What happens to internet communities after a global media event puts them in the public spotlight? Does the flood of new members change a given community's practices, structures, and discussions? Do things go back to normal? These questions lie at the heart of our research project, which examines how a local subcommunity on the popular website Reddit changed as its matter of focus became a global discussion subject.

Specifically, this study analyses changing posting practices on /r/hongkong, a local subreddit whose popularity skyrocketed in 2019, with the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement garnering worldwide media coverage. Now, with global attention shifting away from the protests and the 2020 Hong Kong National Security law, the subreddit no longer exhibits the same level of activity. But what can be learnt beyond simply looking at the numbers? Can a qualitative change be observed on /r/hongkong?

In this extended abstract, we examine the existing research on subreddits as a community, consider the potential significance of media events and subsequent influxes of new users for community practice, outline our methodological approach, and highlight some preliminary findings.

Clubhouse has attracted roughly 10 million users to its platform since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic as an invite-only, drop-in audio social network app. Yet, few studies examine Clubhouse as a new platform for conducting social media research, and even fewer examine the early invite-only growth of social audio apps. This study theorizes Clubhouse as an emerging social media platform during the COVID pandemic, and empirically investigates its communicative capacity, networked connections, and social dynamics. The primary contribution is a social network analysis of Clubhouse’s early users, wherein segmented networked publics based on invite links emerge. While some researchers explain that the growth of invite-only social networks is often attributed to a platform’s ‘cool factor,’ the growth of the early Clubhouse network reveals a hierarchy of social exclusivity among the networked publics, which indicates an embedded capitalist social structure and connection that grants more access to those with more social and economic power. These networked relationships provide insights into how invite-based emerging viral social media platforms are formed.

The “fediverse”–a collection of decentralized social networks grounded in open source protocols such as ActivityPub–has garnered ever-greater attention over the past year with rising backlash against Twitter and other commercial platforms and ascendance of Mastodon. But the origins of the fediverse long predate this moment, and are grounded in longstanding concerns about the deep structure of our communication platforms. This paper mines those antecedents and conversations to advance an historically-informed discussion of the fediverse’s possible futures, with a focus on developing strategies to avoid the pitfalls that have plagued other potential “digital public spheres” in the past.

When Elon Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, many users sought a place of refuge, and Mastodon was seen as an early candidate. Mastodon is part of the Fediverse, a decentralized network of social media services. But people arriving in this network were confused, a problem that many chalked up to a clunky interface and a confusing user experience. Such a reading of the situation misses something much more fundamental. This reaction to Mastodon signals something important about a narrowed network imagination amongst some users, a narrowed imagination that is not shared by all. On Mastodon, users engage in labor-intensive federating practices – they manage both the internal dynamics of their home server and that server’s relations to other servers. Groups are relatively easy to create, but federation can be quite difficult. Federation faces a number of obstacles, but some groups, including far-right political activists, have effectively responded to those obstacles. Researchers should study not only federated social media but also the federating practices used by groups both online and offline, practices that move past the easy labor of group formation into the more difficult work of federation.