Congratulations to Roel Roscam-Abbing, who completed his thesis – Configuring the Fediverse: Online Federation, Alternative Social Media and Participatory Design – and defended it at Malmö University this week. The whole thesis is available for download at: https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:2094768/FULLTEXT01.pdf
It was my pleasure to be his supervisor, to support his work, to be taken back to the theme of making of communities through online media and to reminisce about how community moderation worked in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when I was writing about these things for my masters and after.
Our joint paper on one part of his practical work can be found at: https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3666094.3666107 (Make Friends Not Art: Mapping Law, Power and Participation in Designing an Online Platform during documenta fifteen, published at the Participatory Design Conference 2024)