This paper follows the development of a participatory platform as part of an arts exhibition involving 53 arts collectives, predominantly from the Global South. While the platform was global in scope and designed with worldwide participation from intended users, this participation was impacted in significant ways by the local European laws that the exhibition makers had to abide by. We describe how the socio-legal elements constrained participation and the development of the platform’s features. We reflect on the impact of different actors, the power imbalances involved in the design project and the disappointing outcome - a platform with no obvious users. In doing so, we visit key moments in its production and explore the context for what it can teach us about managing the broader impacts of globalised legal norms on cultural producers and radical arts practice. We use actor-networks to show the play of colonialism and capitalism.

Since Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter/X and subsequent changes to that platform, computational social science researchers may be considering shifting their research programs to Mastodon and the fediverse. This article sounds several notes of caution about such a shift. We explain key differences between the fediverse and X, ultimately arguing that research must be with the fediverse, not on it.

Social media platforms allow users to create digital identities, interact with other users, post and discover content. On mainstream social media platforms, aspects of the platform are centralised under the control of one umbrella. Decentralised social media are designed around the distribution of one or more aspects required to make social media function. Architecturally, these are data storage, content distribution, discovery, identity mechanisms and networking topology. Socially, these are their governance and revenue models. This article identifies and discusses three general types of decentralised social media grouped by architecture: federated, peer-to-peer, blockchain-based. Examples of each are discussed, along with a general description of their functioning and governance. Finally, the entry provides a general discussion of the drivers and issues around decentralised social media. 

This paper argues that technically-inclined PD practices that wish ”to matter” are well predisposed to significantly contribute to public repositories of computational alternatives. It makes that argument by providing an account from an ongoing collaboration with a group of artist collectives that seek to build its own alternative social and publishing platform. That process explicitly relies on and contributes to existing Free-Libre and Open Source software (F/LOSS) applications in the process. Using this collaboration as an example, it then argues, based on Leigh-Starr’s notion of ”installed base”, that contributions to the installable base of computational alternatives can be a key contribution of PD practices. With this notion, this paper adds further substance to discussions of how to rethink PD’s relation with socio-technical work by highlighting concrete points of intervention where PD can meaningfully contribute to technology design.

This paper describes how principles derived from degrowth can be a useful heuristic for designing an ICT system within energy limits. It does so by discussing the design choices behindhttps://solar.lowtechmagazine.com, an ongoing design research project that set out to build a ’low-tech website’. This research resulted in a design which is lightweight, tailored towards older and lower-powered devices, is powered by off-grid solar energy and thus designed with energy scarcity in mind. The project shows that values and frameworks theorized within the Computing within Limits community are technically applicable to practices of web development but also identifies hurdles to their more widespread applicability.