Logo
ScienceStack
Table of Contents
Fetching ...
Sign In

Trust and Friction: Negotiating How Information Flows Through Decentralized Social Media

Sohyeon Hwang, Priyanka Nanayakkara, Yan Shvartzshnaider

TL;DR

This paper investigates how decentralized, community-governed social media (the Fediverse) shapes user privacy through the lens of contextual integrity. By conducting 23 semi-structured interviews with admins and members, it examines how community rules, leadership, and both informal and formal education influence information flows and privacy expectations. The findings reveal that trusted admins and concrete rules help align information flows with community values, while governance frictions arise from value, security, and software incompatibilities that create new privacy risks. The work highlights design opportunities to mitigate frictions and argues for more participatory decision-making to realize the privacy benefits of decentralization.

Abstract

Decentralized social media protocols enable users in independent, user-hosted servers (i.e., instances) to interact with each other while they self-govern. This community-based model of social media governance opens up new opportunities for tailored decision-making about information flows -- i.e., what user data is shared to whom and when -- and in turn, for protecting user privacy. To better understand how community governance shapes privacy expectations on decentralized social media, we conducted a semi-structured interview with 23 users of the Fediverse, a decentralized social media network. Our findings illustrate important factors that shape a community's understandings of information flows, such as rules and proactive efforts from admins who are perceived as trustworthy. We also highlight ''governance frictions'' between communities that raise new privacy risks due to incompatibilities in values, security practices, and software. Our findings highlight the unique challenges of decentralized social media, suggest design opportunities to address frictions, and outline the role of participatory decision-making to realize the full potential of decentralization.

Trust and Friction: Negotiating How Information Flows Through Decentralized Social Media

TL;DR

This paper investigates how decentralized, community-governed social media (the Fediverse) shapes user privacy through the lens of contextual integrity. By conducting 23 semi-structured interviews with admins and members, it examines how community rules, leadership, and both informal and formal education influence information flows and privacy expectations. The findings reveal that trusted admins and concrete rules help align information flows with community values, while governance frictions arise from value, security, and software incompatibilities that create new privacy risks. The work highlights design opportunities to mitigate frictions and argues for more participatory decision-making to realize the privacy benefits of decentralization.

Abstract

Decentralized social media protocols enable users in independent, user-hosted servers (i.e., instances) to interact with each other while they self-govern. This community-based model of social media governance opens up new opportunities for tailored decision-making about information flows -- i.e., what user data is shared to whom and when -- and in turn, for protecting user privacy. To better understand how community governance shapes privacy expectations on decentralized social media, we conducted a semi-structured interview with 23 users of the Fediverse, a decentralized social media network. Our findings illustrate important factors that shape a community's understandings of information flows, such as rules and proactive efforts from admins who are perceived as trustworthy. We also highlight ''governance frictions'' between communities that raise new privacy risks due to incompatibilities in values, security practices, and software. Our findings highlight the unique challenges of decentralized social media, suggest design opportunities to address frictions, and outline the role of participatory decision-making to realize the full potential of decentralization.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 31 sections, 2 figures, 1 table.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background
  3. Privacy, agency, and safety through the lens of contextual integrity
  4. Decentralizing social media governance to communities
  5. Shaping privacy expectations in social media communities
  6. Empirical setting: the Fediverse
  7. Study design
  8. Interview protocol
  9. Interview pool
  10. Interview coding and qualitative analysis
  11. Establishing information flows within a community
  12. Rules shape value-laden expectations around information flows
  13. Informal and formal strategies for revising community members’ technical understandings of information flows
  14. Informal strategies
  15. Formal strategies
  16. ...and 16 more sections

Figures (2)

  • Figure 1: Users must rely on top-down decisions in centralized social media settings (e.g., Twitter). In comparison, decentralized alternatives (e.g., the Fediverse) allow users to form self-governed communities, where members can make decisions about how information flows across the system at the community level.
  • Figure 2: Example of a sample of our inductive codes (left-most) being clustered into broader themes.