If anyone needed a reminder, last week’s news from Meta coupled with Musk’s continued efforts to deploy Twitter to strengthen the European radical right showed once again that having a social media ecosystem that is largely beholden to the whims of American billionaires is a terrible situation to be in.
Against this dystopian backdrop, this week is off to a better start with announcements of two parallel efforts for building a better social media infrastructure that is less prone to corporate capture:
- On Monday, Mastodon’s founder and CEO, Eugen Rochko, announced that he will transfer the decentralized social network’s ownership to a new EU-based nonprofit organization.
- Later in the day, a group of public interest technology advocates launched the Free Our Feeds campaign, which aims to raise $30 million over three years to establish an independent foundation that can steward the AT protocol on which Bluesky is built.
Both initiatives aim at the same problem: Ensuring that the underlying infrastructures powering social media services are run as public services that are resistant to capture from companies or individuals. They represent attempts to safeguard nascent public digital infrastructures for a new generation of social media services. It is telling that both initiatives highlight the crucial role of institutions and governance—not just funding—in ensuring the longevity and resilience of public digital infrastructure. These efforts, while ambitious, come at relatively small costs compared to the immense value they offer in safeguarding our digital public space.
At first look, Bluesky and Mastodon look very similar. Both are often referred to as “Twitter alternatives.” On closer inspection, they serve rather different needs: Mastodon addresses the need for social networking within and among smaller communities of like-minded users, while Bluesky seeks to re-create the digital global town square that Twitter once provided.
Mastodon, built on the ActivityPub protocol, has been around for much longer and saw significant user growth in the immediate aftermath of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. It currently has 10M users (of which 1M are active). Around 9000 Mastodon servers are federated with each other, but each has its own community rules. As a service, Mastodon facilitates conversation within communities and seems to prioritize it over growth. This is also the result of an architecture of the core product that does not include algorithmic recommendations. Mastodon has grown from a grassroots open-source project stewarded by Eugen Rochko, with relatively little means (including funding from the EU’s Next Generation Internet Initiative).
Bluesky, on the other hand, is a venture-funded startup that was spun out of Twitter after Musk acquired the service. It has seen significant user growth in the last few months. It currently has 27M users (there are no publicly available numbers on active users). While Bluesky runs on the open AT protocol that allows for decentralization, it operates as a centralized service in practice.
Being significantly larger than Mastodon, Bluesky accommodates a much broader diversity of discussion topics and viewpoints, resulting in a more global and diverse platform with some similarities with the “old” Twitter. This includes the use of recommendation algorithms, which are implemented in a decentralized fashion, allowing users to pick and choose algorithms based on their preferences.
Both services are built on open and decentralized protocols. In theory, this protects against the capture of the services by private interests. In practice, the AT protocol is currently owned by the same venture-backed company that operates the Bluesky service. In the case of Mastodon, the protocol itself is a W3C recommended standard, but there have been concerns about core IP related to the core Mastodon software stack being owned by Rothko. Yesterday’s announcement by Mastodon addresses these concerns by transferring “ownership of key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components (including name and copyrights, among other assets) to a new non-profit organization.” According to the announcement, the new entity will be “European” and will become the sole owner of the Mastodon GmbH for-profit that will continue to run the service. While the details of the new entity are still unclear, this is a welcomed move that should ensure that Mastodon will remain true to its founding ethos of being a public service. This move addresses the danger of a powerful project steward becoming unaccountable to the community, as we have seen recently with WordPress.
In the case of Bluesky, the issue is different. Here, a group of concerned outsiders is trying to establish the conditions for the underlying protocol to be independent of the venture-funded startup running Bluesky. The danger they are trying to avert is that of having the same company in charge of both the service and the protocol. In such a situation, the open protocol can no longer act as an assurance against corporate capture. The Free Our Feeds campaign seeks to raise money to establish an independent foundation that, in time, can take over ownership of the AT protocol. In a first step, the campaign, backed by public interest technologists, including Mozilla’s current leadership and Wikimedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, but also has support from the Green MEP Alexandra Geese, is trying to raise $4 million to set up the foundation. This is an ambitious goal (at the time of writing, it had raised $28,000). Still, the last few months have clearly shown that we need a different approach to social media that is based on public digital infrastructure as an enabler of genuine public digital spaces. Or, as Robin Berjon, one of the initiators of the campaign and a project custodian, phrases it:
This is the moment to reclaim social media. As we did with the creation of public roads and shared spaces in our towns, we must invest in digital infrastructure that operates under a social contract — benefiting everyone, not just the few.
You can contribute to the Free Our Feeds fundraiser and/or support Mastodon via these links:
Free our feeds Donate to Mastodon
Open Future is active on Bluesky and Mastodon. In December 2024, we stopped using X/Twitter as a communication channel.
