(or: running SunOS 4 on an emulated SPARCstation in 2025 with QEMU 10.1.)

A colleague from one of my previous jobs recently wrote about running VMS on an emulated VAX 11/780. I figured I'd give it a go, as I'd passed up the opportunity early in my career to spend more time with VMS (twice, in fact). I didn't get very far, but something caught my eye at the end of his blog post – he'd also been playing with emulating a SPARCstation. Ooh. That thoroughly nerd-sniped me for the weekend.

Why?

At my first job, in the early 1990s, I found myself working on a SPARCstation 10 writing software in C for a project our company did with a local telco. It was my first time using SunOS, as my university was a DEC shop. Over time, I took it upon myself to maintain the fleet of SPARCstations and its surrounding network – keeping the software on them in sync, introducing new, useful open source software, and solving problems our developers had while using them. I just couldn't help myself – it needed doing, so I did it. The company eventually noticed, so one day our boss asked me, “How about you focus on just doing this? We'll call you a System Administrator.”

So, then – SunOS has a very special place in my heart as the first Unix I used for work. Running actual old hardware is something I don't have enough room for, though. So emulation it is!

Aren't there already instructions to do this?

Blog posts about stuff like this seem to age like milk – inevitably different things go wrong as the years progress and emulators get tweaked. There was nothing out there that just worked in this, the year of 2025.

Here's what I've discovered in order to get it working, then, building on posts from nonspecialist and a few others.

While my final instructions focus on macOS, I'd also experimented with running QEMU on Ubuntu 24.04 and 25.10 VMs, just in case it helped. You should be fine with them too, keeping in mind the tweaks around display and network connectivity.

Getting to the initial installation

John Millikin's post is probably the most useful one I've found across the internet. Among other things, it reminds us about keeping the RAM sized under 100MB unless you can be bothered tweaking the size of the swap partition on disk. 96MB of RAM works fine, for instance.

I had trouble using QEMU's default OpenBIOS to try and boot off the CD image – it said No valid state has been set by load or init-program.

nonspecialist's second post covers getting it to use the Sun ROM. I also had that emotional feeling of seeing that font and that Sun logo popping up on a white screen. Woah.

Since 2023, though, something has changed in QEMU and you won't see that “Wrong packet length” error in his screenshots – instead, you'll see a “Timeout waiting for ARP/RARP packet” message repeating.

If you've used Sun hardware in the past, you'll remember being able to press Stop-A on the keyboard to get into the boot monitor. How do you do that in QEMU? Well, if you've connected the monitor somewhere, you can!

I added -monitor stdio to the end of my sprawling qemu command (see below). That lets me type a command like this in the terminal / shell (pty if you want to get technical) where I ran the qemu command:

QEMU 10.1.0 monitor - type 'help' for more information
(qemu) sendkey stop-a

From here, a boot cdrom at the Sun OpenBoot PROM (OBP) prompt worked, enabling me to:

• boot from the CD image to install the miniroot
• boot from the miniroot and install the OS from the CD image by running suninstall

Steps to follow on macOS to get this far

Assuming you've installed Homebrew on your Mac, you can do this:

• brew install qemu
• fetch the SPARCstation 5 ROM image and SunOS 4.1.4 CD image – yep, SunOS 4 was retrospectively named “Solaris 1”, and Solaris 1.1.2 / SunOS 4.1.4 was the final release
• qemu-img create -f qcow2 disk1.qcow2 2G to make the disk image
• put the script just below into a file called run-sparc5.sh
  • if you're not on macOS, you'll need to customise the -display and -nic sections
• boot the VM by running ./run-sparc5.sh – it should then say QEMU 10.1.2 monitor - type 'help' for more information and the cursor should be next to (qemu)
• when you see “Timeout waiting for ARP/RARP packet”, enter sendkey stop-a in that same window where you'd typed ./run-sparc5.sh (ie. just next to (qemu))
• pop over to the VM's window and boot cdrom
• when it reboots, do the same sendkey stop-a but this time boot disk
• you'll be dropped at a root prompt (starting with a #) where you can type suninstall and follow the prompts to install the OS to the disk

run-sparc5.sh

#! /bin/bash
qemu-system-sparc \
    -name mysparc5 \
    -L . -bios ss5.bin \
    -machine SS-5 \
    -m 96 \
    -drive file=disk1.qcow2,if=scsi,bus=0,unit=3,media=disk \
    -device scsi-cd,channel=0,scsi-id=6,id=cdrom,drive=cdrom,physical_block_size=512 \
    -drive file=sunos4.iso,if=none,id=cdrom,media=cdrom,readonly=on \
    -nic vmnet-bridged,model=lance,mac=52:54:00:11:22:33,ifname=en0 \
    -vga cg3 \
    -display cocoa \
    -monitor stdio

Hiccup number one

At this point, I was excited to boot into the working OS but instead, it only got a little further before QEMU crashed with a Trap 0x29 (Data Access Error) while interrupts disabled, Error state error.

I found some discussion in this issue in the qemu repo which led to a second issue that gave me some further help when someone suggested:

One thing I remember from using real Sun systems is that if you do a “Stop-A” while it's trying to boot (from the net, or whatever), you can leave the device environment in a bad state, and you typically had to fix up your NVRAM environment to get the boot device you wanted and issue a “reset” to the PROM monitor and start again.

Making that work, though, needs us to stop it trying to boot off the net when it resets., so that we don't need to press 'Stop-A'. A quick refresher on Sun OpenBoot PROM commands reminded me that I could type this:

setenv auto-boot? false
reset

It'd then reset the VM, and I could boot disk from there.

Hiccup number two

Reading a bit further down issue 2015 I saw someone say:

Unfortunately, at this point it's currently freezing having mounted root, swap, and dump.

which matched what happened to me. Ugh.

Randomly trying things until they work, part 1

I tried other SPARCstation types – I could get a SPARCstation 20 partially booting if I added -machine SS-20 -cpu TI-SuperSparc-60 and used the appropriate ROM, but it crashed in other ways and I still haven't got it completely working. I also couldn't get it to make more than 1 CPU visible, but that's no big deal – Solaris 2 used multiple CPUs much more effectively, I seem to remember.

Randomly trying things until they work, part 2

At this point, I could've gone and built QEMU from source, trying some of the patches mentioned in that repo issue. I was feeling a bit lazy, though, and figured I'd try a few other things before giving up and going that way. One experiment was to swap out the Sun ROM for QRMU's default OpenBIOS...

...which worked!

The finally-working QEMU script for macOS, then

#! /bin/bash
qemu-system-sparc \
    -name mysparc5 \
    -machine SS-5 \
    -m 96 \
    -drive file=disk1.qcow2,if=scsi,bus=0,unit=3,media=disk \
    -device scsi-cd,channel=0,scsi-id=6,id=cdrom,drive=cdrom,physical_block_size=512 \
    -drive file=sunos4.iso,if=none,id=cdrom,media=cdrom,readonly=on \
    -nic vmnet-bridged,model=lance,mac=52:54:00:11:22:33,ifname=en0 \
    -vga cg3 \
    -display cocoa \
    -monitor stdio

ie. I've just removed the “roms” line from the one above.

So all of this means that you should:

• use the first script (with SPARCstation 5 ROM) for initial installation
• use the second script (without the ROM line) for running it normally

Hurrah!

Ok, so I could boot up, enter boot disk3:a at the OpenBIOS prompt to get into the installed OS, do that final configuration, and make the network work per John Millikin's post.

I have a weird netmask on my network for historical reasons, so I had to add an entry to /etc/netmasks and configure /etc/defaultrouter.

How do I get files onto it?

You might notice John Millikin's post talks about compiling recv.c on the VM to get a basic program to receive files over a bare network connection from elsewhere. I was going to use this, but had another thought, about using ancient internet technology that still works today.

I remembered that SunOS 4 has a bunch of network services accessible by default (a security nightmare if you connected it up to the Internet, unexposed!). One of these is FTP, the venerable File Transfer Protocol. Checking /etc/inetd.conf confirmed my memory that an FTP server would, indeed, run on demand.

On my Mac, Homebrew still has lftp available, so I installed that, and could transfer stuff by running lftp -u username _host or IP_ and then put file (or mput file* to send a few at once).

Netscape works per John's post, and when looking for stuff earlier in my adventures, I'd found a copy of Lucid Emacs(!) on archive.org, which seems to run.

Historical artefacts

What was truly useful, though, was suddenly remembering that I still had these books on my bookshelf – a few issues of Rich Morin's Prime Time Freeware for Unix from the mid-90s. These were from the days when people had slow, or even only occasional internet access. Having local copies of software was super useful. The CDs still work, and I was able to copy the source for two pieces of software – gzip and zsh – that were essential way back then, onto my VM and compile them.

What's next?

Well. I'll probably:

• dig up a 3-button mouse, as Sun's OPEN LOOK Window environment really just doesn't work without one
• compile a few more memories that I can find on the PTF CDs – olvwm for one, and probably a heritage version of GNU Emacs – maybe 18.59 for real nostalgia
• make it look more colourful!
• see how much semi day-to-day stuff I can do from it
• wonder if I can make it properly boot automatically (ideas welcome!)

...and what else is next?

Beyond getting back to that VMS emulation, I'm also wondering how easy it is to emulate a DECstation, so I can relive my student days? Definitely tasks for some other time, though.

Final thoughts

SunOS existed in a time before journaling filesystems, so make sure you shut the VM down properly (via a su -c 'shutdown -h now') rather than just switching it off, or you'll find yourself needing to learn how fsck works.

#SunOS #Unix #Emulation #RetroComputing #SPARCstation

It was day two in Kunming, and the rain had eased up. I walked around the streets of the old town area, looking for somewhere to try one of the famous local dishes (过桥米线 – Cross the Bridge Noodles), and building up the courage to cross my own, internal bridge – making myself walk into a restaurant and order something in my extremely nervous Mandarin.

A bit of wandering and AMap'ing later, I found myself seated at the back of a restaurant, which was just as well – as soon as I'd ordered, my nose suddenly erupted with blood, and I spent about 15 minutes waiting for it to stop before I could eat.

The bowl was huge – I found myself cursing my aging body that just doesn't have the inner space for food that it once did, but it really hit the spot. Lovely rice noodles, flavourful broth, and a tiny amount of regret that I'd let the waitress talk me into ordering some “side dishes” that turned out not to be side-dish-sized. Oops.

Full, happy, and a bit short of blood, I wandered back out into the streets of the Land of Mushrooms, and walked until I was tired. Nothing makes me happier than the chance to wander a brand new (to me) city.

#travel #China #August #Kunming #昆明 #Yunnan #云南 #food #过桥米线

I've upgraded us. See the changelog for more info, there's some nice changes. Let me know how you go?

#status #update

I’ve been meaning to rework some of the underlying bits in our host for ages, and with a wet long weekend having arrived, I’m finally getting around to it. Services will be offline this weekend (tomorrow – Sunday) for a while.

#maintenance #downtime

We rented a Ford Mustang and hit the road out of town. When we accelerated onto the freeway, the look on Pond’s face was priceless as she exclaimed “oooh!”

I queued some appropriate songs. The landscape sped past. Moving onto some side roads, we pulled the top down and enjoyed feeling like ... somebody else.

We had a quiet lunch in a popular country town and, returning home, felt like the world had taken on a slightly different quality – just for a day.

I hadn’t considered just how different it would feel, though, and I wonder how we might experiment like this in other ways to bring other little sparks of joy into our life.

#Travel #RoadTrip #Photography #Drive #Moments

The “morning person” part of my brain never lets me sleep too long – it was up and out of the house each morning of this long weekend, onto a tram or a train or a bus, and off to some other part of town while everything was still peaceful. I took photos with numerous devices, and would've walked over 25km in total.

One morning, I spotted somebody's Christmas remnants and heard Fleetwood Mac leaking out of a popular cafe before resting in a park while a pair of masked lapwings patrolled the grass near me. Another morning, a wafting smell of food grabbed me as I crossed a railway bridge, and just nearby, a friendly cat talked to me from somebody's garden. The cat had so much to tell me, in fact, that it jumped the fence into a neighbouring garden to continue meowing to me as I walked away.

The streets remained quiet, though, for which I'm grateful. My restless mind craves a chance to breathe, to listen, to explore without the stress of a crowd. Sometimes, I'm revisiting memories; Sometimes I'm thinking about conversations I need to have, and it's all part of a never-ending battle to Remain Present. Music helps, and often it's the soundscapes that really help.

#walks #photography #weekends #wandering #restlessness #music #ambient

One of the best things to do on a hot day is to get around to an OS upgrade that you were running out of excuses for. It's now done – as per usual, success means that everything still works, and you don't notice anything different.

#server #APnP #status #update #os

I don't often have the energy to write anymore, but I'll ride it while it's suddenly here. My listening this year wasn't particularly exploratory – I let my sub to The Wire lapse a few years back, and I miss the serendipitous references it brought me. With that, here we go:

Favourite things released this year

• Tindersticks – Soft Tissue – I’m calling it a comeback, as this grabs me somehow more than other recent and not-unpleasant work. It hits a definite groove, and it's a masterpiece.
• Cindy Lee – Diamond Jubilee – A box full of experiments, some of which work, and a couple of which are transcendent – Not unlike a Guided By Voices album of old in that respect, except that it’s a two-hour behemoth with a bit more 60s-inspired fuzz/reverb. Glorious.
• DIIV – Frog in Boiling Water – Warm, familiar, and making the sounds they’re so good at, but the feeling that Something’s Not Right is unavoidable. A strangely unsettling album.
• Jessica Pratt – Here in the Pitch – when I inevitably wake up from whatever dream this life is, I expect to hear Jessica Pratt's music softly playing, before the grand revelation that my existence was all part of some late-60s experiment.
• Adam Wiltzie – Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal – what I'd probably be listening to just before I wake up from that dream.
• Klein – marked – Definitely the kind of album I’d only hear about from one of two places – The Wire magazine, or one of Boomkat’s e-mails. I heard about it purely by chance, but it's the kind of discovery I relish – someone's out there pouring themselves into slabs of noise like this, and it's beautiful.
• Snarski vs Snarski – Waiting for the Bell – Two musical brothers take their turns with each others’ songs through the ages, giving a bit of new life to familiar tunes via each of their lovely voices. Come for Crossing off the miles, stay for Be careful what you put your name to.

Pleasant Discoveries from other times

• The Sorcerers' Ethiojazz-inspired tunes. I saw this video playing silently in the window of a shop in Northcote one evening. Not long afterwards, I saw some other reference to the band, which led me to In Pursuit of Shai-Hulud. Sometimes the universe sends you signals, I guess.
• Tony Molina (thank you acb!) who reminds me of Elliott Smith, Guided by Voices and something else.
• Hollie Cook – Happy Hour in Dub which I found hard not to enjoy.
• Voice Actor – Sent from my telephone – what if your stoner friend popped in every now and then with some random dream memories or other observations? I've listened through the whole album, but this feels like the perfect kind of source material to drop into a mixtape or two.

Continuing Earworms

• Drab Majesty gives us the 80s of our dreams.
• Spunsugar gives me one take on the 90s in my dreams.
• Night Tapes – drifting felt like a fine slice of dream-poppy excellence.

Recent releases I'll take into next year

• Saint Etienne – The Night
• The Necks – Bleed

I need to spend some time with these to form proper opinions.

Late 2023 releases I brought into this year

• bdrmm – I don't know – nice fuzzy noise that hits the spot. I see the next album's on the way in February, too.
• Blonde Redhead – Sit Down for Dinner – if you're looking for a soundtrack to feeling overcome by wistfulness, this might be it. Had I seen them play back in June, I may well have drowned in my own tears.
• Hermanos Gutiérrez – El Bueno Y El Malo – currently replacing Khruangbin as the band you'll hear in many inner-suburban situations, and rightfully so – a second example of brotherly excellence in this list, too.

Three albums I keep coming back to

• HTRK – Death is a Dream
• Susumu Yokota – Sakura
• Christian Fennesz & Jim O'Rourke – It's Hard For Me To Say I'm Sorry

No notes on these three – I encourage you all to find out for yourselves.

#music #EndOfYear #NowPlaying

...is now running, with minimal visible changes. On we go.

#status #update

We've updated. See the release notes for more info. In terms of new features:

• ✅ yes, authors can see subscribers
• ❌ no, we haven't enabled e-mail subscriptions – we'll wait for SMTP support

#status #update

Last Friday I got caught up in some airport silliness. As soon as I read the text message telling me my flight home had been cancelled I foresaw a need for reading material. I was only a few pages from finishing a novel and I didn't have much else I could use to keep myself occupied.

So before heading to the airport to try and get on another flight I stopped in at a nearby bookshop and found some cheap editions of classic whodunits – I picked out The Mystery of the Three Orchids by Augusto De Angelis who is an Italian writer and journalist (and anti-fascist) who wrote from the mid 1930s to the early 1940s.

Sure enough, I arrived home five hours late. The book served me well – I'd read more than half and I finished it the next day. It was simple and satisfying, easy to read while tired, exactly what I was after.

It revived some of my existing idle thoughts about what, for me, makes a good whodunit (book or film), and what I'd like to see in new ones. So I thought I'd make this list as an exercise in thinking it through some more.

An eccentric detective

I think I draw the line at the detective having some kind of super power or really extraordinary talent, but apart from that any detective will do. They can be professional, freelance or amateur, I don't mind. I don't have a favourite detective but nor have any really bugged me.

Okay, maybe Inspector Thomson in Gosford Park was too bumbling, and Benoit Blanc's accent is terrible. I never warmed to Miss Marple nor Hercule Poirot. Commisario De Vincenzi was fine, I guess?

Oh yeah, Lieutenant Columbo. Maybe I just want Columbo. He's scruffy (something I can identify with) and good at getting people off-guard, that's all you really need. Having a photographic memory or extra-sensory perception (or whatever) just feels like cheating, and it can create distance between the mystery and the reader (who doesn't share the special ability).

A contained and compartmentalised setting

I really enjoy stories that unfold simultaneously in different compartments within a contained environment, whether that's a house, a boat, a train, an island, or whatever. Essentially, it creates a reason why people can't immediately leave or why help will be unreachable or delayed at best. And it's fun to piece the story together in time. I imagine this aspect is quite fun to write.

The airship in the indie game Wayward Strand would make an excellent setting (ignoring the fact that it's an old folks' home where death is neither uncommon nor mysterious).

Red herrings

According to the Wikipedia page for red herrings, the term was coined by a dude who used smoked fish to distract his dogs from chasing rabbits. This week I've been using dried kangaroo to distract my dog from being scared of going down stairs, something we have to do at least three times a day. So now, at least three times a day, I have good cause to dramatically yell out, “aha, a red herring!!” – excellent news.

Anyway, red herrings are fun and should always be included because they're about playing with the reader. You want to be able to guess the mystery before it's revealed, or to be fooled, but you don't want to find out pertinent information at the point of reveal. There's no fun in that.

Not more nostalgia

It's gotten beyond a joke. Yes, mobile phones and the internet make it harder to write constraints into a story. Yes, first-class train carriages looked pretty in the 1930s. Of course this was when many classics of the genre were written, but do we need to keep remaking them? There's a lot about these times that's really on the nose in any case. I like to see stories that work within the context of today, just so we're not avoiding this challenge. Or, at least, for stories set in the past for a reason that's more than aesthetics or narrative convenience.

Easy on the zeitgeist

One thing that bugs me generally is when stories lean too hard on the zeitgeist. I want my murder mysteries to be escapism from world events, not to excessively reference them. Even stories set in the past that reference an imagined zeitgeist can bug me. They can lean a little bit, just not so much that it's writing half the story for them. I just find it the opposite of clever.

Down with rich people

Notwithstanding my love for Gosford Park, I'd like to suggest that rich people are not a compulsory inclusion in a whodunit. I know that inheritance can provide a spicy motive – I myself expect to inherit a stack of second-hand floorboards from my father, who in mentioning this to me appears to have conceded he has no plans to do anything with these floorboards in his lifetime. Maybe one of my siblings has their eye on them and I'd better watch out.

But back to the point, it'd be nice to see fewer rich people (and their servants) featured in whodunits. There can still be money involved, that's fine. I just resent the suggestion that those of a wealthier class are inherently more interesting.

I caught the train to Southern Cross today and walked over to Docklands, grabbing along the way a display cabinet chicken tandoori wrap and a coffee. While I sat down to eat outside the ferry terminal, I got out my digital camera and tried to figure out how to tell it what I wanted to be in focus.

I've had this camera for a while (I seem still not to have reattached myself to the passage of time since March 2020) and I've figured out the focus settings more than once, but they just don't stick. I like this camera—an Olympus micro four-thirds—because it's smaller than a DSLR but still has interchangeable lenses. My problem is that it's all settings, acronyms and multi-level menus, which is great for doing an exact thing but is not conducive to heuristics. I work by heuristics, normally via some kind of visual logic, which suits photography pretty well but not with this camera.

I decided to give the Olympus a rest and use my film camera instead. It's my dad's old Pentax that he used to take all of our family photos in the 70s and 80s. He gave it to me in non-working order but it was easy to get repaired. I've decided to not bother with the light meter and just use rules of thumb instead: it was an overcast day so I set the f-stop to 5.6 and cranked up the shutter speed to 1/500 (I won't know until I get it developed whether this was a terrible idea and I come crawling back to the light meter). I am fairly sure the film currently loaded in it is from around when time stopped.

I realised my favourite part of Docklands is 'The District', a breezy, mostly indoor shopping and entertainment district that always seems to be mostly deserted. Even when there are people there. It has the Melbourne Star ferris wheel, which is no longer operating, and a Hoyts cinema with enormous screens and motorised recliner seats but which is almost entirely self-serve. There are several US American restaurant chains with highly developed aesthetics and food I would never eat. Lots of families do come to Docklands to hang out, I mean it seems like the parking is convenient and there is free ping pong.

I wandered around the upper walkways to get a view of the malls below and take some pictures. After a while I noticed that the same logo, the logo for the shopping centre itself, was on all the windows – the upper floor is almost entirely untenanted. With regularity, there were also decals urging your reconsideration of Docklands: [hashtag] Imagine different. Indulge your curiosity. More food and entertainment this way –> [a series of blank panels].

I realised that the signage was the best thing about the place. Incantations attempting to lift Docklands' hex. Underrated. Is this art? Are you art? Imaginaria. A flame inside a five-pointed star. A very many pot plants. Surely we can jump-start some psychogeographic significance here.

Of course, mocking Docklands is too easy and very tired. Cheap shots, the lot of them. But I do think the thing that makes Docklands funny is also what makes it interesting. Perhaps there'll be some paranormal indications when I get my film developed (or maybe the film was just expired).

Compiled by @KatLH@scholar.social with input from many others. I have been regularly using the fedi since 2018. Thank you to those who responded to my call-out, and please get in touch if you’d like to be credited.

I tooted a call-out seeking different people’s views on the ethical complexities of academics treating the fediverse as a source of research data (I hesitate to even use the term ‘data’ in case it implies a resource or commodity). By ‘the fediverse’, I am mainly referring to Mastodon and its similar forks.

My intent is to provide a non-exhaustive list of ethical issues for researchers. I have written this in plain language for broad accessibility. Those contemplating research should not assume that something that might be seen as acceptable and innocuous on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook is acceptable or innocuous within the fedi. Skilled social media scholars will already have good practices with these kinds of things, but experience tells us that many researchers still do not.

This is not a new topic and others have tackled it in far more detail and with greater insight and consultation than I have here – please see the list of links at the end, most of which I consider essential reading. I hope that this document is a useful summary and helps avert harm.

Terms of Service

At the most basic level, researchers need to be aware that every server has its own ToS that defines what is allowed. There is no central authority granting access. ToS are not consistent between different servers, and furthermore they may change over time. Fediverse content can involve many, many different servers.

While it is a very obvious point that researchers need to comply with all relevant ToS, unfortunately there are already egregious examples of this not being done [1].

Some terms may explicitly address the use of data for research (e.g. [2]) or might be more general about the use of content hosted by that server (e.g. [3]). I suggest that anyone contemplating research with the fedi starts by getting in touch with the relevant server admin(s).

Consent

Many people on the fediverse explicitly opt out of data collection via the bio in their profile, which might contain something like “I do not consent to my data being used […]”. However, there is a general expectation that the minimum bar to clear should be opt in via informed consent. There are several reasons for this, some of which I outline below. Unfortunately, there is a long history of private data being leaked from the fediverse simply because it’s technically possible.

Server admins will actively defend safety and privacy. Actions by anyone that compromise safety will almost certainly result in moderation actions such as: suspending the offending account or defederating from the researcher’s server in the event their admin does not take action. This means that a server that aims to be ‘open’ or ‘objective’ will achieve the opposite, as their reluctance to defederate will be met by defederation by others.

Trust deficit

There are communities within the fedi that have been directly harmed by unethical research in the past (for example, First Nations and transgender communities). Hence there is a pre-existing trust deficit.

Furthermore, the historically extractive nature of research and the impetus to ‘publish or perish’ is well understood by many people on the fediverse. While in some areas academia is getting better at foregrounding the needs and desires of communities through participant-led research, most would argue this is still the exception rather than the rule.

Researchers might therefore encounter a general sense of wariness before earning trust and obtaining informed consent.

Audience and privacy

Fediverse software offers a suite of privacy controls such as post privacy and the different server moderation policies. This can get quite complex depending on federation and vantage point.

The visibility of content to a particular user is not necessarily indicative of the intentions of the content’s author. For example, posts on specific servers (such as those run by and for marginalised groups) may well only be intended to be read or shared by that community and not by outsiders, regardless of technical visibility.

A fediverse user’s understanding and preferences relating to privacy may be in flux as they interact with the fedi. Once again this means that researchers shouldn’t make assumptions about what is acceptable use of a person’s content.

Safety

Many people on the fedi are members of communities historically targeted by hate groups – this includes some academic communities, too. Defederation from untrustworthy servers is an important safety measure, but data collection can compromise defederation and create risks.

As one person who responded to me explained:

I am on server A. I have preemptively suspended server C for safety. An academic (or journalist) comes along from server B without any knowledge of this and puts A and C together into some dataset. Now C can know of my existence.

On this note, academics rebuilding their networks post-Twitter should remember to ask permission before adding anyone to public lists.

Extra notes about social context

Much of the fediverse has a strong sense of relationships, mutual aid and a duty not to betray one another. Researchers should not assume that their understanding of social relationships gleaned from other social media platforms or communities are transferable to the fediverse. Incentives or reasons to participate in research might be different as a result.

Nobody can see the entire fediverse. Different servers can have very different stances on moderation ranging from heavily defederated to completely unmoderated. As a result, what is visible can vary wildly. This means aggregate analysis is highly contextual and research purporting to offer an objective view is junk.

Despite everything mentioned in this document regarding marginalised communities, much of the fedi is hegemonically white, tech-oriented, able-bodied and rich.

I highly recommend this blog post [4] which gets into more detail about how researchers can misinterpret social worlds and cause harm.

It’s not all negative

Compared to the large social media platforms, the fedi can be a great site of dialogue and engagement. Opt in research can tend to get a lot of traction, provided researchers are trusted and the framing doesn’t grate or harm.

Server admins and many other people on the fedi are excellent sources of guidance and could even become potential collaborators. I imagine that open source research tools and creative participatory methods will lead to all kinds of cool things.

Links and further reading

[1] An Open Letter from the Mastodon Community https://www.sunclipse.org/wp-content/downloads/2020/01/open-letter.html

[2] Privacy Policy – Use of Scholar Social for research https://scholar.social/privacy-policy

[3] Server Rules – use of content hosted by mastodon.nz https://mastodon.nz/about

[4] maloki, On Scraping Mastodon https://blogghoran.se/2020/01/27/on-scraping-mastodon/

Robert W. Gehl FOSS Academic https://fossacademic.tech/2022/10/18/notesOnNobreEtAl.html

Elias, T., Ritchie, L., Gevalt, G., & Bowles, K. (2020). A pedagogy of ‘small’: Principles and values in small, open, online Communities. In Open (ing) Education (pp. 364-389). Brill. (thoughts from 2018 on what to consider)

This is a test. Wheee