This Project: Research for the Fediverse

To make the Fediverse thrive, a great community of people work everyday on platforms, protocols, and communities. These people work to make the Fediverse more useful and more fun, more accessible and better-known.

Question: what does the Fediverse need? Link to heading

The Basel Punkt Social project aims to support efforts of those architects of the Fediverse by studying the question: Which efforts are most needed to make the Fediverse more useful and more fun, more accessible and better-known? The project aims to answer these questions by involving the people for whom the Fediverse is intended: everyone.

Finding answers by asking the people Link to heading

Concretely, this project aims to answer these questions by surveying active Fediversians, disappointed users, and potential future Fediversians. We ask those people for whom the Fediverse is meant what they like about the Fediverse, what is missing, and we study which narratives convince people to join.

Research output Link to heading

The answers to these research questions matter in the first place to the “architects” of the Fediverse: Those who develop the platforms and the open protocol. In addition, the results will offer useful insights for the Fediverse organizers and advocates: Those who set up local servers, organize events, and lobby politicians to leave Big Tech social media. Results are made available in an open knowledge base, open for everyone to read and contribute to themselves.

Research Projects Link to heading

This project currently envisions four research subprojects.

What do active Fediversians enjoy and value? Link to heading

The first subproject aims to understand what active Fediversions like and dislike, and to learn from their experience in enthusing others. This first exploratory survey is aimed at a cross-section of users across platform types and servers.

What makes people to leave their account inactive? Link to heading

The second subproject focuses on disappointed users of the Fediverse. We survey people who have an account on a Fediverse platform, but stopped using it. This sizable group of people bares a serious potential for growth of the Fediverse as they are intrinsically open for alternative social media. We want to know what would have kept them, or make them return.

Liberating target communities Link to heading

A third subproject aims to study “target communities”. These target communities are people who are new to the Fediverse, and form the target audience of evolving platforms in the Fediverse. As an example, the Bonfire platform software hopes to reach local communities, e.g., villages or sport clubs, who currently use Facebook groups to e.g., organize events in their village. We aim to learn what functionality we need to offer these communities to involve them in the Fediverse.

Liberating Basel Link to heading

A fourth subproject involves setting up a local digital clubhouse, an instance, in Basel, aiming to offer anyone in Basel an entrance into the Fediverse. This clubhouse, basel punk social, exploits the locality that is unique for the Fediverse as a virtue, so that people quickly encounter other people they know. The pioneers joining basel.social will get a voice in an iterative process of making this an ever more fun and inclusive place.