Decentralised social media offers an alternative to big tech platforms like X and Meta. How does it work? Podcast

When Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, many users looked for alternatives, fuelling a wave of online migration from the social media platform. Musk says he’s using Twitter, now named X, to champion free speech and that “cancel culture has been cancelled”. But his closeness to Donald Trump and his use of X to support far-right political ideologies around the world, have driven even more people to explore new options.

How do these alternative platforms differ from traditional social media, and what does the future hold for these online spaces? In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we speak to Robert Gehl, Ontario Research Chair of Digital Governance at York University, Canada, about the evolving landscape of decentralised social media.

In 2018, technologists working at the World Wide Web Consortium built a new protocol for social media called ActivityPub. It would give birth to the Fediverse, a decentralised form of social media. Robert Gehl likens the Fediverse to email.

 "A friend of mine can have a Gmail account, another friend can have an Outlook account with Microsoft. I could have an account with ProtonMail. And even though these are three different companies and three different locations in the world, I can email all my friends and they can email me back because all those email servers agree to speak a shared protocol.“

ActivityPub does the same, but for social media. Somebody could set up a server that speaks that protocol and invite their friends to sign up. Somebody else could set up a different type of server, and those two could connect using ActivityPub’s protocol. Gehl explains: "You can build a big network out of all these little servers that removes a centre.”

 Examples of platforms on the Fediverse include micro-blogging site Mastodon, image-sharing site Pixelfed and video-sharing platform PeerTube. By comparison to these decentralised systems, traditional social media platforms like X, Instagram or YouTube centralise user data, content, moderation and governance and control how information is organised and distributed to their users.

Other alternative platforms, which aren’t part of the Fediverse, include Bluesky, which  launched to the public in 2024. Bluesky grew out of Twitter, and Twitter’s founder, Jack Dorsey, used to be on its board. However, Gehl says analysts still see Bluesky as a quite centralised because of the way it’s designed.

 "They’re building an architecture where all posts are accessible and then they let people build filters to go to that big stack of posts and pull out the things that they want to see …  I personally find Mastodon and the Fediverse to be a little bit more compelling because they’re federated systems. When you run a federated social media system, you install the software like Mastodon, and then it pulls in messages from the network as need be … so you don’t have the entire network on one box.“

Listen to the interview with Robert Gehl on The Conversation Weekly podcast, which also includes an introduction with Nehal El-Hadi, interim editor-in-chief at The Conversation Canada.