CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 51Social Media and PoliticsDigital Platforms and EconomicsMedia and Digital Communication

The digital covenant: non-centralized platform governance on the mastodon social network

Open access
Gehl, Robert W., Zulli, Diana·2023·Information, Communication & Society
DOI 10.1080/1369118x.2022.2147400
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

The majority of scholarship on platform governance focuses on for-profit, corporate social media with highly centralized network structures. Instead, we show how non-centralized platform governance functions in the Mastodon social network. Through an analysis of survey data, Github and Discourse developer discussions, Mastodon Codes of Conduct, and participant observations, we argue Mastodon’s platform governance is an exemplar of the covenant, a key concept from federalist political theory. We contrast Mastodon’s covenantal federalism platform governance with the contractual form used by corporate social media. We also use covenantal federalist theory to explain how Mastodon’s users, administrators, and developers justify revoking or denying membership in the federation. In doing so, this study sheds new light on the innovations in platform governance that go beyond the corporate/alt-right platform dichotomy.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1080/1369118x.2022.2147400

Cites

25 of 25 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

We couldn’t retrieve this paper’s full text, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Decentralized social media protocols introduce challenges that complicate the vision of a more equitable and participatory digital ecosystem.

    “While decentralized social media protocols are promising, they also introduce challenges that complicate the vision of a more equitable and participatory digital ecosystem [49].”

    From Seeing the Politics of Decentralized Social Media Protocols (2026) · cites this paper as [49]

  • Prior work on decentralized social media rarely considers how the underlying protocols structure and shape the systems being examined.

    “Focused on user experiences in the context of specific app implementations such as mastodon.socialand Bluesky [5,49,82,109,119], this work rarely considers how the underlying protocols structure and shape the systems being examined.”

    From Seeing the Politics of Decentralized Social Media Protocols (2026) · cites this paper as [49]

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Gehl, R. W., & Zulli, D.
Affiliations
  • York University (CA)
  • Purdue University West Lafayette (US)
Corresponding author
Gehl, Robert W.
ORCID
Venue
Information, Communication & Society
Publisher
Informa UK Limited
Published
2022-12-15
Volume
26
Issue
16
Pages
3275-3291
ISSN
  • 1369-118X (ISSN-L)
  • 1468-4462
DOI
10.1080/1369118x.2022.2147400
OpenAlex
W4311741804
Cited by
51
References
25
Citations by year
2026: 11 · 2025: 14 · 2024: 19 · 2023: 7
FWCI
15.25
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • Information Communication & Society (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
  • Knowledge Commons (Lakehead University)
Funders
  • Brian Lamb School of Communication
  • Purdue University
  • Louisiana Board of Regents
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Communication › Social Media and Politics
  • Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Strategy and Management › Digital Platforms and Economics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Networks and Communications › Media and Digital Communication
Keywords
platform governance, Mastodon, decentralized social networks, covenant, corporate social media, codes of conduct, membership revocation, federated networks, alternative social media

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review