How the Fediverse Found Parts for Its Platforms

The third installment of our article series on digital autonomy is about federated social media. Author Jeffrey A. McGuire talks to Christine Lemmer-Webber, co-author of ActivityPub and Executive Director of the Spritely Institute, and Ivan Minutillo & Mayel de Borniol of the community platform Bonfire. Read How the Fediverse Found Parts for Its Platforms on the Linux Magazine website, download the PDF, or start with the excerpt below.

Together with Linux Magazine NLnet is publishing a five-part article series on how public funding of free and open source technologies contributes to digital autonomy. Each article, written by Jeffrey A. McGuire, focuses on a specific ecosystem supported by the NGI Zero programs that is of strategic importance to increase digital autonomy. Previous articles covered Open Electronic Design Automation: Changing the Chip Industry, and open source software supply chain management: The Answer Was Already on the Shelf.

The researchers came for a feed and stayed for the journals

When Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, researchers realized their professional lives were housed on a platform they no longer trusted. They turned to Bonfire, an open source toolkit used to assemble online social spaces for communities. One of its two core contributors, Ivan Minutillo, saw the science community move from Twitter presence to Twitter activism: working to replace the platform and preserve their work.

The discussion soon shifted toward an open, federated replacement for platforms like ResearchGate and Academia.edu. Then, to academic publishing: A standard journal charges a submission fee, charges readers to get past the paywall, and pays authors nothing. “It is so exploitative,” says Minutillo. What began as a search for social networking software became a different question: What if there were federated open journals, where researchers organize and publish as peers?

The Open Science Network, a scholarly edition of Bonfire, comprises communities tackling that question. It is governed by researchers, and a living lab at the University of Warwick brings them to the design table with librarians and software engineers. Any university, society, lab, or collective can run its own server and stay connected to the others. Sciety, an open evaluation service, is one result: Each article page houses direct conversations about preprints and peer reviews, which become citable objects, so the conversation about a paper’s production becomes part of the scholarly record.

Commercial research networks exist; what none of them offered was governance by the researchers themselves. The software underneath the alternative was, in part, paid for by the public: more than 70 projects working with ActivityPub have been funded through NGI Zero programs, themselves made possible with financial support of the European Commission and an allocation of public funds. ActivityPub is the protocol that connects the Fediverse – the federated social media and networks built upon it. And network autonomy in this context means having material to build with, and enough of it that a community can shape its own space.

Continue reading the article on the Linux Magazine website