This paper contributes to the growing body of literature that interrogates the modalities of nostalgia afforded in, by, and through digital media technologies with a focus on its performative dimension within one social formation of nostalgia – the TikTok aesthetic. Drawing on a fine-grained, qualitative artifact analysis of the most viewed video in #nostalgicore on TikTok, this paper asks how the platform’s socio-technical affordances enable and/or constrain Boym’s “restorative” (regressive) and “reflective” (progressive) modalities of nostalgia as a basis for action. Drawing on performance studies and emotion theory, I conceptualize nostalgia as “emotive” to foreground its performative dynamics and allow for further study of nostalgia as a performance or “narrative event” that articulates time, space, and affective feeling. Through the interplay of TikTok’s temporal and spatial affordances, I find that TikTok permits the feeling of the "thick present" to emerge, encouraging liminal, fever dream-like performances of nostalgia in which young people imaginatively construct nostalgic worlds. I argue that this practice constitutes a form of digital placemaking that resists normative assumptions of nostalgia operating on a linear temporal horizon of action (i.e., backward/past vs. forward/future) as it is made, remade, and algorithmically circulated. Contributing to recent work on “algorithmic nostalgia,” these findings suggest that creative and mnemonic practices are entangled in algorithmically structured aesthetic social formations of nostalgia and invite further consideration to how TikTok encourages the “mnemonic imagination” through performance.

Keywords: nostalgia, TikTok, performance, temporality, affect, social media affordances

This paper examines the critical importance of Nigerian contemporary activisms as activists oscillate between designated whisper networks, offline spaces and networked counterpublics. It adopts a multi-method approach to understanding two hashtag activisms in the Nigerian context, #SayHerNameNigeria and #QueerNigerianLivesMatter, and draws on methods and theories from network science and data feminism. With these two hashtags, Nigerian activists retool hyper-visible hashtags to make powerful connections to transnational movements producing visibility for feminized experiences of police brutality and the insistence on dignity for queer lives. This paper approaches these activisms as networked activities relaying the connections between and beyond users and contexts that directly feed into the material flows of offline groundwork. Therefore, I explore these hashtag activisms from the perspective of "transplatform" in that they not only occur in offline and online spaces but also constitute Nigerian activists' revisions of Global North policy-rooted demands and actions.

This paper further examines what doing this research groundwork means for a Nigerian activist-scholar/ hashtag archivist. As my location as a feminist activist and scholar further extends my perspective of transplatform affordances, I argue that doing this groundwork means taking part in all stages of data engagement, including participant observation, data scrapping and visualization through the access offered by the currently precariously fated Twitter application programming interface (API), and data analysis and interpretation. Finally, I explore how my process of data engagement must become triangulated as I must create ethical standards for myself as I chronicle hashtag data, contextual interviews and African feminist biographical narratives.

User biography sections on digital social platforms (hereafter described as “user bios” or “bios”) are spaces for account holders to take narrative ownership in communicating their identities to other users and interlocutors. Online platforms, such as social media, are increasingly used as community hubs for disabled groups, and especially for autistic people (Author; Author; Sins Invalid, 2019). We focus on #Autisktok, one of many enclaves for autistic community building and cultural production on TikTok. Through a critical/cultural qualitative thematic analysis of #Autisktok user bios, we assess how the user bio mediates self-advocacy, agency, and autistic-centered knowledges on #Autisktok. To investigate how autistic TikTokers use their profile’s bio section as a space for “restorying” mainstream discourses about autism and agency, we draw upon M. Remi Yergeau’s (2018) work on autism and neuroqueer rhetorics and Arseli Dokumacı’s (2023) theory of micro-activist affordances, extending these frameworks toward the digital. We pose the following research questions: How do autistic youth use the bio section on TikTok to (re)story autism diagnosis? What is the user bio’s role in creating a supportive enclave for other autistic creators, users, and activists on the TikTok platform? Three themes emerged from our analysis: the explicit use of autism in the user bio, autism and intersecting identities, and the bio as a space for asserting agentic autistic selfhood.

Like, Comment, and Share are ubiquitous features and central elements of engagement on social media platforms. Yet the values promoted by such features remain an open question. We propose the concept of value affordances, defined as the set of ethical, aesthetic, and relational principles that emerge from the interaction between different stakeholders and technological infrastructures. We develop a novel method for studying value affordances through focus groups to explore the engagement features of Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Across platforms, our participants agreed that engagement features promote expression, care, and community, aligning with how companies promote their platforms. They also agreed that engagement features hinder privacy, mindfulness, peace, and safety, echoing public concerns about the harmful consequences of social media. Their accounts typically downplayed the role of technology, instead emphasizing user agency and responsibility. We discuss how users navigate tradeoffs in the value affordances of social media through creative strategies to negotiate, downplay, or even resolve these tensions. These include using features antagonistically, avoiding using specific features, or using features in more limited contexts like groups or direct messages. Users also negotiate value tradeoffs through how they assign responsibility for promoting or hindering particular values. While our participants consistently emphasized the agency of users, they differentiated responsibility into categories of "us" and "them," identifying with positive actions that promote values and blaming others for negative actions that hinder values.

The non-centralised Mastodon, which is part of the larger ‘fediverse’ has been hailed as a Twitter alternative ever since the change in leadership. Mastodon’s non-centralisation is a matter of architecture, not just policy, and is described as “content moderation subsidiarity”. There is a large degree of consensus on codes of conducts between the differing instances in the fediverse, yet a diversity in its distinct communities that have their own local norms and moderation policies. The fediverse’s architecture provides an opportunity for ‘agonistic pluralism’ where multiple competing norms can coexist side-by-side, yet the defederation of some instances with the large default instances of mastodon.social and mastodon.online calls into question whether such a model of deliberation is what users of the platform want to strive for.

To investigate how moderators deal with norm conflicts, we ask ourselves what role architecture plays in moderators’ agency in norm contestation and how Mastodon’s affordances shape such defederation decisions.

We map the fediverse to provide a quantitative view of the scale of this defederation with large instances. We perform 20 in-depth interviews with moderators who have and haven’t defederated from either mastodon.social or mastodon.online and investigate how their tactics and strategies in dealing with norm conflict are shaped by the platform’s affordances.