Robert W. Gehl's new book, Move Slowly and Build Bridges, explores the politics, ethics, and possibilities of the Fediverse — a constellation of non-commercial social media networks that aspire to challenge the dominance of corporate platforms. Gehl's engagement with digital communities enabled him to deeply examine the structures and forms of governance in the daily practice of communities in the Fediverse, where developers, administrators, and users negotiate autonomy, diversity, and accountability. The result is a critical reflection on how social media might operate differently — not oriented toward profit extraction from users, but rather toward fostering more horizontal and self-governing models of social media.
In this interview, Gehl, an alumnus of George Mason University's PhD Program in Cultural Studies, discusses the book's central ideas and shows how the practices of the Fediverse trace the contours of a decentralized Internet.
Your object of study is the Fediverse. Which aspects of it first captured your interest, and what distinctive qualities gave you confidence in its potential? What about Mastodon?
The fediverse refers to a variety of social media systems that can potentially communicate via a shared protocol. It’s federated in the sense that each server is independent of the rest, and yet they all can connect. This is a major change from what I call corporate social media, which has typically been logically and administratively centralized, concentrating power in the hands of very few people who profit off of user sociality.
As I argue in the book, the fediverse is not merely a technical achievement – it’s a social one, as well. In addition to using technical protocols, fediverse members have developed social protocols – ways to govern themselves and to maintain (or, when justified, break) connections between autonomous communities.
Mastodon is a Twitter-like microblogging system that has had major waves of growth since its creation in 2016. I focused the book on Mastodon because its arguably the most popular federated social media system, but also because Mastodon’s developers and those who run Mastodon servers have done a great deal of the work to develop those social protocols.
But the fediverse is bigger than Mastodon – there are dozens of other projects to develop federated, noncentralized, noncommercial social media. It could well be that in a decade, Mastodon will fade but another project takes its place. So be it – I think the underlying desire to have our own social media, not corporate social media, is what’s important here.
What would you say is the central thesis of Move Slowly and Build Bridges?
The central idea of Move Slowly is that there is a set of ethical norms emerging through the daily interactions of admins, mods, and members of federated social media. I call this the covenantal fediverse. Here I draw on federalist political philosophy, which tends to focus on how groups (clans, tribes, communities) can both maintain autonomy while at the same time band together to form larger political units. Each unit can self-govern but they do so within the bounds of a larger covenant. Iris Marion Young might call this a “thin set of global values.” Scholars of Indigenous knowledges might see this as quite similar to the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
Autonomous groups that agree to band together through shared ethical values – that might sound messy. Well, it’s because it is! My book focuses on some of the triumphs of the covenantal fediverse, like its ability to welcome hundreds of thousands of new members over a few hectic months, or its centering of queer and trans developers. It also focuses on its abject failures, such as the anti-Blackness that often pervades the network. Above all, it focuses on the potentials: the possibility of having social media that does not harm the environment, the possibility of a noncapitalist political economy of the Internet, and the work of Black technologists and their allies to stave off racism through care work. I see these potentials in the network covenant.
There’s no guarantee that such a network will succeed (to echo Stuart Hall). But the potential – the social protocol – is there, and there are thousands of activists working on this project.
Your title uses imperative verbs, a form so often associated with advertising slogans. What led you to choose this stylistic strategy?
The title is a riff on the phrase (often attributed to Mark Zuckerberg) “move fast and break things.” That phrase encapsulates a Silicon Valley ethos of disruption over all other values. I was trying to think of the opposite of what Mark Zuckerberg would say and “move slowly and build bridges” came to mind.
Indeed, what I really want to stress is how different the pacing and scaling of the fediverse is when we compare it to corporate social media. The network has zero incentives to scale up beyond a desire to help people off corporate social media. This is because there is no venture capital involved, there is no one demanding endless growth. If people build sorting algorithms, they’re for finding new things, not keeping one’s attention on something like marketing messages. And fediverse instances often close down registration to keep their communities small and more easily moderated. These are all part of the “move slowly” bit.
At the same time, fediverse members do want a big network – basically, they want a large number of independent yet interconnected communities. There is space for groups – NGOs, academic units (hint, hint, Cultural Studies at George Mason!), public institutions, news organizations – to establish their own servers on the fediverse and connect to the rest. That’s the “build bridges” bit.
From your research, what ideas or insights emerged about how decentralized social media can endure in a world dominated by corporate platforms?
Prior to the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk in late 2022, many of the noncentralized, alternative social media systems I had studied as part of the Social Media Alternatives Project were very niche. I’m thinking of systems like diaspora*, GNU social, Twister – all of which I have published articles about, but none of which were really getting much popular attention.
This was in spite of corporate social media scandal after scandal: Cambridge Analytica. The emotional contagion study. Gamergate. The support for the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar. When these scandals erupted, people often expressed a desire to leave corporate social media, but they did not seem to find any place to go, even though there were some alternatives.
Then, Musk bought Twitter, and hundreds of thousands of people seriously explored alternatives, most notably Mastodon. There was a very large influx. For some reason, the Musk incident was different from previous corporate social media scandals.
That gives us two lessons, I think. One is that design matters. Mastodon was much more aesthetically well-designed than many previous alternatives. It had a more professional look to it. The aesthetics mattered.
The other lesson is that the underlying technical infrastructure needs to be strong. In 2022-2023, a network of tens of thousands of independently-run online communities was technically able to absorb a fast influx of hundreds of thousands. That showed us that the underlying technology (a protocol called ActivityPub) was capable of scaling up.
I think those lessons, plus hard-won lessons about digital self governance, demonstrate that noncommercial, noncentralized social media alternatives are, in fact, viable.
The next step, in my view, is carefully watching governments. Governments around the world are looking to regulate social media. In many ways I support the idea. But if they are not careful – or if corporate lobbyists get their way – new regulations may well destroy the nascent world of alternative social media. In fact, to push this a bit further, I would like to see independent, sovereign technology funds and public institutions used to foster alternatives.
How did your time in the PhD program at George Mason University contribute to the development of the ideas in your book?
Every class I took, every professor I engaged with, everyone of my fellow students – we were all wrestling with questions of power and society, and very often how media technologies figure into those questions.
In addition, so many of my colleagues there were keen to push past critique and to explore experimental solutions. Often, such explorations drew on the history of the new social movements to do that work – feminist, Black, and queer movements – along with the longstanding struggle for workers’ rights.
All of that, and I mean all of it, fed into my research. I owe a great deal to my time in Cultural Studies at Mason!
Finally, are there any new projects you're currently working on that you'd like to share?
My answer is simple: I am creating content. That is all I will say at the moment!
October 16, 2025