Exploring Fitness

A deep dive into the world of decentralized social media. Learn about the history of the phenomenon, the challenges these new platforms face, and what it all means for the future.

Social media users are facing some pretty big challenges today. They’re frustrated by being at the mercy of changeable algorithms or having their data sold to the highest bidder.

And the idea that, should a platform move in a direction they don’t like (as is the case with some disillusioned folks on X/Twitter) or disappear from the market completely (which would happen in the case of the U.S. TikTok ban), leaving the network means abandoning everything they’ve worked so hard to build there. 

Content, poof. Audience, bye-bye.

But with all the bad comes so much good: the ability to share your life and work with billions of users all over the world, an outlet for creative expression, the possibility of monetizing your passion, and, perhaps, the most important of all: the ability to share and connect with family and friends.

Most social media users — especially those leveraging the networks to boost visibility for themselves, their businesses, or their work — accept that the good of social media goes hand-in-hand with the bad. 

But what if there was an alternative? 

As it happens, there are several. 

A wave of new social media platforms has swept onto the market in recent months, offering solutions to many of the problems I’ve mentioned above. They’re federated, decentralized, and growing fast. 

But what exactly is decentralized social media? Could users find the community they’re looking for? Can creators gain traction there? And can it realistically challenge the centralized giants that dominate the current landscape? 

Let’s take a closer look. 

The evolution of decentralized social media

While it might feel like it burst onto the scene in 2023/24, decentralized social media isn’t all that new. 

The first decentralized platform, Diaspora, launched back in 2010. It promises users freedom, privacy, and control of their own data. Despite initial excitement and a successful crowdfunding campaign, Diaspora struggled to gain mainstream traction. Their platform still exists and currently has around 850,000 users. 

In 2016, Mastodon, an open-source and decentralized microblogging platform, was launched. This was closely followed by Steemit, Pixelfed, Lens Protocol, and several others.

Like Diaspora, these networks intially struggled to gain traction — until now. The advent of blockchain technology and growing disillusionment with traditional social networks have reignited interest in decentralization. 

2023 in particular saw a steep rise in interest in decentralized social media options — and a much talked about phenomenon called the fediverse. 

And, rather than sputtering and lying dormant, these platforms and new ones like them are slowly, steadily (and sometimes in great spurts that correlate to changes on mainstream platforms) growing their user bases.

Mastodon, Pixelfed (an Instagram alternative), PeerTube (a YouTube alternative), and an ever-growing ecosystem are built with an open protocol called ActivityPub. This connection makes them interoperable (read: able to talk to each other). All platforms built with ActivityPub are considered to be part of the fediverse (federation + universe).

And, according to David Pierce, The Verge's Editor-at-Large, ActivityPub is worth getting excited about. “It’s an old standard based on even older ideas about a fundamentally different structure for social networking, one that’s much more like email or old-school web chat than any of the platforms we use now.”

“It’s governed by open protocols, not closed platforms. It aims to give control back to users and to make sure that the social web is bigger than any single company.” 

Even Meta’s Threads have plugged into the fediverse, though they themselves aren’t decentralized (more on this to come). 

Another key player in the decentralized social movement, Bluesky, was launched in 2021. Interestingly, Bluesky has Twitter to thank for its inception — work on the platform started in 2019, when former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced the company was funding a small team of researchers to build an “open and decentralized standard for social media.”

Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard. 🧵

— jack (@jack) December 11, 2019

“There are MANY challenges to make this work that Twitter would feel right becoming a client of this standard,” Dorsey tweeted at the time. “Which is why the work must be done transparently in the open, not owned b