 Welcome to adapting to the new era of social platforms and open source. My name is Fatima. I'm better known as Sugar Overflow on the internet. I'm a developer evangelist at GitLab. Someone is taking a photo. I focus on DevSecOps, AI, and managing and strategizing all of our community platforms and where our community exists. I'm a longtime contributor to the Drupal project. If you're familiar with that and I really enjoy conferences like these, so if you want to chat about some of the things in this talk or other open source things, please drop by the GitLab booth later and you can find me all over the internet, including the Fediverse as Sugar Overflow. If you weren't at this morning's keynote with Corey Doctorow, it was absolutely amazing and I recommend you check out the recording when you can. He talked about a lot of things, but one of the things that I found super relevant to my talk was that this idea that the internet today is really locked down by a lot of rules created by corporations for the benefits of corporations. Many of us have experienced this recently with the changes that have been happening to different social media platforms and the rise of decentralized platforms. With the Fediverse, we're finally able to be more in control of our privacy, our data, where we take it, how we use it, decide what platform we want to be on, and then maybe move around if we'd like to, so we're going to talk a little bit about those things. And then social media has been undoubtedly helpful in connecting communities and spreading information, both good and bad, and making communities like ours be able to share information. So it's also become really hard to leave existing social media platforms. So over the last year, we've seen a lot of changes in the social media landscape, impacting how we connect and exchange information. A lot of platforms have introduced paid membership models, which make it harder for open source communities to reach their audiences without a lot of funding. For example, Twitter's API used to be free. It was a longtime resource for app developers, for researchers that were studying social media data. And now the enterprise pricing really locks out a lot of those customers from being able to afford it. Changes in algorithms that decide what's relevant to a feed have also affected a lot of organizations. You'll hear a lot like content isn't being looked at, isn't reaching a lot of their audiences like it used to. Centralized platforms have also been under a lot of scrutiny about how they're handling personal data. And users are becoming more and more cautious about what kinds of data they share and what they want to share on the internet. But some of this chaos has led to a lot of interesting opportunities along with the pandemic. For example, LinkedIn Creator mode came out in 2021, so it gave some content creators access to additional tools and features. You can use hashtags on your profile, share a cover story. It's like an effort to bridge more content on LinkedIn. Reddit also introduced an audio feature called Reddit Talk. So you could host these audio conversations in subreddits in an effort to bring communities together. They just recently deprecated it, though, because it was a big infrastructure load for them. Audio-based platforms were generally really popular in the pandemic. I think a lot of us were having a lot of Zoom fatigue and preferred to maybe not have our videos on. And so we saw Invite Only Clubhouse be really popular as a social network. I myself was on there and there were a lot of special interest communities that didn't have a space on other platforms or maybe didn't feel safe sharing the depth of content that they could on Clubhouse. So that was really cool as well. I made a lot of friends on Clubhouse as well. And then Discord servers became a place for more than just gamers to share content, learn, hang out with each other. We also saw some organizations spin up at Discord for their own communities and then host town halls, office hours, and things like that. So one of the biggest opportunities from some of the changes was the normalization of the Fediverse. So the federated social media has been around for more than a decade. But these platforms have only recently become so popular. People are thinking about moving off Twitter and then exploring things like Massajon or diaspora. And they're now gaining more attention as alternatives because people want more control over their data and their personal privacy. This graphic comes from a blog called Axbom written by an author called Axbom. And it's called the many branches of the Fediverse. It doesn't cover all of the platforms out there. But as you can see, there are a lot of tools for a lot of different use cases. There's everything from writing books, to multimedia, to social networking, to sharing photos and images and videos. But as you can see, a lot of these tools branch out from this green grass layer at the bottom of the tree, which is the activity pub and more protocols. So those are like open source protocols that these platforms run on, which allow them to be interoperable with each other. But before we dive into more about what each of these, not all of them, some of these platforms do, let's talk a little bit about what federated services mean. So I get really excited about talking about the Fediverse, but I realize that not everyone understands what federated models are. So you'd be surprised that we use Federation in our day-to-day lives for things like post offices and libraries. So I decided to use the example of a public library system. So public libraries are a decentralized network of individual libraries. They're all connected to this larger public library system. Each of these branches will operate independently. So they'll have books, resources, programs, things that they operate for their own branch, as well as databases and access to books from across other branches. Similarly, federated services are decentralized. They're a network of individual services connected by a common protocol. And each service of a federated model operates kind of like the branch of a library. It operates independently. It's responsible for its own data and user base, but its services are also all connected. So you're able to take that data from service to service. For example, users on Macedon can communicate with users on other federated platforms like Plurna or Miski, even if they themselves are hosting their data on a specific platform. So like if you're a user of Library B, you can also order a book from Library A or C. And so the way that libraries works is really similar to the way that some of these federated platforms work. So some benefits of federated social media models, their independent instances, they can use open protocols. The most popular one is Activity Pub, but Diaspora is another one that you might hear. Then you invite only Blue Sky Social runs on its own protocol, so they're also developing a new open source protocol. Activity Pub has been around for more than a decade, so tends to be the one that people start with. This enables users across different instances to communicate and interact with each other and also move from platform to platform. You'll never have to leave your social graph behind. This is something we heard at the keynote this morning, like the right to exit because you own your social graph, you can take it where you go, and so you're not ever really tied into a single platform. There is a really high level of customizability, so if you live in a country where there are stricter regulations or maybe the organization or project you're a part of requires more compliance, you're able to set those things up, although it might get more expensive when thinking about infrastructure. And then special interest communities can operate their own federated platforms. You can have confidential communications, you can have moderation, thinking about really sensitive situations where maybe you don't even want international data transfers. You want your instance to live in your local region, and you don't want people to be able to move that data across regions to protect the safety of your users. It's very exciting, but there are still a lot of challenges associated with federated social platforms, so compared to centralized platforms that we're comfortable with, the Fediverse has a much smaller user race, but hopefully growing. You might not find all of your community there. There might be an invite-only wall, and so it can be really hard for open-source communities to fully migrate because you don't know where everyone's going, you don't know if everyone's going to be there. The other thing is discoverability can be really tricky, so finding content across a platform can look really different from what you're used to. Sometimes content is more asymmetrical, it's not always based on a timeline that we're used to, it's not always a timeline-based thing. It might be harder to find other open-source projects that you're interested in. For example, if you're on Mastered On, you'll see that everyone overuses hashtags, and this is because hashtags are the only way to find content across other instances. Setting up and maintaining these instances requires a lot of technical resources and a lot of technical knowledge. I think this has been the biggest barrier that I have seen in setting up Mastered On instances. For example, this can be a barrier for communities that maybe aren't technical and don't have the expertise to set that up or fund it. Then the federated nature of the Fediverse can help avoid censorship, but that also means that there's a lot of work that you have to put into moderation, setting up moderation policies. The good news is you can set that up per instance and moderate as you see fit. The bad news is you need to do all of the volunteer labor in order to go through those reports, so you'll see that a lot of instances may even limit the membership or have membership based on approval just to limit the workload that they have to go through. Some examples of Fediverse platforms, the elephant in the room is Mastered On. I say that because the logo for Mastered On has a little elephant on it. On Mastered On, you start by selecting a home instance. I think this alone has been a really big barrier to users because before you even look at anything on the platform, you have to decide where you want to live on the platform. That has turned away quite a lot of users, even though it does get quite easy to switch from an instance to another instance. Content feeds are asymmetrical. You'll have this local timeline of the folks that are on the same home instance as yours, which is why picking your home instance becomes such a big hurdle in the beginning. Then you'll have something called a federated timeline, which is all of the folks that you're following on other platforms. Again, there's no stridentialized search indexing, so hashtags are your best friend, but also your worst enemy. It's the only way to find topics and spread ideas and look for other people. It's also Mastered On is based, built on the Activity Pub protocol if you remember the giant tree. That means if you are on Mastered On and maybe you have your peer tube channel where you share all of your videos, you can communicate with friends across those different platforms. It's probably the most popular right now because it has a lot of user privacy built in, control over data, customizable instances. During the Twitter crisis, you did feel like a lot of people just went straight to Mastered On, and I've heard a lot about how it feels like the internet 10 years ago because there was a lot less legal rules and limitations, and it's a lot like throwing words into the void and helping someone seize them. I think that's primarily because we're not sort of comfortable with the idea of federation yet, and we're still trying to understand how content lives on these platforms. Another one that I found that seems to be really popular, they have like two million users currently. It's called Minds. They say that they're a decentralized alternative to Twitter. They're a fully open source, so you can actually look at their source code. According to their white paper, they are focused on internet privacy, internet freedom and privacy. The interesting thing about it is that users earn crypto tokens for really popular content. If you're writing something that gets a lot of views or goes viral on Minds, you start earning crypto money for it. They also provide you with tools to monetize your content, and your page is basically a channel. You can post on it, you can blog on it, you can share videos on it, and you can showcase all of the memberships that you've joined. It's like a different architecture of information, but it's pretty interesting. Another feature that they're working on that isn't quite functional yet is this build your own algorithm. It lets you decide, I want to see like-minded content, or I want to see stuff that challenges my viewpoints, among other things. They're currently still training their AI models, so even though this is in your settings, it doesn't actually do anything yet. It might be pretty interesting when it does. There are so many other decentralized social platforms with specific niches. PeerTube is basically a decentralized YouTube alternative. It's unique. It's free to install, open source, and decentralized video storage. It's also built on the activity pub protocol. Ideally, you could have a master on and a PeerTube, and you've replaced two of your social media platforms. It does peer-to-peer broadcasting, so it reduces server bandwidth, so it doesn't, it's not about like hosting everything on one big server. It's like everyone kind of hosts their own thing. Diaspora is another open source social networking system. They run their own protocol. It was really cool. This project has been running for 11 years as of last month, fully volunteer based, has a really cool wiki where they talk about the decisions they've made. I really, I really enjoyed going through that. And then Frendica is like a interoperable with all the protocols platform. I think it's a Facebook alternative, though they don't say that very clearly in their documentation anywhere. It's got a very old school feel to it, so I think that might turn away some customers. One thing I did read about it is very lightweight to host for server administrator. So it's one of the lightest platforms in terms of infrastructure and ease of use. Okay, so you've decided that you're interested in pursuing another, a new social platform. So I put together a little guide to help you think through your decision and be prepared for a lot of strategy work and have her drink water and talk. So the first thing you want to do is evaluate your current engagement strategies on centralized platforms. So if you're on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, consider whether your social media outreach is actually effective in meeting your goals. Is your community engaging with your posts? If not, where is your community? Because that's probably where you should go. Before you go down the path of I want to be on the Fediverse, you want to make sure that your community is actually interested in being on the Fediverse with you. And then once you've figured out where your community is, I would make a list of things that can be improved, our reach of our content, maybe we can do better posts, maybe we need to think about privacy, things like that. So identify some areas of improvement, list them out, and then think about where you're going. And then you want to prioritize what we call owned channels. So you want to start developing things that are in your control. So things like mailing lists or forums, retaining control over the communication and user data. So difference between owned and rented channels. Own channels are communication channels that you control or own. So that's like a website or an email list or a forum, an email list newsletter. And so with these, you have a direct line of communication to your contributor. That's really rare. Like, you know, on platforms that are centralized, you kind of have to hope that they'll see your information or hope that they're subscribed to your feeds. Whereas with newsletters and forums, like that is your place to talk directly to your community. Rented channels on the other hand, our third party channels like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, even if you are a mast on that's kind of a rented channel, even though you are in control of some of the settings and privacy options, they're effective for reaching a larger audience. So if you're doing more outreach or you're looking to grow your community, it's good to invest in rented channels. But they come at the risk of like the platform might change its policies, you know, your users might move to another platform in the face of a crisis. And then the project has a little bit of a limited control about the values of the project, but also platform and also how the platform will be used and who has access to it ultimately. Generally, you want to invest more in own channels. That's your guaranteed audience. Along with the Fediverse, I would remiss if I didn't mention there's a lot of existing social platforms that are a great option depending on your needs. And when you're assessing your needs, you also kind of want to think about, you know, the some of these, for example, we use discourse at GitLab, it helps promote community discussions, topics, replies, admin as administrators, we can set up onboarding flows, we can set up templates for topics. We can really help guide that discussion as well as set up groups and trust levels. So it gives us a lot of control over our data and customization. Discourse can be self-hosted so it can become an own channel if you host it on your own. It's also an open-source platform. There's a huge community and they write a lot of plugins that can help you figure out, you know, if you need something custom built or if you want to send notifications. They've also been releasing a lot of new features lately, including a sidebar, which looks like slack and a chat function. Now, I'm not someone who wants live chat on my community's discourse forum, but I do think that they're trying to meet a lot of needs of a lot of different customers. And so it's a really great option for an owned channel that gives you a lot of flexibility. You may not need a whole mast on instance if you just need a discourse. A new letter is another great tool for community building. It's one of the most powerful own channels that you can have because it's like a one-to-one communication. You get to have regular contact with your audience, share updates, provide content, especially with some platforms you might get the ability to make it more personalized, you know, have A.B. testing and things like that. Features depend on what service you're using, but generally you can customize it, schedule it, have email lists. The downside with newsletters is that you have to do all the recruitment and all of the writing of content. Our GitLab community newsletter is a lot of work, but it gets a lot of engagement from our subscribers and a lot of our community heroes and super users do submit content as well, so that's always really exciting. Discord is another platform for creating and engaging communities. This is more real-time chat and communication has a lot of features like voice channels, video calls, screen sharing, community management tools, so you can set up roles, permissions, groups, specific channels that only certain people can see. While Discord is not fully an owned channel, it's partially rented because it is owned by a company that controls the overall data and permissions and things, you do have a lot of customizability in your own instance. We actually inherited this discourse. It's a really cool story about community. It was created organically by our GitLab community, and one day they asked us if we wanted to take it on, and it's been growing ever since, and so as someone who manages community, it's a really nice story to be like, wow, they were there, and now they want us to be there with them, and this is great. Sorry. A subreddit on Reddit, a specialized community is called the subreddit. It's a place for building community on Reddit. You'd be surprised. They're very helpful. In one place, post comments, content, and votes. There's a lot of participation on Reddit and a lot of strong opinions, but as moderators, you do have a lot of tools that can help you kind of moderate discussions and make sure that, you know, civilized discussions are happening. I've also noticed that our Reddit kind of self-operates. They're very helpful. They help each other. They've built a good culture on their own as well, and then we have a lot of control over, you know, spam reports and things. They do a lot of the work for me, like every day I log in, and they'll have already reported all the spam, and all I have to do is take care of it, and so I found that the subreddit is a great place for technical, very technical discussions and sharing of content. Again, this is not a fully-owned channel because Reddit does have platform policies, and if you do violate those policies, they can ban your subreddit. Not that I think anyone in this room is going to violate Reddit policies, but just so you know, somewhat owned channel. So you've assessed your current strategies and needs, and now you're ready to select a platform. So we've gone over a few owned channels, as well as some examples of Fediverse platforms. So at this stage, again, just see where your community is at. If they have a community discord, maybe you just start there, start small. If not, research some of those platforms, see which of your needs match up to the features of those platforms. Keep in mind things like privacy, control, interoperability, and censorship resistance, since that's the primary reason why so many people are moving off. And then step three is the hardest part, create and then continue to maintain your platform of choice. So if you've selected to go down the Fediverse route, you've got a lot of work ahead of you, creating an instance, setting up cross-platform interoperability, monitoring and adapting to keeping your mastodon or peer tube instant updated. You know, as the platform changes, you also have to do some infrastructure work. Maybe everybody migrates to your mastodon instance, and suddenly you have infrastructure costs. And so there's a lot to think about when moving to the Fediverse. There's a lot of great articles that you can read that have been written more recently to help you figure that out. And then if you're moving to a federated or centralized platform, you're going to have to establish some community guidelines. If you don't have them already, as well as moderation policies, I highly recommend having moderation policies and a code of conduct before you start on a new social platform helps to have that and train your team on understanding how to do that. The Discord Academy has a really great moderation guide that I highly recommend for folks that aren't comfortable with moderating, especially if you're moving to like real-time chat like Discord, you want to make sure that your team knows how to do moderation. So one of the stories that I did find that I thought would be interesting, so I've been on the Hatchi during the server since, you know, everybody moved off Twitter on mastodon. And the instance has done a really, really great job of communicating, managing, moderating, and scaling this instance. They have this really great Wiki where they share announcements and blog posts about the process. So they'll be like, Hey, like we're having infrastructure issues. Here's how we're planning the scale. Here's the legal advice that we got. Here's our collective decision. The server's just been growing and growing. It started out being funded by donations that were going to the creator, Chris Nova's Twitch channel. And then there's like a Kofi donation page. So there's been a lot of money that's just coming in voluntarily. And then they also have a volunteer team of moderators who like work to combat spam, approve membership, keep an eye on performance. And so I think they've done like an exemplary job on how to run an instance, but also to kind of showcase a lot of what goes down behind the scenes. So if you're looking for a deep dive and like trying to understand what a successful operation on mastodon looks like, highly recommend Hatchi Durham's Community Docs. Ubuntu Social, Ubuntu, Ubuntu Social is another example of an open source mastodon instance. So they're a completely community run initiative. They're not sourced by the project or hosted by canonical. They actually limit membership. So only people with Ubuntu email address are able to join this instance. And they did so because they had an experience where the infrastructure costs were just too much for a volunteer to maintain. And they decided like, hey, this is the best way that we can create an instance where our community members can have conversations, but we don't have to pay so much money out of the pocket. And then the person who hosts this, Popey did a really great interview on the last episode of the Linux Matters podcast where he goes into details about like, he ran out of disk space, trying to update the instance the first time had to have the whole complete restore. So if you're interested in like the technical difficulties, like the caching problems and things like that, like that episode is really great to check out. So you're on this new platform. Now what? Well, just keep measuring, evaluating and iterating just like with any new tool or service you want to start small, share your adoption with your community, encourage your team members to join you, promote it with existing channels. So if you have owned channels, start promoting the fact that you're moving over, share your plan, your reasonings and your timelines. I think it's a good idea to tell your community what your plans are and then see what the reaction is. Chances are they're on on board with it. Like I really love the way Hachi Durham gives us announcements and lets us know what's going on. I also recommend if you can to involve your community members in the decision making process and platform selection through surveys or open forums. I think it's important for the platform that you move to, to be what your community wants to move to. Essentially that's a place for your community to talk to you and grow with you and so it's good to know what their preferences are. And then regularly assess your strategies. I mean everyone has room for improvement. So make sure that you know things are working. Are you having user growth? Are people interacting with your content on this new platform? Are you getting feedback from community members? What is that feedback and how can you do better? A little plug for GitLab so we're really intentional about documenting in a manner that creates a single source of truth. We operate Handbook first so a lot of the platforms that we're on that I showed you today like our Discourse Forum, our Discord, we put all of the documentation as to how we moderate, how we set up workflows, the trust levels on our forums in our Handbook. So if you use again this QR code it'll take you directly to the community engagement section of our Handbook. So you can see how we do it and hopefully if you do it differently you can open an issue and let me know so that we can learn together. And that's all I've got. This is a QR code to the slides. I did a lot of research on the Fediverse to put this talk together so there is an appendix full of articles if you like reading. Thanks so much for joining me. Questions? This session ends. I forgot to start the timer. 10 minutes so we have 10 more minutes for your questions. Thank you. Any questions? Yes. Okay so for the recording the question is do you get any meaningful technical discussions happening in the subreddit for GitLab? So you know someone will jump in and say I don't know how to do this this is not working and they'll you know post the error log or the code community member will jump in and be like actually you're doing this not so correctly here's the correct way to do it. Occasionally we'll even get like hey I'd like read your handbook and I really like this section on culture and transparency and then people will have a whole debate about culture and transparency and being open. I don't know that I've seen any like really deep dives unless it's something like trending like AI or similar or a new feature that's when you really get like 300 comments of a discussion so it really depends on the topic but yes like once a month usually we get something that's like very spicy. Thanks for your question. Yes. Okay repeating the question for the recording on Mastodon you're hearing that a lot of open source folks are going to the Hachidorm instance or the Faustodon instance. Do I know any differences between the two? No. At the time when I selected Hachidorm I didn't know about Faustodon a lot of the people who were in my social graph on Twitter were moving to Hachidorm so I was like I guess I too should move to Hachidorm and so I really looked up to Chris Nova at the time when they started the instance and so that was my primary reason I can follow up with you if I hear about Faustodon. Thank you Michael. So the question is GitHub recently added forms to their platform is GitLab adding anything to that as a employee of GitLab I cannot make a forward looking statements but happy to chat maybe there's an issue open we can look at it together. Thank you. Any other questions? Okay great if you do have questions or you want to talk more one-on-one I'd love to hear your feedback and thoughts I will be at the GitLab booth from 2 p.m. every day until this conference ends. Thank you so much.