized social media ecosystems.
• Motivation and related work: Prior research has focused on governance within individual communities but has overlooked the ecological dynamics between communities. Existing tools like CrossMod and ad hoc coordination efforts (e.g., Discord campaigns) demonstrate the potential but lack bottom-up, decentralized design.

Solution

• Proposed approach: An ecosystem of resources, tools, and interfaces to enable inter-community governance, guided by principles of modularity, forkability, and polycentricity.
• Novelty:
  1. Introduction of "Governance Nutrition Facts" labels to make community governance decisions visible and comparable.
  2. Trust bubbles to facilitate tiered, nuanced relationships between communities.
  3. Modular and forkable governance systems to support community autonomy and customization.
  4. Ecosystem design integrating shared logs, issue bulletins, and collaborative moderation tools.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Conducted four design workshops with 24 Fediverse community leaders and developers.
  • Used speculative design methods to ideate ideal workflows and tools for inter-community governance.
  • Synthesized findings into six challenges and proposed an ecosystem of solutions.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Identified six challenges: visibility of governance decisions, collating nuanced issue information, managing information sharing, enabling inter-community relationships, customizing governance decisions, and minimizing adoption barriers.
  • Proposed modular governance labels, trust bubbles, and shared tools like issue bulletins to address these challenges.
• Advantage over baselines: Moves beyond ad hoc coordination and centralized solutions by emphasizing decentralized, community-driven approaches.
• Experiments / evaluation: Workshops with Fediverse participants revealed practical insights and speculative ideas for inter-community governance; follow-up interviews validated and expanded on these findings.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Participant pool skewed toward individuals deeply invested in governance, limiting generalizability.
  • Adoption barriers and labor intensity of proposed tools need further exploration.
  • Future studies should test prototypes and refine designs in diverse social computing contexts.

Summary

This paper introduces inter-community governance as a critical design space for decentralized social media systems like the Fediverse. Through workshops with community leaders, it identifies six challenges and proposes an ecosystem of tools and principles—modularity, forkability, and polycentricity—to address them. Key contributions include the concepts of Governance Nutrition Facts, trust bubbles, and shared moderation tools, which aim to foster collaboration while preserving community autonomy. The findings provide a roadmap for designing infrastructures that support sustainable, community-run social computing systems.