The social structure of the fediverse and how it all interrelates.
## Writing
- [[BLOG - 2023-01-01 - Developing for the fediverse - some personal guidelines ]]
## Topics
- Curation and discoverability
- For example, many people make lists of people to follow (I'm sure that existed on twitter too)
- [DH people on Mastodon - Google Sheets](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15Ak4VHCnr_4Stkzkz-_RhOgX-jCJMt0oq0GN9XXDaKo/edit#gid=229844055)
- Local search
- Curation accounts and bots
- Boosting and replies
- Local and federated timelines
- How hashtags disseminate
## Participants
### Users
- technologically savvy users
- early adopters
- marginalized users (many different communities here!)
- high profile users
- consumers vs producers
- newcomers
- oldtimers
- Professional users
- journalists
- scientists / researchers
- social media researchers
- pundits
- public thinkers / pundits
- artists / famous artists
### Active shapers of the fediverse
- Instance owners
- Moderators
- Communities of users
- Communities of instances
- Developers
- Client developers
- Mastodon developers
- Activitypub tooling developers
- Protocol design committees
### Other fediverse participants
- institutions
- towns
- government
- government individuals
- museums
- open source projects
- websites in general / project sites
## Responsibilities
Everybody participating in the fediverse has different commitments and responsibilities that are worthy of examination.
### Instance owners
- responsibility of instance admin to not inflict technological change on its users
- this involves defederation
- feature set of the instance they are running (fork, no fork, configuration option)
- through policies, determine
- bots
- corporate accounts
- tools available to moderation
- communication around policies
- technological savvy (scaling, backup, long-term plans)
- also, education, training, path of growth for community members to get involved in
- tech
- moderation
- content curation
### Users
- support their instances
- follow their instances guidelines
- understand the context of them being part of an instance
- build the community (since there is not necessarily an algorithm)
- social practices of both the instance and of the wider network
- support around harassment and community building and supporting marginalized users or newcomers
### Developers
- responsibilities towards users
- writing about user centric design
- listen to users
- don't presume to know what they will do or not do
- users have agency, if you build for a global audience, you can't presume to speak for alll of humanity
- deploy empathy
- responsibilities towards instance admins
- make things configurable in the codebase
- don't roll out new features and entangle them with more security oriented features
- don't push social change willy nilly
- beta release?
- "secret" rollouts with affiliated instances?
- Privacy and security always needs to be considered
- ownership of data and how to enforce and make data governance public
Examples of discussions that arise when building things without being cognisant of what consent means:
- [TechHub](https://techhub.social/@cloy/109598814392511612) (archive: [Evernote](https://www.evernote.com/u/0/client/web#?n=b46903e9-704e-45dc-9b10-871a19fc4fc0&b=e65c97ec-bc93-4fb8-904d-2b1d501a9246&legacy=p))