Decentralised social networks: is this the new era of social media?

We live in an era where digital technologies have permeated every aspect of our society, radically transforming how we connect, communicate, and consume information. One of the innovations that has most profoundly altered our habits and modes of interaction over the last 20 years is undoubtedly represented by social media.

Consider that the latest data shared by We Are Social and Meltwater in their annual report Digital 2023 speaks of 4.76 billion active social media users worldwide (59.4% of the population) and an average daily time spent on social media of 2 hours and 31 minutes for individuals aged 18-64 with internet access.

And if we were still not convinced of the central role these platforms play today, just take a look at the ranking of the top 10 most downloaded apps (Figure 1) to understand how these tech giants occupy a central role in today’s society.

However, the relationship with social media is certainly not idyllic. The heavier these platforms become, the more frequent the criticisms that consistently rain down on the heads of founders and executives of big tech. In fact, despite the considerable time each of us spends on social networks, these digital spaces cannot be considered devoid of risks or issues. Privacy violations, misinformation, and control concentrated in the hands of a few large tech companies are well-known problems that increasingly require a structural solution. In this context, concepts of distribution and decentralization – often associated with the blockchain world – are more frequently cited as elements capable of redefining social media as we know them today. But is it really so? Let’s try to understand together by analyzing some concrete examples of companies and projects that have embraced these concepts.

The largest and best-known among decentralized social networks is called Mastodon. 

At first glance, it appears as a microblogging platform very similar to X (or Twitter, for the more nostalgic), but in essence, it is a platform completely different from the major social networks we are accustomed to.

Mastodon is characterized by:

• a business model devoid of advertising and recommendation algorithms;
  
• a decentralized architecture that ensures user control over data and content;
  
• a paradigm defined as community-oriented.
  
  

This platform allows various digital communities located on servers scattered around the world to connect with each other, while ensuring that each instance (server) – each with its own topics and characteristics – maintains its autonomy in terms of governance and moderation. In this sense, the platform presents itself as a true decentralized alternative to traditional social media with the declared goal “to return control of content distribution to people by avoiding the insertion of sponsored users and posts in feeds.” (Mastodon)

Together with other platforms, Mastodon is part of the Fediverse, a group of federated servers used for web publishing and file hosting.
As of today, the Fediverse has about 13 million subscribers worldwide distributed across more than 22 thousand servers (Fediverse Observer) and is poised for rapid expansion, also thanks to the recent launch of Threads – Meta’s app, which, among other things, has announced its intention to soon join the Fediverse, thus introducing millions of people to this new vision of social media.
To simplify, from a practical point of view, the Fediverse works similarly to emails. Each user has the ability to create their own identity on one of the many available servers (similar to when we choose to register with Gmail or Outlook) and then easily communicate with other registered users on the same or other servers.
This happens because the software running on the instances supports one or more open-source communication protocols, such as ActivityPub. (fediverse.info).

Among the most adopted protocols, we find ActivityPub – used by Mastodon itself – whose task is to enable both server-to-server communication among the various instances that make up the federation and to offer a client-to-server interface to allow interaction among users. Mastodon is not the only social network to have adopted this protocol. We can indeed find other social network services like Pixelfed (similar to Instagram) and PeerTube (similar to the better-known YouTube). Among the platforms capable of interoperating with networks linked to ActivityPub, we also find Minds. The latter stands out for allowing its users to earn tokens (called MINDS) by creating and sharing valuable content with the community. A fundamental theme for the functioning and sustainability of the so-called Creator Economy. (Buzzoole)

Before concluding this brief analysis of the most well-known and interested decentralized social networks, it is certainly worth mentioning BlueSky as well.
It is a project born at the behest of Jack Dorsey (founder of Twitter) and based on the AT Protocol – a federated protocol built by BlueSky itself – to offer greater account portability. (AT Protocol) Currently, the platform boasts about 2 million users (Wired) despite being available on iOS and Android only since April 2023 and that an invitation from one of the already active members is still required to access it.

If it is true that there are indeed so many innovative services on this front, a question may naturally arise at this point: why do we hear so little about them?

Personally, I believe that the reasons are multiple and that the widespread adoption of these new technologies is not without challenges. The current maturity of these projects, combined with their technical complexity and the natural resistance to change from leading platforms and average users, imposes moderate expectations regarding their spread. Moreover, there are still many doubts that our society raises regarding the issue of misinformation and the management of sensitive content, which find easy space in decentralized social networks and often lack complex content moderation mechanisms.

On the other hand, this does not make these initiatives any less interesting or promising, and the great interest shown by Zuckerberg and Dorsey in this type of innovation may perhaps be enough to make us understand how decentralization could, with good probability, represent one of the cornerstones of the next era of social media.

Whatever personal opinion each of us may have regarding these individual projects, I like to think that their beauty lies precisely in their diversity and in the fact that they are all, or almost all, very recent and in full experimentation phase. The ambitions of those working on these networks and protocols are significant, as are the potential impacts they could bring to how we interact, inform ourselves, and share information online. Will we be ready to embrace this change?

Nicola Zanata