Mastodon Survey

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A quick note: I’m conducting a survey with a colleague of mine, Dr. Diana Zulli. We’re interested in learning from Mastodon developers, admins, and users about “freedom of expression.”

I will post the link to the survey in Mastodon, rather than here. If you use Mastodon, I hope you see it there.

I wanted to note one thing about the survey: we’re offering a small bit of compensation for people’s time (at least, the first 75 or so people — after that, the funding runs out.) Because of where we work, we are using Qualtrics for the survey, and the only real way to compensate people and protect people’s private information is by using Amazon gift cards. We realize you may not share the same values as Amazon. We talked about this problem at length and decided to go ahead with the incentives. If you have interest in doing the survey but no interes in Amazon, you can skip the final questions of the survey.

If you have questions about this survey, hit me up on Mastodon (@robertwgehl@scholar.social) or via the email address listed here.

Alternative Social Media: Canadian Edition

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Just a quick update: I am now set up in my office at the University of Calgary in Alberta. I’ve come here on a Fulbright Canada Fellowship, and one of my goals is to study Canadian alternative social media. On this first full day of basic research, I’m already seeing a great deal of activity, particularly in terms of Indigenous social networking.

In the coming weeks, I intend to add more examples to the SMAP archive, as well as look for opportunities to learn from the activists and coders who are developing ASM in Canada.

Ride the Mastodon Out of the Walled Garden

Uncategorized,

by Rusty

NB: This is a cross-post from the Rhizomatix blog, a blog that can be found as a Tor Hidden Service [onion link] as well as a Gopher page [Gopher link]. That’s right — an old school Gopher Page! The post was written by Rusty, and was promoted on scholar.social, an academic-oriented instance of Mastodon, a Twitter alternative. Rusty kindly let me repost it here on the S-MAP. It is part primer to Mastodon, part retrospective on one person’s engagement with that system, and part critique of Mastodon; great material for the S-MAP. Some of it has been edited for clarity.

[Also, let me promote the S-MAP’s extensive collection of Mastodon instance terms of service and sign up screens for study.]

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat. For many folks, these names are synonymous with the internet. For many teenagers and adults, not actively using these big tech platforms would create the eerie sensation that you don’t exist. And that’s a real problem. We invest so much of our identities in platforms that see us as data points to be studied & marketed. The crux here is the user’s lack of control. Popular social media platforms function as “walled gardens,” or restricted zones in which the company controls how the platform functions & all the data is archived on centralized servers.

I won’t rehash the sins of Facebook or Twitter here. That project has already been done by folks smarter than me. Good resources for how walled gardens perennially abuse their users include the Electronic Frontier Foundation, BoingBoing, & Motherboard.

Instead, I explore some newer alternatives to walled gardens. These alternatives center their missions around the issues of data, both who controls it & where it is stored. They also adhere to principles of open-source development, consentful interaction, & data protection. While many alternatives exist, here I want to focus on Mastodon.

Continue reading Ride the Mastodon Out of the Walled Garden →

Presentation at the University of Calgary: Dark Web, Alternative Social Media, and Memes

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Robert W. Gehl

I am heading home from a great visit to the Institute of Humanities at the University of Calgary, where I gave a keynote, titled, “A Deep Dive into the Marianas Web: Surveillance, Information, and Mythologies of the Dark Web.”

This talk is based on a paper I’m working on about the Marianas Web meme, a meme that began in 2011 or 2012 and has circulated the Internet in various forms.

Along the way, the talk draws on a common event I saw happening on Dark Web social media (alternative social media that exists on Tor, I2P, or Freenet), where new users ask, “Ok, I’ve made it to Tor. How do I go deeper? How do I go to the Dark Web?”

While the meme has been debunked (most eloquently by Violet Blue), in my talk I took it seriously, uncovering the anxieties that the meme reflects. I argue that the meme associates spatial metaphors of the Internet, digital immateriality, and post-truth politics into a potent mix.

The talk was part of a larger conversation happening at Calgary about social media. The Institute of the Humanities put together an essay contest for undergraduate students on “Social Media: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.” The winning entries (by Lorianne Reuser, Daniel Huss, Bryn Waidson, and Max Kurapov) as well as the work of my co-keynoter Safaneh Neyshabouri, prompted excellent discussions of the problems of (corporate) social media: its consumerism, its addictiveness, its valorization of the sensational over the sober. To be fair, the discussion also touched on everyday resistance and deep discussions that can happen on corporate social media.

But one thing that bothered me about the conversation was: it was all corporate social media. It was mostly Instagram, a bit of Facebook, and a lot of Twitter. There’s so much more!

So, once again, I banged my favorite drum: if we have issues with social media’s centralization, distortion of sociality, and surveillance, then c’mon, people now: switch to a non-corporate, ad-free, decentralized alternative! These days, I’m liking Mastodon.

So I was glad that some of the anxieties I argued were reflected in the fake Marianas meme were also explored by the students, and I was happy to plug the alternatives once again.

Facebook Algorithms and Alternative Social Media

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NB: This is an introductory statement for the Contemporary Social Media Platforms and Creative Practice 2018, an online discussion I’m participating in. Thanks to Judy Malloy, a Visiting Faculty Member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, for inviting me to join in!

There’s a saying people use to discuss online services: if it’s free, then you’re the product. As Karl Hodge notes in The Conversation, an exchange between Mark Zuckerberg and Utah Senator Orrin Hatch illuminates this saying quite well. Hatch asked, “How do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?” Zuckerberg replied, “Senator, we run ads.”

Like so many of his public statements, Zuckerberg’s response is accurate, if not particularly illuminating. Magazines run ads. Radio stations run ads. TV runs ads. Facebook runs ads, too, but it’s different: its ads are far more targeted, far more invasive. Its ads are based on our own expressions, desires, and ideas, all of which are sold back to us.

The relationship between advertising and our sociality – our connections to our friends, family, colleagues – is precisely what I became interested in during the writing of my first book, Reverse Engineering Social Media. As I suggest in that book, Facebook and other social media are almost direct outgrowths of the late 1990s online advertising industry, which created the concept of surveillance capitalism: monitor what people do online then sell them things based on their activities.

At the heart of this relationship between advertising and sociality is the sorting, funneling, channeling, and above all modulation of what we see in Facebook. I’m talking, of course, about Facebook’s algorithms. As The New York Times reports,

Facebook’s ad system provides ways to target geographic locations, personal interests, characteristics and behavior, including activity on other internet services and even in physical stores. Advertisers can target people based on their political affiliation; how likely they are to engage with political content; whether they like to jog, hike or hunt; what kind of beer they like; and so on.

If advertisers provide a list for email addresses, Facebook can try to target the people those addresses belong to. It can also do what is called “look-alike matching.” In this case, Facebook’s algorithms serve ads to people believed to be similar to the people those addresses belong to.

The goal of such targeted ads is to fit in with the non-advertising content in Facebook. That is, an ad should look like it belongs alongside your grandma’s latest pictures and your colleague’s note about the upcoming Christmas party.

It is not fair to say that Facebook’s algorithms are totally subservient to the needs of advertisers and marketers. More precisely, the two sides are engaged in constant negotiation. As Taina Bucher writes in a New Media and Society article,

There is now a whole industry being built around so-called ‘News Feed Optimization’ akin to the more established variant, search engine optimization. Marketers, media strategists, PR firms all have advice on how to boost a brand’s visibility on Facebook.

That is, while Facebook wants to serve advertisers by selling our attention to them, it also must maintain our perception that it is giving us access to our friends, family, and interests.

Given that Facebook is driven almost entirely by the needs of marketers, what is to be done? Much of my scholarship has explored this question. My answer is: support the alternatives. If you’re worried about Facebook’s desire to know everything about you, consider leaving Facebook for non-profit, open source systems, such as Mastodon, diaspora*, or Twister (check out the Omeka Archive on this site for more). These systems often do two things that differ greatly from Facebook: they don’t sell your data to marketers, and they don’t shape the content you see with algorithms. As part of this conversation, I am happy to talk more about the alternatives, as well as their relationship to Facebook and its internal algorithms.

#deletefacebook

Uncategorized, , ,

There’s furor over the latest revelation that the world’s largest corporate social media site, Facebook, sells personal data to those who want to manipulate its users. The story — this time — is about Cambridge Analytica, a psychographic analysis organization which claims to be able to drive voter behavior. Many people have weighed in, so I won’t say much here. But I want to pick up on a point made by Adrian Chen in The New Yorker:

Just because something isn’t new doesn’t mean that it’s not outrageous. It is unquestionably a bad thing that we carry out much of our online lives within a data-mining apparatus that sells influence to the highest bidder. My initial reaction to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, though, was jaded; the feeling came from having seen how often, in the past, major public outcries about online privacy led nowhere. In most cases, after the calls to delete Facebook die down and the sternly worded congressional letters stop being written, things pretty much go back to normal. Too often, privacy scandals boil down to a superficial fix to some specific breach or leak, without addressing how the entire system undermines the possibility of control. What exciting big-data technique will be revealed, six years from now, as a democracy-shattering mind-control tool?

His point about “the entire system” is precisely why I started the S-MAP several years back. Or more precisely, the “entire system” is why so many alternative social makers do what they do: make new social media systems that allow for the pleasures of connecting with others while staving off so many of the deleterious practices associated with corporate social media: surveillance, data mining, the sale (or leak) of personal information to third parties, and above all the manipulation of our sociality.

Surveillance capitalism — a system where every move we make through space and thought is tracked, analyzed, and sold — is the system we need to eradicate. There can be no other way. As Chen notes, the short-term answer to Cambridge Analytica/Facebook will be a “superficial fix,” but the real answer needs to be the wholesale dismantling of a system that sees you and me and everyone we love as objects to be cognitively and emotionally dissected.

For now, #deletefacebook will trend on Twitter (sadly, another corporate social media system), but it’s started to trend elsewhere: on Mastodon, the federated microblog. On Twister, the totally decentralized, peer-to-peer microblog. I haven’t looked, but perhaps it’s trending on Dark Web social networking sites.

It is only after we leave corporate social media behind and take on the work of socializing social media — making it our own, owning it, democratically administering it, democratically improving it — that we will even begin to address the system as such.

And then, or better at the same time, let’s move to the eradicate the fusion of money, media, and power that is our contemporary democratic form of governance.

CFP: After Social Media: Alternatives, New Beginnings, and Socialized Media

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Fenwick McKelvey, Sean Lawson and myself are going to put together a special issue of Social Media + Society on alternative social media. We’re aiming for early 2019. Here’s our Call for Proposals:

The editors seeks 500 word abstracts for proposed articles for a special
issue of Social Media + Society on “alternative social media.” The
editors welcome proposals from scholars, practitioners, and activists
from across disciplinary boundaries so long as the work is critical and
empirically rich.

Our call starts with a question: what comes after social media? It is
hard to imagine something other than the current configuration of social
media – of Facebook and Twitter – but signs of discontent abound. Social
media companies have become deputized to police and moderate whilst
being accused of poisoning civil discourse. Their integration of
advertising and targeting signals a new epoch of promotional culture,
but no one trusts the media anymore. As Brooke Duffy argues in (Not)
Getting Paid to Do What You Love, everyone can create, so long as they
don’t mind going broke doing so. In sum, today’s social media is
broken… but what’s next?

For the past several years, one answer to “what’s next?” has been
“alternative social media.” Alternative social media encompasses a wide
range of systems, from diaspora* to Ello to Tokumei. In contrast to what
Robert Gehl calls “corporate social media,” such as Facebook, Twitter,
Google+, and Pinterest, alternative social media (ASM) “allows for users
to share content and connect with one another but also denies the
commercialization of speech, allows users more access to shape the
underlying technical infrastructure, and radically experiments with
surveillance regimes.”

Thus, alternative social media may be understood in relation to larger
histories of alternative media, documented by scholars such as Megan
Boler, Nick Couldry, Chris Atton, and Clemencia Rodriguez, and carried
through into social media alternatives by collectives such as Unlike Us.

Earlier instances of ASM included diaspora*, built as a critical
response to the growing dominance of Facebook in the late 2000s, with a
goal of decentralizing social media data and allowing end users more
control over their personal information. Later, decentralized systems,
such as Twister and GNU social, came online as alternatives to Twitter.
The Pinterest alternative Ello gained a lot of attention, especially due
to its manifesto with the opening provocation: “Your social network is
owned by advertisers.” Alternatives to Facebook and Twitter have even
appeared on the Dark Web (see the S-MAP for examples).

As they have developed over the past several years, alternatives decried
the censorship and manipulation of content found in corporate social
media. Building on this, new alternatives dedicated to “free speech”
arose during and after the contentious elections in Western countries in
2016 and 2017, including the Twitter alternative Gab. Proclaiming its
defense of free speech – especially against the perceived liberal bias
of Silicon Valley-based corporate sites – Gab promises freedom for
everyone, including the “alt right” and white supremacists, to speak.

But other networks, such as the federated system Mastodon, have been
built to allow for powerful moderation of discourse, with Codes of
Conduct that often prohibit hate, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or
racist speech. Indeed, while they are wildly divergent in their
politics, both Gab and Mastodon have positioned themselves as antidotes
to corporate social media. These debates over speech in ASM echo the
longstanding tension identified by alternative media scholars, where
many alternative media developers seek to socialize media and bring it
in line with leftist politics, but see their discourses appropriated by
right-wing media organizations.

Regardless of whether they are right or left, alternative social media
face a simply reality: they just aren’t popular. Compared to the
billions of Twitter and Facebook users, alternative sites’ user bases
are tiny. Whether or not their goal ought to be massive scale, the
powerful network effects of corporate social media – as well as the
bewildering array of alternatives – certainly have stifled the growth of
the alternatives. Still, the alternatives deserve critical attention,
because they force us to rethink what we mean by “social media.” What
tethers so many people to so few corporate sites? And what actual
“alternatives” to corporate social media do the current slate of
alternative social media platforms propose?

Topics that may be explored in this special issue of Social Media +
Society might include:

  • ethnographic or participant observation engagements with alternative
    social media communities
  • software studies analysis of shifts in underlying ASM technologies
    * narratives from practitioners who have built, moderated, or
    extensively participated in ASM
  • comparative analysis of two or more ASM platforms
  • studies of ASM as political, technical or cultural discourses or desires
  • regulatory and policy discussion regarding controversies involving ASM
  • speculative proposals or fictions about new ASM that address existing
    problems
  • analysis of appropriation of ASM innovations by corporate social media
    systems

Timeline/Important Dates [subject to change]

  • DECEMBER 20 2017: 500 word abstracts and CVs/resumes may be sent to
    asm@robertwgehl.org
  • JANUARY 20 2018: Acceptance notifications sent to authors
  • MAY 15 2018: Full drafts due to asm@robertwgehl.org
  • JULY 15 2018: Comments sent to authors by editors
  • SEPTEMBER 15 2018: Final drafts submitted to Social Media + Society for
    peer review
  • FEBRUARY 2019: Special Issue Publication

Questions? Please email asm@robertwgehl.org.

Farewell, Galaxy2

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Tried logging onto Galaxy2, a Tor-based social networking site I’ve participated in since its inception in early 2015. It’s been down for a while, and like many Dark Web sites, it looks like it’s gone for good. We get a rare note about its closure, though, with a note from its founder, Lameth (see below).

Galaxy2 started after Galaxy, another Dark Web social networking site (one I’ve written about) shut down in late 2014. Lameth and a bunch of “Galaxy Castaways” met up on another DWSN, Visibility.i2p, and decided to start anew.

I feel very privileged to have seen these migrations and even participating in them. I’m very saddened by the end of this site. These days, social networking on an anonymizing network sounds bizarre, but of course connecting with other people via a pseudonym is as old as the Internet itself. Moreover, Lameth ran a very civil site. There were moments of discord, but overall, Galaxy2 (like Galaxy before it) belied the reputation of the Dark Web as solely comprised of criminals and pornographers.

I have documented much of Galaxy2 (as much as I could anyway) for my forthcoming book, Weaving the Dark Web, and I know other researchers have paid attention to the site. So it will not totally fade from the public record, at least.

And, perhaps someone will take Lameth’s lead and make a Galaxy3…

Lameth’s Message

—–BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE—–
Hash: SHA256

So, it finally happened. The server broke down and your terrible host here (me, not the current host, mind you!) hadn’t been keeping regular backups off the server… I’m trying to see what I can salvage, but to be honest with you guys, then I’m not very optimistic.

The admins and a few other users has for a long time now been privy to my plans about either handing over G2 for someone else to run, or shutting down G2 completely. Seems like the server got tired of waiting for me to get my shit together and took the decision for me.

Why? Well, a couple of reasons, really, but the major one being purely selfish. I knew I was doing a shit job hosting G2, and as it grew more and more popular, so did my guilt and stress about not being a proper host and a proper admin. I couldn’t dedicate the time for running and managing G2 that I felt it deserved. So at some point I came to a conclusion; I think the mature decision was to give it up and hand it over to someone more capable, for the sake of the community. Turns out I also have a terrible habit of never actually doing the stuff I intend to do, so even the process of handing over the reigns to another host never really got further than me putting out a few feelers and questions to a few people.

So now we’re here. G2 seems to be done, although I try and find time to see if I can manage to salvage something that might make the admins and the new host capable of continuing G2.

I’d like to encourage people to migrate out to other Tor Hidden social Services, regardless of whether G2 can be recovered or not. I hope other social sites will pop up (Galaxy3, anyone?), but I believe there are still some of the “older” chat services around. They might be a good place to reconnect with other G2 users.

Even if G2 is recovered and continues, then this is the end of the road for me. I have little time to spare for this or any online community due to family and work stuff. It’s a bittersweet farewell for me. One one hand, it lifts a burden from my shoulders that I don’t care to carry around any longer; on the other hand I really did enjoy being a part of this community, of being part of the beginning and an integral part of its long existence. Three years (almost) feels like a lifetime for a Tor Hidden Service.

I might be reachable on the following mails, but please forgive my response times…:
Lameth@torbox3uiot6wchz.onion
Lameth@protonmail.com

Please use PGP to encrypt messages to me. The key below will expire soonish, but ask me for a new key once this one no longer works.

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New Collections and Possible Directions

Uncategorized

By Diana G. Zulli

We are happy to announce that over the last two months, the S-MAP has doubled in size. We have added mobile versions to the Imzy, Ello, and Voat collections. More notable is the addition of a new collection Mastodon instances. Here’s what we’ve been up to:

  • More of Imzy, including mobile: Founded out of Salt Lake City, Utah, Imzy is marketed as a “friendlier” alternative to Reddit and is designed to support positive interactions among niche communities. Unfortunately, Imzy recently shut down, so we are fortunate to have captured the mobile versions of this site while still available.
  • Mobile shots of Ello: Ello functions as an alternative to Pinterest and provides a space for users to showcase art, fashion, and photography. Ello interactions extend to hiring opportunities, shopping, and creative collaborations, all of which are available through the app.
  • Mobile shots of Voat: Voatify, the corresponding app for the social networking site Voat, is also similar to Reddit. Voatify houses a collection of themed categories, termed “subverses,” and is popular for its no censorship policy.
  • Mastodon collection, including instance rules: Mastodon is a federated, open-source social networking site that values small communities and bottom-up site moderation. Mastodon’s user experience is similar to Twitter, where users can post short messages and interact with each other. Unlike Twitter, Mastodon users join volunteer-led “instances” or communities. Each Mastodon instance reflects a distinct community with rules and privacy policies unique to that instance. The S-MAP now houses both the desktop and mobile versions of several Mastodon instances, as well as dozens of collected rules pages.

In total, the S-MAP had added nearly 300 items to the above collections. Specific items include site/app descriptions, user reviews, sign-up processes, privacy and user policies, and site interfaces.

Since the items on the S-MAP include a wide range of topics, we are confident the S-MAP will be useful for a variety of teaching, research, and methodological objectives. Potential directions include:

  • Teaching:
    • The ethical considerations of information sharing/data gathering online
    • Alternative social media sites as a business
    • Privacy and censorship in alternative media
  • Research:
    • The nature of online communities
    • How the interfaces of alternative social media sites construct user behavior compared to more mainstream social media sites (e.g., posting behavior, viewing behavior, construction of appropriate topics, community formation).
    • The ideological construction of site values/priorities. That is, how site descriptions, instructions, and policies promote different beliefs or values.
    • How the notion of “alternative” is inscribed into each site’s interface and design
  • Methodological Perspectives:
    • Platform Studies (e.g., exploring interfaces, social media architecture, and how these systems can be modified)
    • Textual of Content Analyses (e.g., analyzing/comparing the material realities of each site)
    • Visual Analyses (e.g., analyzing compositional elements of site images to see how they work in relation to a broader system of meaning)

We are excited by the growth of the S-MAP and hope to include more content in the near future. Contact us if you draw on our collections!