2023
Fediverse
Helping journalists navigate the ever-evolving social media landscape.
UX Research
Into the Fediverse
Northwestern University's Knight Lab is a community of designers, developers, students, and educators working on experiments designed to push journalism into new spaces. For this Knight Lab Studio project, our team of students explored the many changes happening in the social media landscape, interpreting them in light of the needs and practices of news producers. We explored what is available now, what is coming next, and cooked up a few ideas suggestions for journalists navigating social media's ever changing landscape.
Kick Off
Please note that due to information concerns and an NDA agreement, the critical details of the project and problem space can’t be disclosed, therefore the emphasis will be placed on the overall process work and deliverables. After an initial briefing with the client, we began to gather around a central question:
How might we remove the everyday challenges and moments of friction that stand in the way of online learners realizing their goals?
Background
After many years of flying high, public sentiment around social media in general, and specifically around certain platforms has turned sour. A 2020 Pew Research Survey found that nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that social media has a mostly negative effect on the way things are going in this country. In a recent article on the Columbia Journalism Review, Sarah Grevy Gotfredsen wrote “When Elon Musk completed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter last year, journalists around the world looked on in alarm,” and those fears earned credence weeks later when Musk banned journalists who criticized him from Twitter.
At the same time, social media has become a critical tool for audience engagement, story lead generation, and simply drawing attention to stories as they are published. If the old ways are no longer working, what will come next?
In the wake of Musk’s Twitter takeover, the federated microblogging service Mastodon drew a lot of attention and millions of new account users. Federated models (aka “the fediverse”) offer the promise of a social media landscape where news organizations can be in control of their circumstances, and less subject to the power of large platforms. But, months later, some observers are criticizing Mastodon for being too complicated or otherwise not ready to fill the role Twitter held.
Discovery
Research
To dive deeper into the evolving social media landscape, our team conducted a hands- on exploration of federated platforms like Mastodon, focusing on the opportunities and challenges they present for news organizations. Each member of the team signed up for accounts on multiple platforms within the fediverse, experiencing the onboarding process firsthand. We navigated the user interface, joined different communities, and engaged with the functionality to assess how accessible and effective these platforms could be for journalists and news producers. During our research, we compared the user experience of federated platforms with traditional, centralized social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
At this point, our team was also preparing for our first round of interviews with journalists who had experience using decentralized forms of social media, such as Mastodon.
Through these interviews, we aimed to understand: What are the truly most useful features of social media for journalism? What are the risks and challenges of social media for journalism? Are there, or could there be, platforms which mitigate these risks? How should journalists engage with the Mastodon platform? Which other “fediverse” projects might be useful to news producers?
End Product
We used these insights to shape our guiding principles and identified the key opportunities we believed we could address within a guide that outlines practical strategies for navigating platforms like Mastodon, mitigating risks, leveraging key features, and identifying other promising projects within the fediverse that could benefit news producers. This resource is designed to help journalists adapt to the shifting social media landscape while maintaining control over their audience engagement and content dissemination.
Here is a link to Knight Lab’s Notion page with the guide made as a result of this project.