2025-09-28, 2356h

Considering the role the Fediverse has and what role its Fediverse user have, if I look at social media as one mode in which society processes information into commodity forms. Like looking at the political economy, informed by Marxist analysis and critical media studies, Twitter is a centralized factory in whicch user speech is commodified directly as surplus data: ads, engagement, AI training. Users are pieceworkers, surplus value is realized by the platform.

Fediverse, users still perform labor - more kinds of labor, in fact, posting and moderating - but outputs circulate as commons... but are formatted to be expropriated into the same economies in which Twitter's surplus value exists.

sociology of culture, critical theory of communication - Twitter - participation is framed as broadcasting into a mass public governed by algorithmic visibility. Users are subject to platform feeling rules of virality and engagement - Fediverse - participation is framed as community and authenticity, but these are also feeling rules: - cultural grammars for making users ongoing labor feel like value capture (into the collective commons) even though it is structrually open to expropriation - users join the Fediverse not for safety or ideology but beccause it offers better symbolic returns (recognition, beloning) which are narrativized through discourses of decentralization and care.

labor studies - Twitter - posting = alienated labor - appropriated direclty into commodity circulation - moderation = corporate governance of labor - Fediverse - posting and moderation = unpaid reproductive labor - safety and usability are produced through users' own efforts - Fediverse redistributes moderation-labor from corporate employees onto unpaid volunteers, often marginalized, so that the posting labor can be expropriated into the same systems.

feminist political economy - "empowerment" (local moderation, blocklists, self-development of software) is in practice the outsourcing of reproductive labor onto those least able to erefuse it.

science and technology studies, infrastructure studies - Twitter - tightly enclosed sociotechnical system with infrastructural opacity - acceptability boundaries are aligned by advertising imperatives - Fediverse - open federated infrastructure that allows advertiser-unacceptable content - but only by designating the establishment and maintenance of boundaries as a local infrastructural problem - this structure induces the formation of commons and expropriability

critical theory of affect - Twitter - feeling rules = visibilty, virality, engagement - Fediverse - feeling rules = community, authenticity, ethicity - users narrate their partiicpation as ethically situated - produces an affect of value capture (they're doing something to keep more of their labor (its ethical prefiguration) - the real product of the Fediverse participation is this affective experience of retaining value, not material retention of value - different ways to feel about this == different fediverse subcultures

critical theory of expropriation - Fediverse is commons factory without walls: - generates commons by processing inputs that are not acceptable as private property - but its ability to do this (decentralization) also makes it participate in expropriation. - illusion of protected commons (ethics!) but structurally commensurate with private property /after/ user labor.

disability justice - Ten Principles of Disability Justice - collective liberation: Fediverse fragments responsibility - leadership by the most impacted: those most impacted by Fediverse structuring (those who /cannot/ use commercial platforms, not those who choose not to) are not guiding development - sustainability: constant defensive moderation leads to burnout and, my opinion, worse and worse moderation standards across the Fediverse - cross-movement solidarity: Fediverse actively makes this harder by making fragmentation the easiest option.

I think the best idea here is that the Fedivers eis an industrial complex of producing subcultural commons, and we can look at like, the love of open-source as why the commons part, and the love of... the sort of, "I'm not that" that comes from the American drift to dualism that I was babbling about in "The translation of post- to anti- within American idioms."