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 like Mastodon and Pixelfed, as well as the quasi-federated Bluesky. Federated means decentralized – rather than one central service, like X, federated systems have tens of thousands of servers. They also tend to be nonprofit and community-run.
Federated services, otherwise known as “the fediverse,” have been hailed as a network for public communication, dialogue and debate, where ordinary people, not corporations, shape their social spaces, and where advertisers, hate speech and intrusive algorithms are much easier to avoid. News organizations, nonprofits, universities and even governments have experimented with the fediverse and Bluesky, partially or even completely shifting their social media presence away from X.
However, as we, researchers who study media and communications, and our coauthors Thomas Struett and Patricia Aufderheide describe in a recently published paper, history provides numerous examples of other promising platforms for the digital public sphere that have died untimely deaths. We identified potential pitfalls from these examples and ways to avoid them.
The fediverse in a nutshell.
We identified three such challenges: too many cooks, commercial capture and guilt by association.
Too many cooks
One nice thing about the big social media platforms is you know who’s in charge.
But instead of centralizing power like Meta or X, the fediverse has a distributed governance structure. While decentralized governance helps the fediverse avoid some of the pitfalls associated with the big social media platforms, like political censorship and surveillance capitalism, it introduces other risks that must be addressed before the fediverse can serve as a worthy replacement.
In short, when too many cooks are in charge, it’s hard to make a good meal. Take content moderation, for example. 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 like #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, like email or the web itself, is open…
