Everyone Everywhere All at Once: The Fediverse Problem

Abstract

Recent history has seen the increased adoption of decentralized social networking, also known as federated social networks, by everyone from regular users to the European Union. However, the incentive structures that make current regulation of interactive service providers functional rests on presumptions that apply to conventional social media but not to federated social networks---federated social networks are not-for-profit entities and do not rely on data collection and ad sales to exist. When everyone can operate their own social media network, with little incentive to moderate under existing law, it can only be expected that our long-standing expectations of a sanitized experience break down. The focus of this paper is on the issue of how current law, if left unchanged, will grant sweeping immunity on a far wider level than could have been imagined in 1996, while simultaneously leaving gaps that will no longer be as effectively filled by the self-preservation instincts of conventional social media networks.

Keywords: Federated, Social Media, Decentralized, Section 230, Immunity, Regulation, Internet, Facebook, Meta, Instagram, Mastodon, Twitter, X, MeWe, PeerTube, YouTube, Technology, Tech, Law, Networking, Protocol, Communication, ActivityPub, EU, Digital, Privacy, Content, Moderation