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FediForum October 2025:

Anchoring Our Work in Real Community Needs

/2025-10/session/1-c/

Topics:

Convener: Ben Werdmuller (https://werd.io, @ben@werd.social)

Participants who chose to record their names here:

Notes

  • I am pre-adding a note due to my conflict. I wanted to say “hello” from the ICLEI Canada Livable Cities Forum, where I just participated in a workshop on combatting mis/disinfo on climate change and sustainability. I cannot believe how incredibly aligned it is with Ben’s keynote, this topic, and my riff from the August Fedicon On building a Purpose, not a Product.
  • Emelia: Core 2 social projects are Mastodon and Bluesky. The architecture of these systems means if you want to do something outside of them, you can’t. It might mean building something in the wrong way. For example, your identity is tied to your server. Mastodon cannot support every kind of community, so you end up having multiple accounts.
    • If your protocol only supports public data, then it may not be safe or secure for marginalised folks who have different requirements to privileged folks.
    • If your software/protocol ties identity and data to the application, then you limit how people can interact with the network.
    • Protocols need to understand the people who want to use them, even if they want to use them for something that they weren’t originally designed to. For instance, E2EE might be necessary for some community not others, local non-federating content may be desireable.
  • What is the balance between protocols for community vs publicly posting? Can you have private posting and community at the protocol level?
  • Evan: https://github.com/swicg/groups
  • Evan: What does Ben, director of technology at Propublica, need from the Fediverse?
    • Ben: Social work in a newsroom is not run by product or tech teams. They are on the business side. Social media is run by an audience team on the editorial side. Engagement team listens and uses social messages. Different management structures.
    • ProPublica is on fediverse because it has a history of experimentation. Some guy named Chris decided to be on fediverse and Bluesky. Ben then experimented with donation requests and got more donations from fediverse than any other social channel. That gets people’s attention, like the fundraising team who now want to be on Mastodon.
      • Dan in chat: “Ben is being modest here, the fundraising team has a “Ben” column for the donations he was able to personally get from fedi.”
    • Ben: “Can’t be vibes. We have to measure.”
      • Lack of referral tracking on Mastodon meant action driven by Mastodon couldn’t be measured. Bluesky had early advantage in proving it drove engagement/traffic. We need analytics, not just ideology. “Up to the right” matters to decision makers. Need to integrate into the social analytics tools that are already being used, not build new ones.
  • Evan: Do investigative journalists have different needs than other media?
    • Investigative journalists need leads, people to leak, signal where there might not usually be signal. But then when people do share, it must be private and often anonymous. Sources very often cannot be identifiable in any way. Effort made to have no tracking, fully encrypted, et al to ensure sources’ identities are never leaked. Negative consequences if ever violated. Encrypted channels and ability to find sources.
  • Johannes: Second generation of tools moving beyond geeks using protocols. Not technologists, but people in communities using the technology to build the tools.
    • Johanna in chat: Purpose not product!
    • Ben: Skills are not set in stone. Technologists can learn people-centered research skills. We can learn to put on new hats. Would love to see workshops in training and learning new skills.
      • Johanna: Evolve those skills! Think of the people who are not your stakeholders, but should be your stakeholders and get them involved.
  • Michelle Hughes in chat: I remember when Facebook was an extremely great tool for communities – You could create a group, make posts within the group, and have the group host events. I could always find, for example, local activist groups and places to volunteer. Discovery was easy. I think this is what the Fediverse needs in order to be useful for communities – groups and events.
    • Jesse in chat: +1 - I hear this as the #1 request in user interviews when I talk to people who want to leave facebook but can’t yet. They need a groups solution.
  • Dan: Having to make community server level decision on whether or not to flip setting traffic referral.
  • Jonathan: Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life book recommendation. https://nathanschneider.info/books/governable-spaces/
  • narF: On the topic of privacy, Signal (the app) is already good for group chats, privacy, trustworthy. Why not improve that instead? The Fediverse feels like the opposite: very open and public (admins can see private messages, blocks are public). Can we ever make it really private and still be approachable to non-tech folks?
    • Evan in chat: There’s a discussion here about different kinds of E2EE integration for the Fediverse. https://swicg.github.io/activitypub-e2ee/integration-models.html
    • Emelia: people generally don’t want to use a new platform; like every new thing that you try to introduce is friction — so instead people want things to just fit exactly their needs.
    • Ben: Replacing Signal probably isn’t the goal. There might be other situations where it would not be appropriate for and we need options for other use cases. Keep building both Signal and improving the protocols for a variety of tools to meet various use cases of different communities.
  • Signal is awesome! « Most of us
  • Anca: People conflate a community with use of a specific technology. If you build something with all the equivalent features, bringing existing social connections could be a feature you can’t build. Building the technology is not enough. Great privacy is not enough. Need to know what people need. Federation wasn’t a desired feature for one customer segment, but building it now (later) that a community is wanting it. Also disconnect between what investors want to invest in vs meeting the needs of people who can pay just a little bit.
    • Ben: Investors will come once you have traction - which you can build by co-creating with communities.
  • There is a great deal of noise and concern in planning/urbanism spaces about the “digital third space” and its benefits and problems. One of the problems is that humans inherently order their interactions in terms of territory and proximity. In digital spaces, we seem prone to misplacing that sense onto a platform which then becomes our safe and familiar space, we need to anchor our senses in the community of people, not in the 4 “walls” around us.
  • Mayel @ Bonfire: Products have used adversarial interoperability to get initial traction and then shut down the APIs once they get it.
  • Mayel @ Bonfire: Good to think how our own products can be authoritarian. Community servers have a hierarchy with server admins and moderators. Challenge this in their software by having everything be individually configurable overrides. Also power of the default and governance in defaults, but then give individuals the power to override for them. Some things like upload limits are a shared resource, so not overrideable. Referrer header could be granular.
  • Emelia: People building the platforms and people using the platform often don’t understand all settings and when something is done for legal reasons. No one working on a platform wants to go to prison for you. Yelling at them (the builders of platforms) is yelling at the wrong place. Talk to politicians putting the laws in place. Challenge the legality of these laws in court. Example of age verification. This is not something Bluesky wanted to do, but a requirement it was legally obligated to do. Users and people don’t want age verification, but it’s now something that the legal system requires. Mastodon not having age verification support places administrators who are in jurisdictions that require age verification in an incredibly difficult spot: do I want to run a server and potentially face fines or jail time, or do I not want to do that. Tricky to navigate.
  • Emelia: Some people often don’t want to sign up for a new service. Need for identity not tied to specific apps and platforms. “Putting people first means putting their identity first.”
    • A lot of people don’t have a single online identity.
    • Putting identity first doesn’t mean having a 1:1 mapping between real people and identities, anonymous or psuedononymous identity is just as important. But we do probably need to help people understand that if they are using one identity, then their actions can be linked across platforms.