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FediForum June 2025:

Politics of Protocols and Designing With Power in Mind

/2025-06/session/1-i/

Topics:

Convener: Tolu (@tolu@micro.blogs.princeton.edu) and Sohyeon (@s0hw@hci.social)

Participants who chose to record their names here:

Notes

Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.22962v1

Related project Sohyeon is doing, facilitating workshops with folks to come up with new governance resources/tooling that might address some of the concerns around the politics that emerge with/via protocols: https://dsmw.cs.princeton.edu/

Paper summary

  • Each protocol has its technical stack and culture which leads to different power structures

  • Proposes a framework to compare and contrast decentralized protocols

    • architectural components (client, space, server, aggregator) - these are more about infrastructure
    • interaction components (feed, storage, curators) these are more about the features that define the user experience
    • diagrams to try to show how different protocols operationalize these components and implement “decentralization” in distinct ways
    • Definition of a semantic space to facilitate comparison: power over identity, over curation, and infrastructure.

  • Who controls:

    • identity (i.e., keys),
    • data (i.e., server, relay, pds),
    • feeds (i.e., moderation, algorithms?), etc?

  • How centralized is the authority over such components?

  • What is the structure of the communication links?

  • Question - how to use something like this to actually let people see where the power is concentrated?

    • using the framework to think through particular dimensions/issues like identity, curation, or infrastructure
    • seeing trade-offs that people/designers/engineers make, e.g., usability and security
    • consider who owns what components

  • every protocol decentralizes differently, prioritizing different values, etc

Discussion

Tommi:

  • It can be insightful to think about things a more horizontal way / anarchist way - there is a dialectical distribution of power between people, within the infrastructure circle of a protocol. A sense of community influences power - so how does a protocol’s technical design interact with this? Community governance as a potential intervention point.
  • e.g., on bluesky, it is very difficult to figure out who are the moderators and who else is in the “community”
  • in contrast, on activitypub, there is a much stronger sense of / recognition of community by virtue of its design

Eric:

  • Who is the target audience(s) for something like this? How can it be concretely used?
  • Also wondering how these aspects of the framework can be applied within single servers/spaces through organizational/governance rules. I think the framework is super helpful for thinking across protocols, but could be applied within them as well

Michalis:

  • What other dimensions of power are you interested in / or come to mind? Are the three explored here exhaustive?
    • Tolu: no, not exhaustive. Maybe other things that would be good to explore are about security, or about finances/money
    • Sohyeon (in comments, and also post): I think it’s more that any “issue” can become the normative lens through which to analyze what a protocol stipulates, and the framework helps see concretely what is going on.

Jon:

  • Confused about the notion of space - e.g., with blacksky
    • Tolu: a space can be “partitioned” so a space is not exactly all / everything what someone interacts with depending on the other components

Michalis:

  • Can this become more generalizable to other types of protocols? not just social media?
    • Would have to be a sociotechnical system / platform-like system, but seems possible!

The context of a technical system is often not articulated or acknowledged - this is a major problem.

The framework seems broadly applicable to other issues in the space.

From the Chat:

Q: I would love to see this framework applied to BlackSky: is this a “space”?

Does the power of “Development” also come up? For example, things like Nostr and Farcaster are considered permissionless". I can create an ATProto lexicon that can be picked up by other apps in the ecosystem.

chadkoh: I suppose this is “Power over Curation”

Eric Fassbender: I think looking at variations within ownership could be a way to look more at the way that power flows. You could have two spaces using the same protocol, but one sole owned and one co-op owned. As a user you have differing levels of power there, even though you are in the same space

chadkoh: I suppose this is “Power over Curation” made me also think about Frames on Farcaster… who is allowed to write executables for your feed

Sohyeon Hwang: ohhh i dont think we talk about it directly, it might overlap with power ove rinfrastructure in some ways!

chadkoh: yes I can see that too! concerns about power:

AP as implemented in today’s fediverse gives a lot more power to bigger instances. People on mastodon.social have a much richer view of the network than on smaller instances (because of the rules about which posts federate to which instances). And mastodon.social is generally viewed as “too big to defederate”. ActivityPub Relays (aka aggregators) can undercut that to some extent but with current implementations smaller instances have to keep copies of everything for the relays to help. It’s not clear to me how much of this is at the protocol level abstractly, and how much is just how fedi’s specific implementations of AP have evolved.

In ActivityPub, server mods have a lot of power. It’s sometimes described as digital fiefdoms. Mods can block people and even other servers, so they really craft the experience on each Mastodon server.