Praise for Move Slowly and Build Bridges
"This is a delightful, readable, and yet sober account of a momentous effort to reinvent social media so it might be worth having. Gehl's book is essential reading for admins, lurkers, posters, coders, and scholars alike—the first definitive document for the early life of the fediverse." -- Nathan Schneider, author of Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life
"Almost everyone is criticising commercial social media these days, but what matters is to rebuild social media on fundamentally different principles. Few people are better qualified than Robert Gehl to explain how this might be done, and indeed has already been done in the fediverse, particularly Mastodon. Drawing on extensive interviews and historically-informed fieldwork, Gehl gives us the best account we have of how social infrastructure really can be built outside of corporate resources, and with serious attention to the voices of minorities. In his telling, the abstract principle of federation emerges from a history of intense social struggle. So, if you want a realistic, honest, and deeply informed account of how social media platforms could be different, and in fact somewhere already are, then read this book." -- Nick Couldry, author of The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What If It Can't?