This Project: Research for the Fediverse

To make the Fediverse thrive, a great community of people work every day 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 these 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 and interviewing 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 could convince different groups of 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, both on this website and mirrored on the open science framework.

Research Projects Link to heading

This project currently envisions three research sub-projects.

What do fediversians enjoy, value, and dislike? Link to heading

The first sub-project aims to understand what people like and dislike in teh Fediverse, and to learn from their experience in enthusing others. Importantly, this subproject aims to include disappointed users of the fediverse: 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. This exploratory study aims at a cross-section of users across platform types and servers, covering not only mastodon, but also other Fediverse platforms.

More information about this sub-project

Liberating target communities Link to heading

A second sub-project 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, and which narratives convince different groups of people to leave Big Tech social media for the Fediverse.

More information about this sub-project

Liberating Basel Link to heading

A third sub-project involves setting up a local digital clubhouse, an instance, in Basel, aiming to offer an entrance into the Fediverse for everyone feeling punk in Basel. This clubhouse, basel punk social¹, exploits the locality that is unique for the Fediverse as a virtue, so that people quickly encounter other people they know. Indeed, similar local communities have shown successful, including toot.wales and tyrol.social.

What is special, is that pioneers joining Basel Punk Social will get a voice in an iterative process of making this an ever more fun and inclusive place. We will ask the members on a regular basis what they like, dislike, and which new features they would fancy. We will implement such features and evaluate what works, and what doesn’t.

This sub-project will generate a lot of knowledge about needs and desires of online communities, while at the same time empowering members, allowing them to shape their own online social space.

More information about this sub-project