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Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi have published a report on Fediverse governance which is the kind of thing I would have read with relish when I was Product Manager of MoodleNet. And even before then when I was presenting on decentralisation and censorship in the midst of the ‘illegal’ Catalan independence referendum.

These days, while still interested in this kind of stuff, and in particular in [how misinformation might be countered in decentralised networks]9bonfirenetworks.org/posts/zap…) I’m not going to be reading 40,000 words on the subject (PDF). Instead point others to it, and in particular to six-page ‘quick start’ guide for those who might be new to the idea of federated governance.

I wouldn’t have guessed, going in, that we’d end up with the major structural categories we landed on—moderation, server leadership, and federated diplomacy—but after spending so much time eyeball-deep in interview transcripts, I think it’s a pretty reasonable structure for discussing the big picture of governance. (The real gold is of course in the excerpts and summaries from our participants, who continuously challenged and surprised us.)

There are no manifestos to be found here, except in that our participants often eloquently and sometimes passionately express their hopes for the fediverse. There are a lot of assumptions, most of which we’ve tried to be pretty scrupulous about calling out in the text, but anything this chunky contains plentiful grist for both principled disagreement and the other kind. Our aim is to describe and convey the knowledge inherent in fediverse server teams, so we’ve really stuck close to the kinds of problems, risks, needs, and challenges those folks expressed.

Source: Erin Kissane

Image: Google Deepmind