Ever since Elon Musk acquired X, formerly known as Twitter, the social networking site has been losing users. Waves of articles and tweets have emerged outlining the various reasons why users are fleeing the platform: dissatisfaction with the new owner, the devolving content moderation system, the throttling of news content, the reinstatement of previously banned users, the right-wing bias of the algorithm, the monetization of racist, antisemitic content, and many more.
While there has been extensive literature over the years documenting users’ negative feelings over their social media usage, it is notable that it took such a seismic shift in leadership to actually make users quit one of the most prominent media platforms. Surveys of people trying to quit social media point to the many benefits that it provides them – social connection, finding new job opportunities, and a general sense of keeping up with the news – all of which disappear when they leave. And for a platform that has come to represent culture online, the loss of over a decade’s worth of information is no less felt. The preservation of the billions of 140 and 280-character tweets, gifs, memes, informational threads, useful hacks, and sassy clapbacks, all of which came to represent culture online, has proven challenging especially after the Library of Congress stopped preserving every tweet in 2017.
This is not the first time that a platform has lost a lot of information capital. In 2009, Yahoo! shut down GeoCities in the US, one of the earliest platforms that allowed for easy creation, hosting, and discovery of user-created websites. At the time of its closing, there were about 38 million pages on the service, representing millions of hours of work by users engaging in free expression online through the creation and customization of personal webpages. Though the Internet Archive and the Archive Project launched a movement to preserve as much of the content as possible, eventually releasing about 1TB of data representative of the early internet’s digital culture, much of the data was still lost.
The history of social networking is filled with people populating vibrant spaces, creating communities, finding innovative ways of self-expression, and then being forced to abandon these painstakingly created digital havens due to platforms failing from economic pressures or just plain ol’ bad management.
What if, then, the next time, people could take their stuff to the next place they inevitably have to move?
Decentralization could theoretically be a way to make switching platforms easier without having to wait for user experiences to get unbearably bad. Instead of starting from scratch at the next governance disagreement, users could take their network and their content with them when they want to leave.
Challenging Platform Power Through Decentralization
Decentralization means that there isn’t one single entity responsible for making rules for the entire ecosystem – each community can decide to create and follow its own set of practices.
Right now, who you talk to on the social internet depends a lot on the platform you use. Your Facebook friends stay on Facebook, your X followers are present on X. There is no way to broadcast to someone using X from your Facebook account. You have to log into the app to communicate with them. This is called platform lock-in, and this is what gives these tech platforms part of their outsized power.
Essentially, the platform has held your community captive, and they get to set the rules for how you interact with them.
The Fediverse is one solution for facilitating decentralization using technical means. All apps in the Fediverse are built upon a technical protocol (called ActivityPub) that allows separating your contact list from the interface client you use to interact with it. Instead of being owned and operated by a single entity or corporation responsible for governance of an entire platform, there are multiple servers run by a variety of actors that set their own rules for how they will be run. Consider email, for example – it doesn’t matter whether you use Outlook, you are still able to send emails to people using a Gmail address or a Yahoo address. What if you could actually talk to your X followers from Threads in this same way?
The difference between the user experiences, then, would not be the content you see or the people you follow, but how the information is presented to you. Platforms would have to compete on all the things that make up their user experience – their content moderation policies that make them comfortable to be on, the ease of use of their user interface, etc. Have an issue, then, with how X is run? Using the Fediverse, you can leave the platform, but be able to take your audience and years of shitposting with you to the next microblogging environment that feels better to use.
Decentralization presents significant challenges.
The biggest challenge for the Fediverse – and decentralization at large – is user adoption. Even with all the benefits that it can provide, getting started with Mastodon is actually really hard.
If you’re a new user with no technical background, it may take some time and effort to familiarize yourself with the vocabulary and the mental models associated with Federation – during the start-up process, you have to decide which servers to be a part of, which communities to engage with, and more. It is a lot easier to outsource all of that thinking and just sign up on a platform when you have 3 minutes between whatever tasks you’re performing at work.
Further, the Fediverse may require much more active participation than traditional social media. An online community requires people who are responsible for customized moderation, for keeping the servers up and running, and for creating the content that makes all the surrounding work worth the effort. Currently, most servers are expensive, volunteer-run and maintained, and community guidelines often depend on the effort that the moderators have decided to put in.
This need for active participation is not necessarily a bad thing – after all, an engaged society is a democratic society. And many proponents of the Fediverse (and current users), are active participants due to their belief in the principles of decentralization.
However, the real world presents a different story. Literature from online communities points to the 90-9-1 rule: 1% of users create most of the content, and 90% of users are lurkers who do not participate, with the remaining 9% simply engaging with content with a like or a share. There are similar stories from the open source world – the vast majority of open source code is maintained by volunteers and used without contribution to either the developers or back into the community. This makes developer compensation extremely difficult.
If we want these projects to be sustainable – which we should because even volunteers need ways of buying groceries – we need new business models for decentralized social media. They cannot all be passion projects that people devote time to outside their day jobs. The genius (and then peril) of digital advertising – which dominant platforms rely on – is that it is a way for platforms to monetize the vast majority of lurkers by dividing them into ever more targeted buckets and selling them products, while still maintaining free access to the platform itself.
The business models for the Fediverse are trickier. One, because the Fediverse is not one thing – it is a collection of servers organized around interests – and the popularity of one doesn’t necessarily translate to the upkeep of another. In traditional media models, like book publishing, the publishing house stays afloat through selling a mix of extremely popular bestsellers that then subsidize less popular books on the publishing schedule. When communities aren’t connected to each other, the success of one cannot directly benefit another.
Could these be the problems of nascency? Potentially! It seems foolhardy to discount that the Fediverse is still too new of a concept to be monetized. With enough adoption, servers with similar missions and moderation policies could create cooperatives to negotiate with advertisers. Data cooperatives, like Resonate, a music streaming cooperative, are an example of people wrestling back control of their data and putting it to community approved use, so it’s hard to see why that couldn’t happen for the Fediverse.
Currently, the crowdfunding model seems to be the primary way in which instances support themselves, and we’re also seeing attempts at monetization through subscriptions. Existing independent companies like Ghost, WordPress, and Tumblr have all pointed to their Fediverse ambitions and are at different stages in their decentralization journeys. The question of business models is far from solved, but there does seem to be hope on the horizon.
It is also yet to be seen how much the mainstream audience cares about the philosophy of decentralization. Network effects show that people go where people are. The ability to leave with your network may not be the deciding factor for people choosing their social media platforms. The rise of TikTok, for example, is in direct contrast with the principles of decentralization, and yet growth in its user base shows no sign of slowing down. TikTok has platform lock-in, a very strong algorithmic recommendation feed, a very passive discovery and consumption experience, and yet people flock to it. It is a lurker’s paradise.
However, the ability to port over an audience to friendlier servers is the very thing that makes decentralization attractive to the people who create content on the internet. The very people who help make these platforms successful are the ones who have the most incentive to maintain direct control over the channels through which their communication occurs.The Fediverse is not a panacea for user empowerment – far from it – but it could theoretically provide a worthwhile alternative to the problem of platform control. New surveys show that people are looking for smaller, more intimate communities to be a part of online. Then, letting users and creators collectively decide what content they want to interact with might be the way to make the social web more intentional – and people more optimistic – about the time they spend online.