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 decentralised – 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 organisations, 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 co-authors 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.

One nice thing about the big social media platforms is you know who’s in charge.

But instead of centralising power like Meta or X, the fediverse has a distributed governance structure. While decentralised 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 e-mail or the web itself, 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 e-mail, for instance. Once upon a time, there were thousands of different e-mail 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 e-mail as a part of larger packages to employers, schools and other organisations.

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This could easily happen again. Meta has already 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 — especially those who just fled Instagram and Facebook.

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 unsavoury uses. This has happened with several beneficial alternative technologies in the past, such as peer-to-peer file sharing, the dark web and end-to-end encryption.

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. Couple this with claims from researchers that “toxic content is prevalent and spreads rapidly” across the fediverse, and a terrifying narrative emerges in which child sexual abuse material is spreading out of control.

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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, including shared blocklists, that prevent it. However, the idea that the fediverse is full of harmful content was used by Elon Musk to justify his anticompetitive decision to block links from X to Mastodon.

Can these platforms survive?

We’re still bullish on the fediverse, and on Bluesky, if it manages to become a truly federated platform. But democratised 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, non-commercial and well respected.

The authors are Aram Sinnreich, professor of communication studies, American University School of Communication, and Robert W Gehl, Ontario research chair of digital governance for social justice, York University, Canada
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article