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Aram Sinnreich[/caption]
You’ve probably noticed lately that a lot of people are trying out alternatives to the big social media networks X, Instagram and Facebook. For example, after Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and started allowing far more disinformation and hateful content on the site, renamed X, advertisers and users started backing away. More recently, Meta’s decision to roll back hate speech rules has prompted many people to consider leaving Instagram and Facebook.
Some of the most popular new destinations include “federated” services such as Mastodon and Pixelfed, as well as the quasi-federated Bluesky. Federated means decentralized – rather than one central service, federated systems have tens of thousands of servers. They also tend to be nonprofit and community-run.
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Robert W. Gehl[/caption]
Federated services, otherwise known as “the fediverse,” have been hailed as a network for public communication, dialogue and debate, where ordinary people shape their social spaces, and where advertisers, hate speech and intrusive algorithms are easier to avoid.
However, history provides numerous examples of other promising platforms for the digital public sphere that have died untimely deaths. We identified three challenges.
Too many cooks. One nice thing about the big social media platforms is you know who’s in charge.
In contrast, the fediverse has a distributed governance structure. While decentralized governance helps avoid some of the pitfalls associated with the big social media platforms, it introduces other risks.
Take content moderation. The fediverse offers great tools for blocking and built-in codes of conduct, but these tools are specific to individual “instances” – the tens of thousands of fediverse servers. Who decides who gets blocked? With no central authority, governance is in the hands of fediverse members, who use hashtags such as #fediblock to loosely coordinate. And that means people who are more likely to be harassed also end up having to do more of the work to prevent harassment.
Commercial capture. The fediverse is open source. It was also developed with no input from the big social media platforms. But its origins won’t necessarily prevent the big platforms from taking over.
Look what happened to email. Once upon a time, there were thousands of different email providers. But today, nearly everyone is on Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Outlook, mostly because those companies added extra bells and whistles and sold email as a part of larger packages to employers, schools and other organizations.
This could happen again. Meta has used fediverse protocols for its new microblogging service, Threads. While this helps Threads and Mastodon users to communicate, it also means Meta has a vested interest in shaping the technology’s future in ways that might conflict with the hopes of today’s fediverse users.
Guilt by association. While some social media companies might seek to capture the fediverse, others might seek to undermine its reputation by highlighting some of its unsavory uses.
The fediverse is already facing such challenges. In 2023, researchers at Stanford University published a report suggesting that child sexual abuse material can easily find a home on the fediverse.
Though this content could flourish in pockets of the fediverse, the scary scenario of prevalent child sexual abuse material is not the case. There are many moderation tools that prevent it. However, the idea that the fediverse is full of harmful content was used by Elon Musk to justify his anti-competitive decision to block links from X to Mastodon.
Can these platforms survive? We’re still bullish on the fediverse, but democratized tech doesn’t guarantee democratic outcomes.
If these platforms are going to deliver on their promise, it’s important to learn from the mistakes of the past. That will mean users putting in the work to make sure they remain safe, accessible, noncommercial and well respected.
Aram Sinnreich is a full professor at American University’s School of Communication. Robert W. Gehl is Ontario research chair of digital governance for social justice at York University. Distributed by The Conversation and The Associated Press.
