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On FediForum (and not just FediForum)

There really are a lot of opportunities here!

Jon

• 35 min read
FediForum: Moving the Open Social Web Forward????

See the update log at the end. Thanks to everybody for the feedback on previous drafts! If you've got feedback on this version, here's the threads on Mastodon, Bluesky, and Lemmy.

"For a community like the Fediverse to succeed, it needs to be welcoming. It cannot have as a leader someone who poses a danger to a vulnerable constituency."

– Michelle Hughes, March 28
"FediForum ... wound up getting cancelled at the last minute due to several examples of what I had described in If not now, when? as "huge cultural issues as well, including anti-Blackness, misogynoir, anti-trans biases." "

– More notes on Organizing, Mutual Aid, and Activism on decentralized social networks, April 3 (notes from a session we had originally planned for FediForum)
See the terminology notes at the end of the article for definitions of anti-Blackness, misogynoir, and various kinds of anti-trans biases including transmisogyny, anti-transmasculinity, and transmisognyoir

Given the circumstances, cutting ties with the now-ex organizer whose anti-trans tweets had kicked off a firestorm, cancelling the conference, and holding a roundtable/listening session were all good decisions by FediForum™. 0 At the roundtable, facilitated by Anuj Ahooja of A New Social, there was a collective desire to do better and a lot of good suggestions. The draft summary notes from the listening session also have perspectives at the end from the remaining organizer, including next steps and a goal of "a better FediForum, and effective contribution to a better Open Social Web." 2

There's clearly an opportunity for this to be a collective learning experience, catalyst for change, and perhaps an inflection point – for FediForum, for other events, and more broadly in the ecosystems of decentralized social networks people known as the fediverses. That's good!

That said, there there a lot of challenges still to navigate. So this article discusses ways FediForum and others can make progress and take advantage of these opportunities.

The overall framework I'll use here is the "Four A's" (acknowledgment, apology, amends, action), which I first saw in Teh Portly Dyke's 2007 post How to Fuck Up. As well as applying the Four As to three specific items mentioned under "Issues of representation and inclusion" in the FediForum draft summary notes, I'll also discuss challenges – and potential learning – in the broader ecosystems.

First, though, I'll talk about about the some of the impact of the last-minute cancellation. Cancelling really was the right thing to do; as word got out that Timnit Gebru, Rudy Fraser and others were pulling out even after the conference had cut ties with the organizer who had made anti-trans tweets, there was no way the regularly-schedule conference would go well. Still, cancelling the night before the conference was supposed to start meant that a lot of discussions didn't happen and that the time and energy people had put into preparing didn't pay off – and added a lot of stress.

FediForum is currently considering their next steps; see Now what? and the appendix discussing FediForum's response for more details. Whatever happens to FediForum itself, though, it's clear there's room for multiple events – potentially including some that are more aligned with the Fediverse's grassroots ethos and ongoing critique of openneess to complement the FediForum's more-corporate "Open Social Web" vibe.

If that winds up happening in a more decentralized way, less centered on FediForum, that'll be a great outcome.

There really are a lot of opportunities here!

Note: it's very challenging to write about intersecting oppressions without stepping into any minefields. So thanks once again to everybody for feedback so far – and apologies in advance for any unfortunate wording that's still here or mistakes I'm still making. Feedback welcome!

A last-minute cancellation has a big impact

FediForum, despite its challenges, has always been a great opportunity for people looking to find out more about stuff they might want to get involved in – and for people, companies, and non-profits to get feedback on ideas, visibility, new collaborators, and sometimes even funding for their projects and products.3 So a lot of people had planned their schedules around FediForum – including me; in If not now, when?, I even talked about a key role FediForum played in my overall plans for a project.

Many of us had also invested a lot of time and energy in prepping. While some FediForum sessions are spontaneous, others reflect a lot of pre-conference thinking and organization – including reaching out to people who wouldn't otherwise attend and inviting them. It's not that the time and energy we put in was wasted, but the FediForum cancellation certainly meant it didn't lead to the short-term results we were hopingn for.

Once things started to blow up, we had to invest a lot more time and energy: figuring out what was going, deciding what to do, exploring last-minute alternatives, and revisiting and updating as the situation evolved. We also had to tip people we had encouraged to attend off about the situation and explain the tradeoffs about whether or not to participate. And on a weekend too!

Fortunately, the people I was working with were willing to go with the flow. The Organizing, Mutual Aid, and Activism session still wound up happening (just not in a FediForum context), and it worked out great. Whew, and yay! Still, there were people at FediForum who might well have been interested in being at this session (Michelle Hughes, for example, had expressed interest in ActivityPub events (like Mobilizon), end-to-end encryption, and better support for groups, all of which were topics we discussed); without any agenda-session where they could find out about it, they lost out. And the conversation certainly would have benefited from these additional perspectives, so we lost out too.

Worse, there were a lot of interesting and timely topics that didn't get discussed as a result of the cancellation. Three sessions in particular I was looking forward to:

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Others were interested in consent; governance; sustainability; threaded discussions; bringing public institutions, civil society organizations media, and communities to the Fediverse; fediversity.eu; and much much more.

The good news is that all these discussions still can, and probably will, happen. And who knows ... the organizing, mutual aid, activism session was better in some ways than it would have been at FediForum, so maybe that'll be true for some of these discussions as well.

Still, there was a lot of disappointment and frustration at the cancellation, and I can certainly see why.

Like I said, though, cancelling really was the right thing to do. FediForum's decision to refund registration fees was also a very good decision. That said, those are just the first steps.

Acknowledgment, apology, amends, action

"You will get better at this, but at first you will fuck up a lot, and you will always fuck up a little."

– Ijeoma Oluo, Welcome To The Anti-Racism Movement — Here’s What You’ve Missed

It's true – and not just with anti-racism, with any kind of anti-oppressive work online. Pretty much all of the examples in the "Common mistakes to avoid" section of 5 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people are things I've done myself, in the Fediverse and other situations. I've also made (and continue to make) similar mistakes related to ableism, misogynoir, transmisogyny, anti-transmasculinity, sexism, and other dimensions.

While I have indeed gotten (somewhat) better over time, I keep finding new ways to fuck up. It's very hard to prevent society's discrimination and bias from showing up in everything you do even when you try. And it's very easy to say or do something unfortunate. So when I fuck up (as I inevitably do), I keep Teh Portly Dyke's advice in mind.

"When you "Fuck Up" (whether the fuck-up is minor or major) practice the "Four A's"

1. Acknowledgment
2. Apology
3. Amends
4. Action"

– Teh Portly Dyke, How to Fuck Up (2007)

FediForum Has Been Canceled chronicles an example of how not to do it. FediForum's now-ex-organizer responded to the criticism of the anti-trans tweets by posting "I fully support the right of trans people to exist, thrive and live their lives to the fullest with equal rights and dignity." 1 So far, so good ... but without acknowledging, disavowing, and apologizing for past anti-trans comments, it rang hollow.

And acknowledgement and apology typically aren't enough. As Teh Portly Dyke says

"the only concrete evidence that you genuinely realize you've fucked up and genuinely apologize for it is that you will change what you do in the future."

The response to a incident in a Fediverse Developer Network chat room in June 2023 is another example of how not to do it. After a bigot described trans and queer people as "deviants" (and then went on to add "cis is a slur"), the moderator refused to take any stronger action beyond pleading with everybody to stay on topic. I left the room, and so did another LGBTQIA2S+ person. The moderator apologized to us ... but that's all he did. So it didn't resolve the situation: as long as language like that is tolerated, it's not the kind of space I want to be in. As Teh Portly Dyke says "For me, if I don't take this step (action), the other three are just so much manipulation." 4

FediForum's responses so far – the posts from the remaining organizer, the official announcement, the remaining organizer's verbal comments at the roundtable, and the draft summary notes – have examples of all four As. Then again, there's still a lot of room for improvement; see the appendix on FediForum's response for a more in-depth discussion.

That's not surprising. Understanding and recovering from a multi-dimensional fuck-up like FediForum's is a process and extremely complex – this post for example goes on for thousands of words on just three of the dozens of bullet items in their draft notes. And FediForum's initial responses are a lot better the initial response from another conference the same now-ex-organizer is involved with.5

So FediForum's initial responses, while imperfect, are good first steps to try to build on as the conference – and ecoystem – tries to move forward.

In aid of that, I'm going to dig more deeply into a few of the items briefly mentioned in FediForum's draft summary notes.

"The Fediverse was built by many trans and nonbinary people"

"[D]espite all the major contributions they’ve made, queer, trans, and non-binary people of all colors have also been marginalized in Mastodon and the broader Fediverse. The stories of their contributions are rarely told and when they are it’s rarely from a queer perspective, leading to the erasure I talked about above. And Mastodon and the Fediverse have gotten big enough that there’s more and more money and other opportunities floating around. how much is going to queer, trans, and non-binary people? This is something that really needs to change going forward."

– me, in A (partial) queer, trans, and non-binary history of Mastodon and the fediverse (We Distribute, June 2023), a deep dive into what hoodie aida kitten so accurately describes in 2018 as a complicated relationship with queer activism

It's great to see this trans and non-binary people's contribution to the Fediverse acknowledged in the draft summary notes. Rapid queer-led community innovation in 2017 was a major factor in Mastodon's success, and much of the functionality we rely on today was originally implemented by people who are not cis. And as ActivityPub spec co-author Christine Lemmer-Webber has noted, four of the five ActivityPub co-authors were queer.

Still, it would have been even better if FediForum's notes had also included the point made near the end of the roundtable (and for the last eight years) that as the Fediverse has grown, the overwhelming majority of the funding, jobs, press visibility, and book deals have gone to cis people and cis-led organizations – or highlighted that even though much the Fediverse is a very trans-positive environment, trans and queer people have also faced a lot of hate and harassment over the years.6

And it's also worth highlighting that communities are not monolothic. The limited benefits to trans and non-binary people have been gone mostly to white trans and non-binary people. Black and Indigenous trans and non-binary people, and more generally trans and non-binary people of color, are multiply-marginalized.

To be clear, these are ecoysystem-wide problems – and problems for tech more generally. While FediForum has a chance to be a leader in helping to address them, they're far from the only ones who need to make progress. So this is a great example of where there are also straightforward opportunities for broader learning and change.

For example:

  • How many trans and non-binary people spoke at the recent Fediverse House event at SXSW – or the developer meetup Social Web Foundation hosted there? 7
  • Were trans and non-binary perspectives even discussed, and if so were they accurately represented? 8
  • What about the RightsCon panel on building a new social web that featured people from Threads, Mastodon, the Social Web Foundation, and a representative of an organization that had recently platformed an anti-trans US politician and hate monger? 8.5
  • How many of the Social Web Foundation's founders, advisors, and partners are trans or nonbinary? 9 How are they getting input about what to prioritize, and how much of their work prioritizes the needs of trans and non-binary people?

So hopefully FediForum's fuckup will be a catalyst for other event organizers, non-profits, standard bodies, and funders to acknowledge these problems, apologize, make amends, and take action to improve the situation going forward.

"Underrepresentation of marginalized communities"

"In my essay I write that the queer community deserves justice; namely, that they “be recognized for their efforts, allowed to enjoy the fruits of their labor, and given the opportunity to continue to play a meaningful role in its development.” But what of the other communities, who, granted, didn’t contribute as much to the Mastodon project, but, again, only because they weren’t allowed to? Do they not also deserve justice?"

– Allie Hart, Mourning What Now?, April 2017
"In The Whiteness of Mastodon Dr. Flowers focuses on Mastodon’s long history of whiteness and racism, also present in much of the broader fediverse. This marginalization impacts Black, Indigenous, and other queer, trans, and non-binary people or color as well; and many queer, trans, and non-binary people fall into other categories — disabled people, sex workers, people from the Global South — that are also largely excluded from Mastodon’s and the Fediverse's power structures."

– me, in A (partial) queer, trans, and non-binary history of Mastodon and the fediverse

This is another way in which FediForum mirrors the Fediverse's broader problems. How many Black or Indigenous people spoke at Fediverse House or the RightsCon panel – and were these perspectives even discussed? How many of the Social Web Foundation's founders, advisors, and partners are Black or Indigenous, disabled, sex workers, or people from the Global South?

Specifically with FediForum, people have long called attention to the problems with diversity, equity, and inclusion for years. At the September 2023 FediForum session on How can white people and guys improve the race and gender situation in the Fediverse?, for example, somebody asked why there were so few Black people in attending FediForum. The list of reasons included

  • timing - during the week is hard for people who are working.
  • issues of tone that come across, feels like a white event, the organizers have contributed to it by their feedback to suggestions
  • format might not be appealing
  • very technical so pushes out the social
  • price, even $2 is a lot for some people – might be free tickets for those who request, but requesting that’s a barrier"

Needless to say these issues don't only affect Black people – and these aren't the only issues leading to underrepresentation. For example

  • At the roundtable, one of the very few younger FediForum attendees noted that the conference could do a lot more to attract people in his generation.10
  • A response by a non-Black person of color s to FediForum's 2023 post asking for suggestions about how to make progress on this mentions "subtle racist remarks and ignorant remarks about our culture."
  • The participation map on FediForum's site highlights the almost complete absence of anybody from Asia, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand. While it's almost certainly not the only factor (Africa and South America are also underrepresented), only having conference sessions in the middle of the night in those geographies probably has a lot to do with it!

The bullets in the draft summary notes do indeed acknowledge many of these, at least briefly. That's good! Then again, this isn't the first time the organizers have acknowledged these problems – that 2023 post, for example, or an earlier now-deleted one when an organizer reached out to me for suggestions. At least so far, though, there hasn't been an apology, amends, or action. Asking for feedback but then ignoring suggestions comes across as the kind of manipulation Teh Portly Dyke mentions. 11

The frustrating thing is that there as there are a lot of straightforward actions to start making progress on representation.12 Oh well, better late than never. While it's really too bad that FediForum didn't start on this two years ago, as the old saying goes: the second-best time to start is now.

Still, waiting so long to address this problem has made another one of the "four As" more challenging. Attendees at past FediForums have benefited in a lot of ways, including feedback on ideas and projects, opportunities for connections and networking – and some attendees have benefited even more.3 By contrast, people from communities that have been excluded from the conference lost out on these opportunities.

How to make amends? It's not obvious, but this is something that the plans going forward will need to address.

"Anti-Black incidents and lack of follow-up"

It's hard to know just what incidents this is referring to; one way to improve the draft summary is to make this acknowledgement more specific and include the appropriate apologies. Still, the remaining organizer briefly mentioned one of these incidents at the start of the roundtable, so let's look at that in more detail.

That incident, in August 2024, started with a pattern that's very common in the Fediverse (and tech more broadly, and really any system where white people want to minimize the extent of racism). Here's how social.coop's Statement from moderation team involving recent racism reports describes it:

"Racism is an ongoing problem in the Fediverse. Recently this has manifested as white people starting threads effusively regarding the experience of being on the Fediverse as exclusively positive, without acknowledging the impact of systemic issues like racism on others. When the very different experience of Black community members is raised, as both a contrast and additional data, it is often dismissed or put in question."

The specific way the pattern came up in the this was when the remaining organizer posted something along the lines of "we all know the Fediverse is better, what data do we have to support that?"

Wait a second.

If you look at Dr. Johnathan Flowers' The Whiteness of Mastodon and Twitter vs. Mastodon podcast, Marcia X and Ra’il I'Nasah Kiam's Blackness in the Fediverse, the links in Dogpiling, weaponized content warning discourse, and a fig leaf for mundane white supremacy, or the others I quote in 5 things white people can do it's clear that no, many Black people have repeatedly said that they don't think the Fediverse is better. Ignoring that is erasing Black opinions – and equating "better" with "better for people who aren't Black."

At this point, the remaining organizer could have said something like "oops, bad phrasing," acknowledged that without addressing the anti-Blackness the Fediverse wasn't actually "better" for everybody, apologized, and take action by editing the post and change his behavior going forward. But no. Instead, he doubled down, made some of other common mistakes, and it spiraled downhill from there. At some point, it wound up getting reported to the social.coop moderators. As the social.coop statement says:

"One of our mods responded to the thread to say that this was problematic, that the CWG ops team had gotten a report about it and that we’d be discussing it at our regularly scheduled August 1st meeting. The reported user then left social.coop before the CWG ops team meeting took place."

And when the remaining organizer deleted his social.coop account, he also he deleted the evidence of this incident.13 As I said in 5 things white people can do, this "makes it looks like you're trying to hide the fact that you screwed up."

Again, the Four As is a good framework for looking what needs to be done here at this point.

  • What does acknowledgement look like? Who should be apologized to? It's not just the Black people who participated and saw that particular discussion. The remaining organizer is gets a lot of visibility in the fediverse (I talked about the NLNet grant, Washington Post quote, and advisory role with the new Social Web Foundation above, and he's a regular in discussions on the W3C standards email list, the Socialhub site, and the Fediverse Developer Network chatrooms. The attitude and behavior he's reinforcing here harms Black people (and more generally people of color) in the Fediverse as a whole.
  • How to make amends?
  • What actions are appropriate?

There are some obvious first steps here, but also a lot of complexity, so it'll be interesting to see how this is addressed going forward.

Now what?

"After canceling FediForum April 1-2 on short notice, we want to hear from you, our attendees and supporters, to listen to you and adjust our plans for future FediForums accordingly. And we want to reschedule the canceled FediForum as soon as possible – but not sooner, so we can get it right! For example, we are currently busy building an advisory board that will also help us steer FediForum in the right direction going forward."

– FediForum Town halls and next steps, an update and surveysent to people who had registered for the conference, April 12

It'll be interesting to see who FediForum winds up with on their advisory board ... hopefully it'll be more diverse than SWF's initial advisors! 9 Their cancellation announcement also talked about a "reconstituted organizing team," and it'll be interesting to see what that looks like too.

If FediForum reaches out to a much broader demographic than their supporters and past attendees, they've certainly got a great opportunity to create a new version that prioritizes equity and inclusion. Some of the suggestions at the roundtable are easy to act on – more diverse organizers, having a day of scheduled sessions as well as an unconference – so there's certainly room for progress. Time will tell.

Whether or not FediForum goes forward, there's clearly room for alternatives, both focusing on the corporate "Open Social Web" and more grassroots-oriented events more aligned with the Fediverse's ongoing critique of openneess. In If not now, when? Mutual aid and organizing in the fediverses, the ATmosphere, and whatever comes next, I suggested looking at today's networks as prototypes. That's a good way to look at the first few FediForums as well.

And while event organizers, non-profits, corporations, non-profits and influencers need to take the lead here – both for FediForum and the broader ecosystem – everybody can help. 5 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people has a lot of suggestions, and the techniques it discusses can also apply to other dimensions of toxicity and oppression as well.

More positively, though, a lot of good stuff is happening in the fediverses, and many of those projects are making a real effort to improve the situation.

So with luck FediForum's implosion will help reinforce broader progress as well. Time will tell! As I said in If not now, when?

"Easier said then done, but the opportunity is there."

Appendix: FediForum's response

FediForum's responses so far – the posts from the remaining organizer and official announcement (as reported in FediForum Has Been Canceled), the remaining organizer's verbal comments at the roundtable, the draft summary notes, and a survey – have examples of all four As. Then again, as I said above, there's still a lot of room for improvement – and that's not surprising. It's early days, and there are still of opportunities for FediForum to improve their response. And whether or not they do, there's a lot other event organizers can learn from this.

Let's start with the positive:

  • The remaining organizer acknowledged that he saw the tweets as a problem – and that they did not reflect his views.
  • The announcement canceling the conference included an apology: "to the people who have diligently prepared for demos, presentations and sessions, and all of you who just wanted to come and help build a better social media future at FediForum."
  • FediForum made some immediate amends to the people who had registered by offering a full refund to everybody who had registered, and promised "we will create opportunity for you in the future."
  • Cutting ties with the now-ex-organizer who had made anti-trans tweets, canceling the confernece, and holding listening sessions are all examples of action

That's good!

Then again, there's still a lot of work to do.14 For example:

  • There's no apology on FediForum's site or in the draft summary notes.
  • The acknowledgement in the announcement and the short summary at the beginning of the draft summary both leave a lot out – for example, neither even mentions anti-trans bigotry, let alone any of the other issues that attendees cited for pulling out. The announcement simply notes that tempers are high, with insults and fears for physical safety, and that "is hard for me to see how a typical FediForum event could be successful tomorrow or the day after, we all need a time out" ... true but partial. The summary in the notes at least mentions the incident ("the content was incompatible with the values of FediForum and its community") but doesn't talking just what that content was and why it was incompatible – or that people were continuing to pull out even after the conference cut ties with the now-ex organizer.
  • Attendees weren't the only ones who were harmed. Who else deserves acknowledgement and apology, followed by amends and action? For example ... what about people who knew about the anti-trans tweets of the now-former organizer (which had apparently been discussed on whisper networks for a while) and chose not to attend the conference – or past conferences? What about trans people, Black people, disabled people, and others in the discussions sparked by the cancellation, discussions the remaining organizer described as "insult-filled" and leading to physical safety concerns?
  • The survey talks about wanting "to hear from you, our attendees and supporters." But this is a self-selecting (and overwhelmingly white) sample. To make progress, they'll also need to reach out to – and listen to – critics and to people who haven't previously attended.

Still, while there's plenty of room for improvement, FediForum's initial responses are a lot better the initial response from another conference the same now-ex-organizer is involved with, which as far as I know hasn't even acknowledge the issue.5 Understanding and recovering from a multi-dimensional fuck-up like FediForum's is a process and extremely complex – this post for example has a few thousand words on just three of the dozens of bullet items in their draft notes.

So FediForum's initial responses, while imperfect, potentially provide enough to build on as the conference and ecosystem tries to move forward. Of course, they might also just do a cosmetic exercise. For many of their participants that might well be enough, and I'm sure they can find advisors who see it the same way.

Then again, if FediForum reaches out more broadly, listens, fully acknowledges and apologizes for the problems, tries to make amends to everybody impacted (not just attendees) and starts taking action to address the wide variety of issues, they might well be able to recover. Time will tell!

In the short term, key next steps include revising the draft notes, ensuring that the "listening sessions" get broad and diverse input, putting together the reconstituted organizing team and advosry board, and doing the promised followups identifying themes and talking about plans to address the problems. The survey suggests they're hoping to have the next event "some time in May", which means there's a lot to do between now and then. Stay tuned, I guess!

Terminology notes

Note that best practices are to capitalize the B in Black. CU Denver's Is the B in Black Capitalized? Yes. and Why we capitalize ‘Black’ (and not ‘white’) in Columbia Journalism Review have more on the capitalization. Since many non-Black people don't know this best practice, this is also a great example of how easy it is to unintentionally say something unfortunate.

For terminology related to "the fediverses", "the Fediverse", and the "Open Social Web" see the brief summary in the footnotes, or the much more detailed discussion in There are many fediverses.

Notes

0 Sean Tilley's FediForum Has Been Canceled on We Distribute (March 31) and Laurens Hof's discussion of the cancellation in Fediverse Report – #110 (April 1) are as far as I know the only media coverage of the cancellation so far. Sean's coverage has examples of the anti-trans tweets, reactions from the community and the remaining organizer, and official conference announcements.

These stories were both produced under intense time pressure, and I'm sure both authors had a lot of other things on their plate – another example of the stress I talk about in A last-minute cancellation has a big impact. Unsurprisingly, though, there's a lot that didn't make it into these stories.

For one thing, while the articles focused on the anti-trans aspects, that wasn't the only thing going on – as I'll explore in great detail in this article. And while Laurens' coverage notes that "various prominent community members announced that they were either withdrawing themselves from the event, or said that they personally would not want to go to the event," neither article mentions that people continued to reaffirm that they weren't going even after the initial announcement that the now-ex organizer would be "transitioning out" (oops, not the best choice of words) and further clarification that the conference would be cutting ties with the now ex-organizer (a good decision, but not enough to change the dynamics).

Also, while the tweets featured in the article were indeed the ones that kicked off the firestorm after Michelle Hughes called attention to them, they're only the tip of the iceberg. There are also screenshots of tweets by the ex-organizer saying other hateful things (including remarks infantalizing autistic people), and this post by queer/trans disability justice activist Liz Henry:1

"When I asked you face to face about the pattern of the things you interacted with on Twitter, you were liking some pretty extreme statements. Including stuff about nonbinary people being confused, mutilating themselves, as well as hateful things about trans women and about trans kids and their parents. And you talked with me about your thoughts about how trans women shouldn't be in women's sports, but that "people can wear whatever they want". Have your views changed?"

And as Tariyé Peterside discusses in Caster Semenya: When Fairness Is False, "transmisogyny is a backdoor facilitator for misogynoir": saying that ban trans women and girls should be banned from participating in sports is also an attack on Black women.

Anyhow, while I certainly don't mean any of this as a criticism of the articles that have been published so far, there's still room for more reporting here. If any journalists happen to read this article, depending on the direction you decide to take your story, it may also be worth looking at the pattern of who has benefited the most from FediForum, and the open question I talk about elsewhere in the footnotes.

1 The now-ex organizer's comment “I fully stand by the statement you are commenting on" was in reply to the post from the queer/trans disability justice activist describing their in-person discussion from last year. Sean Tilley describes this comment as "ambiguous," and looking at the context I have to agree. The "statement" being referred to here is probably the original post in the thread, quoted in the article, saying that the now-ex organizer fully supports trans people's right to exist ... so it probably isn't intended as a reaffirmation of the anti-trans views. Then again, this reply didn't acknowledge, disavow, or apologize for the anti-trans views that were being discussed, so in reality it really is standing by those as well, and impact > intent. In the section on Acknowledgment, apology, amends, action I describe this as an example of how not to do it.

It's important to keep the broader context in mind here. Anti-trans bigots are succeeding in taking away trans people's rights: trans people can't get passports, trans people can't get visas to the US, congress just passed a bill that would prohibit most trans people from voting, trans people are getting booted from the military. No matter whether or not the now-ex organizer believes that her claim that "I fully support the right of trans people to exist, thrive and live their lives to the fullest with equal rights and dignity", she's siding with and amplifying the propaganda of the people who are taking away trans people's rights. Impact > intent.

2 More terminology! The "Open Social Web" is a term surveillance capitalism companies and their friends have been using since at least 2008 either as a synonym for "the Fediverse" or "the fediverses". FediForum used to be about "the Fediverse", and I'm not quite sure when they changed their focus.

There are many fediverses is a deep dive into terminology. A couple of excerpts:

  • "the Fediverse" is a fediverse whose boundaries, culture, software, protocols, change over time. and mean different things to different people but typically include a network organization based on instances, a specific kind of server . Since 2018 or so most people have used "the Fediverse" to refer to an ActivityPub-centric fediverse, and when I use the term, that's what I'm referring to that way – but that's not the only fediverse out there!
  • a fediverse (a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe") is a decentralized social network of federated (i.e. interconnected) servers, and the people and organizations with accounts on them, that communicate through one or more protocols, bridges, and hubs. Participants in a fediverse can be social networks (either centralized or decentralized) in their own right; participants can also be part of multiple fediverses.

The "Open Social Web" framing puts focus on the "openness." Chris Messina's 2008 blog about the "open, social web" is a good reminder of how long companies with surveillance capitalism business models have been trying to push this as a brand. This post was written back when Messina was at Google, long before he started running a VC fund backed by Marc Andreessen and became an advisor to the Meta-funded Social Web Foundation. "Open Social" was at the time was a specification developed by Google, Ning (a company Andreessen had co-founded), MySpace and other social network companies.

Attempts to use "Open Social Web" as a synonym for "the Fediverse" erase the oppositional view that Aymeric Mansoux and Roel Roscom Abbing discuss in "The Fediverse as an Ongoing Critique of Openness" (in Seven Theses on the Fediverse and the Becoming of F/LOSS). See also Jamie Theophilus' Closing the Door to Remain Open: The Politics of Openness and the Practices of Strategic Closure in the Fediverse.

In Hacking Diversity, Christina Dunbar-Harris discusses the tensions between safety and the common definitions of "openness", and that's one of the things going on here as well. Ever notice how almost everybody who uses the term "Open Social Web" un-ironically is a cis guy?

3 A few specific examples of benefits to FediForum attendees:

  • A session in September 2023 on Testing the Fediverse / Fediverse test suite led to funding from NLNet to develop FediTest, a test framework for interoperability of federated social media platforms – with the convener of the sesssion as a lead developer for the project (which also wound up using a product from his startup).
  • The session on An advocacy organization for the Fediverse led in spring 2024 led to Meta funding the Social Web Foundation, a non-profit the convener co-founded later that year – with FediForum's organizers listed as advisors
  • It's very hard for most Fediverse projects to get any media coverage, and FediForum sometimes provides an opportunity. Richard Macmanus' FediForum Showcases New Fediverse Apps and Developer Network (March 2023), for example, discusses Newsmast, Emissary, IFTAS' FediCheck and the Fediverse Developer Network as well as Meta's Threads. A Washington Post article quotes a FediForum organizer hilariously suggesting that Meta "is actually at the forefront” of the industry's transformation from proprietary to open networks. Fediforum's website also links to media coverage of Threads, Threads, Threads, Threads, Threads Threads, and Threads.

4 As Teh Portly Dyke also points out, skipping the acknowledgement and apology doesn't work. Last fall, the fedidevs chat rooms finally banned a well-known anti-trans fascist supporter who had been lurking there for months since his last posts. That's good! But from what I've heard they banned him because he was making people uncomfortable, not for being anti-trans or a fascist, which means there wasn't really any acknowledgement – and I don't think they've ever apologized for not taking action earlier or even acknowledged that yeah, they really should have.

By contrast, an experience I had several years ago in an anti-oppressive political activism organization mostly led by people of color is a good example of the Four As. One of the white leaders of the group said some unfortunate anti-Black things – unintentionally, but impact > intent. Then, while attempting to explain the situation, she made things worse. She wound up writing a detailed apology that fully acknowledged the problems, and took action by offering to resign from her leadership role. The rest of the leadership team accepted the resignation, made amends to the people who had been directly harmed, and then took action by adding another Black person to the leadership team, reviewing the group's community agreements, and helping white group members see it as a learning opportunity.

5 Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) held last week, which as far as I know hasn't even acknowledge the issue. I haven't seen any reports of IIW acknowledging the incident or apologizing, let alone taking action. On Xitter, another organizer posted saying there was a full house along with photos of a conference room packed with people, almost all of whom were white and almost all of whom were guys.

The Friday night before IIW was supposed to start I realized I still. had an active login for their wiki (an organizer had comped me once years ago in hopes that I could help with IIW's race and gender equity issues) and debated about posting it as a suggested topic 😈. Alas, when I checked back the site was down, apparently due to an out-of-date ssl certificate 🤷🏻‍♂️. On the one hand I'm sympathetic, I've often botched SSL certificate renewal ... on the other hand IIWs typical attendees are mostly cis so it's quite possible nobody brought it up either.

6 One example: the co-chair of the ActivityPub committee admitted in 2023 that he had never apologized publicly to the other co-authors for what he described as a "traumatic experience":

"I wanted AP to exist so bad, I didn't pay attention to how hard it was for you. You all told me how much it sucked at the time, and I cajoled you to push on just a little farther. That was wrong. I'm sorry."

7 Based on what I've heard heard from attendees at this event, the answer is "none," but I wasn't there in person so am not completely sure.

8 Not as far as I know. I had discussions with one of the participants before the session, highlighting this pattern of erasures, but apparently they chose not to talk about it. Again, though, I wasn't there in person so am not completely sure.

8.5 In response to the original version of this post, Social Web Foundation Executive Director Mallory Knodel (who moderated the RightsCon panel) said that "Meta was directly challenged and queer, specifically trans, community building on the fediverse was raised," which is good ... although what I had heard from an attendee is that Meta's presence of the panel was directly challenged but there was no mention of FediPact or the broader trans-led resistance to Meta's presence in the Fediverse, which if it's true is not so good. If anybody has more information, please let me know!

9 In The Social Web Foundation and the elephant in the federated room I noted

"SWF's launch post has quotes from partners Eugen, Rob, Matthias, Mike, Jaz-Michael, Jon (not me, a different Jon), Bart, John, and Matt ... and their Launch link round-up has posts from advisors Ben, Johannes, Chris, and another Chris," so hopefully it'll be more diverse than thi Hey wait a second, I'm noticing some patterns here!"

Ironically, FediForum's now-ex organizer was the only woman SWF explicitly named as an advisor. FediForum's remaining organizer was also listed; I talked to SWF last fall in light of the anti-Black incidents. As far as I know both are still advisors, but maybe there was an announcement I missed.

The now-ex organizer was also one of the very few women at the invitation-only 2010 Federated Social Web summit, hosted by Evan Prodromou's venture-funded startup years before he became co-founder of SWF. A picture is worth a thousand words, so check out James Walker's photo that I use at the start of Before Mastodon: GNU social and other early fediverses. And, she's also the only woman mentioned in Prodromou's 2023 post talking about how long "many of you have been allies and friends" – which also included FediForum's remaining organizer, Chris Messina, and several other guys.

10 I saw a classic example of marginalizing youth at a previous FediForum where a student's presentation was derailed by an older white guy who repeatedly brought the topic on talking about a 1990s project that he mistakenly thought was relevant. As an attendee at the session, I did my best to convince the older white guy to STFU, but without positional power wasn't able to. The conference organizers, who had the positional power, didn't get involved. Of course that could be because they didn't realize it was going on, but wait a second, they're the ones running the conference and charging people money for it; it's their responsibility to try to prevent stuff like this from happening and step in when it does.

11 At one point, for example, I suggested an approach to improving the situation that would have cost some money. The organizer said they didn't have the budget for it, and when somebody from a commmunity that's been very underrepresented at FediForum made a similar suggestion in a since-deleted post in another thread, they got a similar response.

So I suggested crowdfunding. The organizer replied that it wasn't an option because it would require time and energy. Well, yeah, crowdfunding requires time and energy. When an organizer says he doesn't want to spend their time and energy addressing equity problems, what kind of message does he think he's sending?

Don't get me wrong, crowdfunding can be difficult. Still, as TDr. Linda Maepa showed with her work on the Umoya Fellowship to make sure folks from Blacksky could attend the first Atmosphere Conference, it's possible in exactly this situation. And it can really have an impact – see Clinton Bowen's Inaugural ATmosphere Conference and the Umoya Fellowship, for example. But, it would have taken too much of the FediForum organizers time and energy, so they didn't go that route.

Of course, crowdfunding isn't the only option. I also suggested getting corporations who are investing in the Fediverse to fund it, and he replied that they were concerned that taking corporate money for this would undercut FediForum's perceived independence, so didn't want to do it. This year, FediForum has introduced higher-priced tickets for corporate employees – i.e., they're taking money from corporations who are investing in the Fediverse. And don't get me wrong, as the list of press coverage elsewhere in these footnotes shows Meta is getting a lot of value here, it's reasonable they should pay for it!

But FediForum isn't using this money it's raising this way (at the risk of undercutting perceived independence) to pay people from underrepresented communities to attend. In fact, I talked with one person from a very underrepresented community who one of the organizers reached out to who was flabbergasted when after being invited to speak, they were then told that they'd have to pay for the privilege. Sigh.

12 A few of the suggestions for making progress:

  • In terms of the format, somebody at the roundtable suggested a hybrid, with one day of pre-scheduled talks followed by a day of unconference.
  • There was also an excellent suggestion of paying ambassadors from communities that were underrepresented, not just to attend as tokens but to work with the conference and community to make it more attractive.
  • The notes mention that IFTAS sponsoring people was actually helpful from a diversity perspective. It was at fairly short notice, so a lot of people had conflicts and the uptake wasn't huge, but even so it led to more diverse participation – including an admin of one of the very few US-based Muslim-focused instances. And IFTAS isn't the only non-profit out there!

There really is a lot of low-hanging fruit.

13 Deleting your account not only deletes every post you've ever made it makes it harder to follow discussions you were involved in, and can also led to deleting messages from people who have responded to you – which it did in this case to every reply one of my accounts had ever made to the remaining organizer, including the ones in these threads. Talk about a violation of the principle of least surprise!

One way to look at this is as an interesting example of the complexities of federation between platforms with subtly different threading and reply models. Then again, my first thought at the time wasn't "oh what an interesting software engineering issue", it was "wtf happened to my posts?"

If you want the details: the account I was posting here was on blahaj.zone, which runs Sharkey. Sharkey, like other forks (variants) of Misskey, has a model like Facebook and forums: deleting a post also deletes replies. The remaining organizer, however, was posting from social.coop, which runs Mastodon. Mastodon has a model more like Twitter where each post is its own entity and they just happen to be threaded together, so when you delete a post replies shouldn't get deleted. But a delete's a delete, so Sharkey didn't take that into account.

A couple of takeaways:

  • if you're using Sharkey, Misskey, or any of the other *keys, this is good behavior to know about!
  • a reader of an earlier draft of the post suggested that deleting your account when you leave an instance (as opposed to "migrating" your account to a new instance and keeping the history in place) is fairly normal. If you're thinking of doing that, remember that it's going to disrupt others' conversations and (if anybody has replied to you from *key) potentially delete other people's posts.
  • if you're doing anti-racism work online, or any other anti-oppression work, it's good good reminder to always get screenshots (which I unfortunately didn't in this case, oops).

14 There's also an open question here: when did the remaining organizer first find out about the problem? In the discussions somebody talks about confronting the now-ex organizer last year, so it had clearly been known for a while; and I've heard from other people that it's been circulating on whisper netwroks. Is the deperture of FediForum's third co-organizer related to this in any way? Anyhow, if the remaining organizer knew but didn't take action, that's a different situation. And if he was blindsided by this, it's a good time for him to ask himself why nobody told him he was running a conference with a TERF.

15 Serano originally described transmisogyny in Whipping Girl in terms of the intersection of “traditional sexism” (the notion that femaleness and femininity are inferior to, or less legitimate than, maleness and masculinity) and "oppositional sexism” (the belief that female and male are rigid, mutually exclusive categories, each possessing a unique and nonoverlapping set of attributes, aptitudes, abilities, and desires). In Is Transmisogyny Killing Trans Women of Color? Black Trans Feminisms and the Exigencies of White Femininity (2019), Elías Cosenza Krell suggests that while Serano’s scholarship has contributed greatly to the conversation on cis/sexism and the devaluation of femininity,"her scholarship elides race and class and allows white middle-classness to stand in as a universal, greatly diminishing the capacity of transmisogyny to describe the oppression(s) that trans women of color, and Black women in particular, face."

In What Is Transmisogyny? (2021), Serano writes

"Multiple things can be true at once. Transmisogyny can be a vital term for some of us to communicate the intersection of transphobia and misogyny that we face. But others may experience it more complicatedly or severely, as in the case of transmisogynoir. And for others (e.g., certain nonbinary people, trans male/masculine-spectrum people), misogyny may intersect with transphobia in different ways that aren’t adequately articulated by transmisogyny. This doesn’t necessarily make transmisogyny “wrong”; it may simply mean that we need additional language."

Update log

Ongoing: typo and wording fixes, additional links, more details in footnotes, and other minor changes

April 17-8: clarify definition of transmisogyny and provide additional information on RightsCon panel in new footnotes

April 14: First published version.

April 11-13: Restructure based on FediForum's draft summary notes; include new sections on the impact and terminology notes

April 7-10: Various revised drafts, shorter and more forward-looking, while waiting for FediForum's notes from the roudtable.

April 5-6: Early draft – less focused, less positive. Thanks everybody for the feedback