From subreddit rule pages to Mastodon server blocklists, the internet is full of quiet governance decisions most of us never see. On this episode of Looks Like New, Júlia Martins Rodrigues talks with Sohyeon Hwang about who’s making them and what it would take to share this power.
Sohyeon is a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, about how everyday people build real power over the technologies shaping their lives. Hwang studies the “governance laboratories” of subreddits, fandom wikis, and Mastodon servers places where volunteer moderators write rules, borrow them from other communities, and improvise systems of collective self-governance in real time. Their conversation moves from where online community rules actually come from, to a framework for comparing decentralized protocols like ActivityPub, AT Protocol, Nostr, and Farcaster, to why Hwang believes governance is best understood not as an end state but as an ongoing, adaptable process built on trust.