Users of social media have become increasingly sensitive to the fallibilities of centralized networks, such as X/Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, that are managed by a single company. Frustrations can arise as new recommendation algorithms and advertising strategies are rolled out, company priorities shift, or leadership changes. It is a phenomenon illustrated by the well-publicized exodus of X/Twitter users following Elon Musk’s acquisition and revamp of the network.
As users seek out alternative platforms that are not driven by the mission of a single company, the online social ecosystem is becoming multifaceted and unpredictable. Millions of individuals and organizations are now navigating less-familiar networks, such as Mastodon and Bluesky. According to a real-time counter developed by Theo Sanderson, a researcher at The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) in the U.K., Bluesky alone had over 23 million active users at the end of November, compared to nine million just two months earlier.
Whether there will be a mass migration from centralized networks is unclear. Such an upheaval entails migrating, or perhaps losing, years of accumulated data and followers. However, developers and advocates of decentralization are ramping up efforts to improve and expand networks; they also are seeking solutions to some of the technical challenges that popularity brings.
An open-source approach to functionality and control
The fundamental building blocks of decentralized networks are open-source communication protocols such as Diaspora, Matrix, Nostr, and ActivityPub. The latter was standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 2018 and is currently the most widely used protocol. Unlike centralized networks where all interactions are processed via servers hosted by a single company, these protocols enable anyone to set up a server, or ‘instance’, where users can create, share, and retrieve content. They also support interoperability between networks with shared protocols.
“Mastodon and other decentralized applications emerge in stark contrast to the traditionally centralized ones,” explained Ignacio De Castro Arribas, an expert in online social networks at Queen Mary University of London in the U.K. “These centralized applications are typically monolithic and vertically integrated with the application providing most functionalities and these being controlled by a relatively vertical governance model.”
Interoperability has fueled the growth of a massive ecosystem of independent servers, known by the umbrella term Fediverse, where users from different networks can interact. Fediverse observatories, such as Fediverse Party, and FediDB, gather and share Fediverse data. In November 2024, over 25,000 servers were listed, including Friendica for microblogging, PeerTube and Funkwhale for video/audio hosting, Lemmy for news aggregation and discussion, and PixelFed for image hosting.
While many decentralized servers deploy the ActivityPub protocol, Bluesky— a network which has garnered intense media attention in recent months—uses the Authenticated Transfer Protocol, or AT Protocol. Bluesky’s functionality and user interface are reminiscence of early Twitter, perhaps contributing to its current popularity. The network originated as an internal project at Twitter in 2019 under then-CEO Jack Dorsey.
Bluesky’s use of the AT Protocol has prompted online discussion within tech communities as to whether it is part of the Fediverse, and unlike some federated networks, Bluesky has a CEO, currently Jay Graber. However, the network’s backbone centers on decentralization. In the 2023 paper that introduced Bluesky’s architecture and the AT Protocol, Graber and her co-authors set out the protocol’s aims:
“To enable decentralization by having multiple interoperable providers for every part of the system; to make it easy for users to switch providers; to give users agency over the content they see; and to provide a simple user experience that does not burden users with complexity arising from the system’s decentralized nature.”
Earlier this year, De Castro Arribas and co-authors undertook a comprehensive study of Bluesky. The researchers found a diverse community—in terms of languages used—that has embraced new features offered by the network, “in particular those related to content moderation and curation; these seem to be the ones with the lowest barriers to entrance for developers, and many users have created labels and feeds,” De Castro Arribas explained.
The ability to build new functionality on Bluesky’s freely available base code is now being deployed to support new users as they move over from other networks, said De Castro Arribas, “It is a vibrant ecosystem of people developing tools that help with the migration and identification of people to follow, like the starter packs.”
Christina Dunbar-Hester, an expert in the democratic control of technologies at the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, also highlights the importance of developer and user accessibility in decentralized networks. Said Dunbar-Hester, “The need for something that’s noncommercial, decentralized, and public interest oriented—and I would break those up somewhat separately—has never been stronger.”
No single entity can take control of a network that is managed by individuals and there is no standardization across decentralized ecosystems. Yet, this also leads to technical inconsistencies and debates around terminology and functionality in the Fediverse. This is healthy, said Dunbar-Hester, because “It is an important conversation to be having. Regardless of how it ultimately plays out, whether it rises or falls, I still think it’s a really important experiment.”
The pitfalls of popularity
Many advocates of decentralization herald its potential to disrupt traditional social networks and create environments that are more accessible, flexible, and accountable. However, some researchers point to the emerging challenges that decentralized networks face as user numbers grow.
Emma Tosch, Luis Garcia, and Chris Martens, researchers at Northeastern University in Boston, and independent researcher Cynthia Li surveyed over 100 Mastodon administrators and carried out a text analysis of 351 privacy policies on the network. The team found inconsistencies in approaches to privacy that suggest “existing individualistic frameworks for thinking about privacy policies do not adequately address this emerging community.” Greater support in the form of “privacy-enhancing technology” is required to improve both users’ understanding of privacy and administrator’s creation of policies, they concluded.
De Castro Arribas, meanwhile, highlights issues with moderation. While anyone can create a server/instance on a Fediverse application, governance of each instance is itself centralized, so “there is a top-down approach with the instance moderator having the power to moderate the content in the instance,” he said. This creates challenges in terms of consistency and heavy workload for (often hobbyist) administrators.
“To make things more complex, instance administrators only have full moderation control over the content generated in their own instance, however users in such an instance subscribe to content in other ones,” De Castro Arribas explained.
An individualistic, decentralized approach can also restrict access to training data for algorithms designed to implement tasks such as toxic content identification and content recommendation. Said De Castro Arribas, “There are potential ways to alleviate this with federated learning where multiple instances pool their data to train a model,” a solution presented in a paper he co-authored.
This growing and unpredictable ecosystem of decentralized networks is characterized by a lack of standardization, varying functionality and terminology, and unfamiliar user interfaces. It is not a technological advance that can be neatly defined or easily controlled, and for many developers and end users that is precisely its appeal.
Karen Emslie is a location-independent freelance journalist and essayist.
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