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Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media

Sohyeon Hwang, Sophie Rollins, Thatiany Andrade Nunes, Yuhan Liu, Richmond Wong, Aaron Shaw, Andrés Monroy-Hernández

TL;DR

The paper argues for inter-community governance as a necessary layer in social computing, using the Fediverse to explore how multiple communities can coordinate governance without centralized control. It employs four design workshops with 24 organizers and developers, analyzed via thematic analysis to identify six governance-friction challenges and three guiding principles: modularity, forkability, and polycentricity. The authors propose an ecosystem of tools and infrastructures, including Governance Nutrition Facts, trust bubbles, and Issue Bulletins, to support cross-community coordination while preserving autonomy. They also discuss adoption barriers, labor considerations, and the risk of re-centralization, offering a roadmap for building scalable inter-community governance across diverse systems.

Abstract

Decentralizing the governance of social computing systems to communities promises to empower them to make independent decisions, with nuance and in accordance with their values. Yet, communities do not govern in isolation. Many problems communities face are common, or move across their boundaries. We therefore propose designing for "inter-community governance:" mechanisms that support relationships and interactions between communities to coordinate on governance issues. Drawing from workshops with 24 individuals on decentralized, community-run social media, we present six challenges in designing for inter-community governance surfaced through ideas proposed in workshops. Together, these ideas come together as an ecosystem of resources, infrastructures, and tools that highlight three key principles for designing for inter-community governance: modularity, forkability, and polycentricity. We end with a discussion of how the ideas proposed in workshops might be implemented in future work aiming to support community governance in social computing systems broadly.

Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media

TL;DR

The paper argues for inter-community governance as a necessary layer in social computing, using the Fediverse to explore how multiple communities can coordinate governance without centralized control. It employs four design workshops with 24 organizers and developers, analyzed via thematic analysis to identify six governance-friction challenges and three guiding principles: modularity, forkability, and polycentricity. The authors propose an ecosystem of tools and infrastructures, including Governance Nutrition Facts, trust bubbles, and Issue Bulletins, to support cross-community coordination while preserving autonomy. They also discuss adoption barriers, labor considerations, and the risk of re-centralization, offering a roadmap for building scalable inter-community governance across diverse systems.

Abstract

Decentralizing the governance of social computing systems to communities promises to empower them to make independent decisions, with nuance and in accordance with their values. Yet, communities do not govern in isolation. Many problems communities face are common, or move across their boundaries. We therefore propose designing for "inter-community governance:" mechanisms that support relationships and interactions between communities to coordinate on governance issues. Drawing from workshops with 24 individuals on decentralized, community-run social media, we present six challenges in designing for inter-community governance surfaced through ideas proposed in workshops. Together, these ideas come together as an ecosystem of resources, infrastructures, and tools that highlight three key principles for designing for inter-community governance: modularity, forkability, and polycentricity. We end with a discussion of how the ideas proposed in workshops might be implemented in future work aiming to support community governance in social computing systems broadly.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 33 sections, 3 figures, 3 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background
  3. Toward Community-Run Social Media
  4. Strategies and Tools for Community Governance
  5. Looking Within Communities
  6. Looking Between Communities
  7. How Might We Design for Inter-community Governance?
  8. Institutional Design
  9. Building Community Capacities
  10. Empirical Setting
  11. Methods
  12. Design Workshops and Follow-up Interviews
  13. Analytical Approach
  14. Findings
  15. Making Decisions About Community Governance Visible
  16. ...and 18 more sections

Figures (3)

  • Figure 1: A screenshot of the slide shown to participants to present the warm-up example of lobster fisherman, which the workshop facilitator talked through.
  • Figure 2: Guided flow of discussion during each workshop across two main break-out group sessions, followed by opt-in follow-up interview calls with individuals.
  • Figure 3: Visualization of the approaches imagined by participants as an ecosystem of shared resources, spaces, and automated tooling. A community (C) shows its "Governance Nutrition Facts" label, which can be generated through a user-friendly interface that modularizes dimensions of community governance. Communities can fork and customize these labels. Communities sit in polycentric "trust bubbles," or coalitions of communities, that are indicated by the colored clouds grouping communities. These trust bubbles help structure how communities share and receive information about governance from one another, shown in an "Issue Bulletin" for each trust bubble. The Issue Bulletin automatically processes governance activity logs into a database a community can review. It also enables communities to engage in discussion.