Alternative Social Media and the Complexities of a More Participatory Culture: A View From Scuttlebutt

Abstract

Recent research has highlighted the emergence of “alternative social media” platforms. Developed by open source communities with non-commercial goals, these platforms can offer more expansive participatory cultures than corporate platforms. However, such platforms also involve new kinds of participatory challenges, such as requiring high technological literacy. This article examines the complexity of enacting participatory cultures by drawing on an ethnographic study of Scuttlebutt, a decentralized social media platform being developed by an open source community. This examination focuses on three key features of participatory culture as enacted on Scuttlebutt: varying modes and sites of participation; reflexivity about who is participating and how; and an evaluation of limits to participation. It also considers the challenges that arise from Scuttlebutt’s approach and how these highlight the profound difficulty of trying to enact fuller models of participatory culture. From these findings, we argue that Scuttlebutt provides an important example of the experimentation that alternative social media platforms are conducting around open, democratic modes of socio-technical organizing, and note that this experimentation raises important questions about how we conceptualize participation and the future of social media.

Social technologies in and out of psychology

“…As Mannell and Smith (2022) explain, ethnographies on user communities on Scuttlebutt highlight an overarching emphasis on participatory culture, which has interesting parallels with Simondon's notion of technical culture outlined below. Importantly, this form of social media does not depend on abstract representations of its users and the actions they perform.…”

“…Finally, with Simondon's (2007) process psychology, we suggest a turn towards a new form of technical culture that bears similarities to the participatory cultures created by current tech activists. This reveals behavioral surplus as but a partial representation of what is possible with social media (see Mannell & Smith, 2022).…”

“…Most of these are built from patchworks of social web protocols that were actively in development by activists and computer networking enthusiasts around the world before the era of “monetized” social computing. Various groups using, for example, the Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) protocol, the Activity Pub social web standards (W3C) and its “fediverse” of social hubs, and distributed ledger technologies like blockchains and holochains have insisted on autonomous social spaces to co-ordinate common interests (see Mannell & Smith, 2022). Whether autonomous space is defined as a form of freedom from corporate social media (e.g., redressing publicly funded code for private profit, or moral refusal to participate in a system that alienates, mystifies, and profits from users), or freedom to pursue some right or desire (e.g., a right to private communications, to protect one’s communications cryptographically, or to share language and information at the cost of its transfer), they are all engaged in creative practices of co-ordinating co-ordination .…”

“…In the case of Secure Scuttlebutt, effort is made specifically to sustain dialogue between engineers and people with fewer technical skills, with the latter recognized for the value of their contribution for tasks like welcoming new participants, moderating discussions, integrating visual art into the platform, and providing feedback about the design and prioritization of features that anyone can use (Mannell & Smith, 2022). From there, the platform provides ample “opportunities to learn programming skills through informal mentoring practices, which facilitates technical participation for those who are interested” (Mannell & Smith, 2022, p. 8). This is notably different from how “user activity” is defined and regulated by corporate social media, where algorithms are programmed to categorize interactions with platform in terms of attributes, identities, and likely buying habits—in other words, as already individualized traits.…”

“…Open-source programs like the Secure Scuttlebutt protocol referenced above place far fewer restrictions than corporate platforms on how information is created, delivered, and discovered, allowing for cultural norms of deeper intimacy between writers and users of such protocols (see Mannell & Smith, 2022). The temporality of communication and ways of filtering information are actively negotiated and creatively deliberated upon in ways that vary from group to group.…”