Own your spaces

The Internet is a highly decentralised network of computers, but most large social media platforms centralise information and control.

Terms of service and what is considered acceptable behaviour vary greatly between platforms. Within those limits, however, users are generally free to create their own communities and, as owners or admins, decide whom to invite or ban.

I previously wrote about one form of this in Fediverse and the consequences of decentralised moderation. There, I discussed how the Fediverse’s collective moderation culture shapes everyone’s experience, from libertarian instances that federate with almost everyone to extremely niche communities that use allowlists. This post is closely related, but more than analysis, it’s a plea for people to build and nurture their own spaces, and to stop letting individual moderators manage groups with hundreds or thousands of members.

Administrators

Sometimes it is a tech CEO you piss off. Since they control the platform, they may simply ban you, with little meaningful recourse or explanation. They ultimately decide which users to host and which to ban.

But this also applies to the owners, admins, and moderators of communities inside a social platform.

Every Internet space has someone who operates or moderates it. Fediverse server admins may own their infrastructure, but the same concentration of authority exists in centralised social media. Owners and moderators decide whom to admit, which rules to enforce, and what kind of culture they want to foster.

Open Internet communities cannot assume that every newcomer is acting in good faith. A space can grow from a few friends to tens of thousands of members, while creating new accounts or posing as different people is far easier online than in person; but banning individuals online is also significantly easier and has lower friction than banning people from real-life interactions.

Inside a walled garden, the social structure is fairly decentralised. Anyone can become the admin of a group, server, guild, or whatever else a platform calls it. As the owner or admin of one of these spaces, you are free to invite or ban whomever you want. However, because these Internet moderators are wholly unaccountable, this creates a highly asymmetric risk of power-tripping, admin abuse and other undesirable behaviours. The risk is asymmetric because only the person on the receiving end of the moderation action is negatively affected. At the same time, the administrator or moderator will, more often than not, face no consequences for their abuse. At worst, what might happen is the community decides to split in protest of abusive moderation practices. In many cases, these communities will fail to gain traction too.

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.

Cardinal Richelieu

The more you speak, express yourself, and share about yourself, the more likely it is that someone will find something to object to. That objection may be justified or unjustified. When any one of many moderators can exclude you from an important social space, one rational response may be to say less. These chilling effects were discussed at length in the previously-mentioned post about Fediverse moderation.

While Fedi has powerful moderation tools, if abused, they can also have a devastating impact and further isolate already marginalised communities.

Reddit mods

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: a Reddit moderator publicly challenges someone’s behaviour. This individual responds in a sarcastic or arrogant tone, the moderator gets offended and bans them.

You could also think of a Telegram admin, a Discord server owner, or a Fediverse instance sysadmin. The situation is not that different in other spaces.

To be clear, a moderator’s job is to, well, moderate according to a set of rules, whether explicit or implicit; moderators decide what is welcome in their community. If they believe you have broken the rules, they can warn, restrict, or ban you.

This authority is important as online spaces are globally accessible, which makes them vulnerable to disruption, including trolling, coordinated raids — in which large numbers of people join a space to disrupt it, often by posting graphic depictions of violence or pornography — the development of a Nazi bar situation, or antisocial behaviour from regular participants. Some of these situations require immediate action rather than an extended debate.

Unfortunately, the ability to moderate quickly and with little oversight also leaves room for arbitrary or authoritarian behaviour. Formal organisations often have policies, documentation requirements, and routes of appeal for resolving conflicts. Many online communities do not: the same small group of moderators interprets the rules, investigates a complaint, makes the decision, and hears the appeal. In most cases, there is no appeal process.

As you can see, there are two administrative levels:

1. The platform operator, such as the company running Telegram (Pavel Durov) or Instagram (Mark Zuckerberg), or the operator of a Mastodon instance.
2. The social circle administrator: the owner or moderator of a specific community inside that platform.

Own your social graph

Sometimes an admin dislikes someone and chooses to ban them from the group. That person may then create a new group devoted to roughly the same topic, but one they control. They no longer depend on the original admin for access to that kind of community. However, they must persuade others to join, and the platform operator can still remove their group or account.

Creating your own space, therefore, mitigates the second-level risk but not the first. Pavel Durov can still decide to delete your Telegram account, as I have personally experienced.

In addition to running your own community inside these platforms, I think it is worth diversifying your presence. Tying your entire online social life to a single platform means you could lose contact with everyone you know only through that platform. In many cases, the operator may not even tell you what you did wrong or why you were banned.

One effective way to diversify your presence and voice is to create your own website or blog, as I have done here. You can use free or paid services such as Blogger, WordPress, Ghost, and Substack to start a blog.

If you are a bit more technical or want to learn more, you could also use a static site generator such as Hugo, Jekyll, or Astro, then host the resulting site on your own server or use a service such as GitLab Pages.

You do not need to build and host everything yourself. Wix offers visual and AI-assisted website-building tools, and you can even publish a site through Notion Sites. If you’re a beginner and don’t know what’s best, just choose something that feels right. You will most likely make lots of mistakes, despite your best efforts. You will make mistakes because you don’t know what you don’t know and operate in a limited-experience environment. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good; just start something. There will be plenty of time to migrate later on.

Go wild! Post about a cool bug you found or maths problems you enjoy working on. Post about philosophy, politics, or just pictures you take with your camera. Let people follow your writing via RSS or Atom.

You would also do well to maintain a presence on several social networks. That way, if one of your profiles is taken down, people can still reach you elsewhere. Make sure those profiles point to one another so people know where to find you. I do this too.

The more you share online, and the more active you are on social media, the greater the risk that one arbitrary decision will cut you off from part of your social life. Running your own spaces and maintaining a presence in several places mitigate that risk.