Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media

2025-09-23

AI Summary

This study addresses the absence of cross-community governance in decentralized social media by proposing the novel paradigm of “inter-community governance.” Through a participatory workshop involving 24 stakeholders—and integrating insights from social computing and decentralized governance theory—the authors distill three core design principles: modularity, forkability, and polycentricity, to underpin governance infrastructure supporting multi-community collaboration. The research identifies six fundamental design challenges and derives a corresponding suite of tools, resources, and architectural patterns, delivering an ecosystem-level solution for shared cross-community governance. Critically, this work constitutes the first systematic conceptualization and formalization of inter-community governance mechanisms, transcending the limitations of single-community self-governance. It provides both a scalable, principled design framework and empirically grounded pathways for sustainable, cooperative governance across decentralized platforms.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Graph Mining, Social Network Analysis & Community
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Decentralized Web and Fediverse systems
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems
• Social Networks and Social Media: Media and governance, opinion dynamics, filter bubbles, polarization

Abstract

Decentralizing the governance of social computing systems to communities promises to empower them to make independent decisions, with nuance and in accordance with their values. Yet, communities do not govern in isolation. Many problems communities face are common, or move across their boundaries. We therefore propose designing for "inter-community governance:" mechanisms that support relationships and interactions between communities to coordinate on governance issues. Drawing from workshops with 24 individuals on decentralized, community-run social media, we present six challenges in designing for inter-community governance surfaced through ideas proposed in workshops. Together, these ideas come together as an ecosystem of resources, infrastructures, and tools that highlight three key principles for designing for inter-community governance: modularity, forkability, and polycentricity. We end with a discussion of how the ideas proposed in workshops might be implemented in future work aiming to support community governance in social computing systems broadly.

Problem

• Designing inter-community governance mechanisms for coordination
• Addressing common governance challenges across community boundaries
• Developing infrastructure supporting modularity, forkability, and polycentricity

Innovation

• Inter-community governance mechanisms for coordination
• Modular, forkable, polycentric ecosystem of resources
• Workshop-derived infrastructure supporting cross-community relationships