Your Next Social Media Platforms are Already Here
Tired of today’s social media mess? Pioneers say alternatives will be principled, decentralized platforms
By Paula Klein
What do social media users want? “To feel more safe, less exhausted, have a higher quality product experience, really great UI, have something that works fast,” according to T2 co-founder Sarah Oh.
Oh is part of what she called a “small and mighty team” building a Twitter alternative with the familiar look and feel of a centralized platform. T2 is still in beta, but founders envision a short-text format that not only works well, but also upholds principles and values that mirror how users live and engage with information offline, according to Oh.
Oh spoke at the recent Social Media Summit@MIT 2023 (SMS@MIT) on a panel about The Future of Social Media and Emerging Ecosystems. Panelists believe that
by learning from mistakes, we can fix today’s broken social media systems. Even better, promising alternatives are already underway, they said.
Renée DiResta, Technical Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, moderated a provocative panel, which focused on the emergence of decentralized web networks — also called Web3 — and the rise of new social-media alternatives. These emerging ecosystems include Mastodon, Mozilla, and Bluesky Social, all of which DiResta said are part of a federated universe, or “fediverse.”
Most of the new platforms are decentralized by design. This means that instead of accessing the internet through services mediated by companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook, users own and govern sections of the internet themselves. These new communities, DiResta said, can teach us about alternatives to the more centralized ecosystems that are now dominant.
[NOTE: The SMS event was held prior to Meta’s release of Threads, an app to rival Twitter, that’s gaining millions of users already. The discussion points up the pent-up demand for new models.]
On its website, Mastodon describes itself as free and open-source software developed by a non-profit organization that supports microblogging features similar to those of Twitter. The platform is supported by a large number of independently run nodes, each with its own code of conduct, terms of service, privacy policy, options, and content moderation. Bluesky, a similar platform, is now being tested.
Yet decentralization isn’t shared by all alternative platforms. For instance, T2, a nascent online community represented on the panel, will be centralized. But T2 still promises it will provide levels of user privacy, security, and social dynamics that today’s platforms lack.
Whether centralized or decentralized, these models promise changes for both users and developers disillusioned by social media’s misinformation, vitriol, and marketing focus.
However, these new online sites will likely find reaching the scale of current global communities to be a long, tough climb.
Mozilla Blazed a Trail
DiResta noted that Mozilla pioneered many of these concepts years ago. Mitchell Baker became Mozilla’s CEO in 2020, but has been with the company since it began. She told attendees that “decentralization has been a part of Mozilla’s ethos from the very beginning.” Mozilla was founded in 1998 primarily as the open-source developer of the Firefox browser, and it has long used protocols that support open, one-to-many social engagement.
Mozilla has a new effort underway, Mozilla.social. It will be a social site that is not neutral to all content.
“We don’t want to be neutral to hate, we don’t want to be neutral to racism, we don’t want to be neutral to misogyny,” Baker said. “Mozilla is about inclusion; it’s in our identity and manifesto.”
Mozilla and others forging a new path face a serious challenge, however: How to maintain ideals while scaling up. “Operating at scale has its own set of problems,” Baker said. “We’re trying to be very, very intentional about that so that we can have an instance that is significant in scale, but operating under a different set of principles.”
In 2019, when conversations around content moderation were heating up, SMS@MIT panelist Mike Masnick wrote an essay, Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech, for the Knight First Amendment Institute. At the time, people were asking how platform companies could achieve both content moderation and privacy. Concerns were also raised about how to trust a market dominated by four large companies. Government regulation was a flashpoint then, as it is now.
In 2019, Masnick, now editor of the Techdirt blog and CEO of Copia Institute, wrote that building open protocols anyone could use for email, news, chats or searches — as in the early days of the Internet — would ensure integrity. “Indeed,” he wrote, “some platforms today are leveraging existing open protocols but have built up walls around them, locking users in, rather than merely providing an interface.”
Decentralization, Masnick argued, “would push the power and decision making out to the ends of the network, rather than keeping it centralized among a small group of very powerful companies.”
At the same time, decentralization would likely lead to “more innovative features as well as better end-user control over their own data,” Masnick wrote, adding, “it could help usher in a series of new business models that don’t focus exclusively on monetizing user data.”
On the IDE panel Masnick admitted “there is no silver bullet,” but his earlier words seem prescient. The pendulum seems to be swinging back to decentralized models that better protect both user privacy and free speech.
T2 co-founder Oh told SMS attendees that she believes “the domination period” of the four large platforms “really ended sometime last fall.” T2 won’t “diverge too much from the experience [users] had the last few years,” she explained, so it will have a centralized architecture. However, “to build any kind of user-generated content platform today, trust and safety have to be fundamental pillars.” [NOTE: T2 was renamed “Pebble” in September]
Pie in the Sky?
Moderator DiResta asked the panel about feasibility and tradeoffs: Can a social platform that upholds highly ethical values also be commercially successful?
Oh replied that there’s “no playbook” for newcomers. Instead, she explained, “there is pressure to build a business in a certain way, reach certain metrics, and raise the funding necessary to continue to grow your platform.”
Masnick acknowledged the difficulty of building trust and safety online — especially as a platform grows. “You always think there are easy solutions,” he said, echoing a comment made in another panel earlier in the day. “Just ban the bad people and help the good people. It turns out, that it’s not easy…There is no perfect answer, no right way to do this.”
Mozilla’s Baker knows first-hand how difficult content moderation can be, especially at scale. “You have to decide what your audience wants,” she said, while also maintaining firm guidelines. At Mozilla, “inclusion is not negotiable,” Baker said. “And hate crimes, misogyny, stalking, and death threats…that is not inclusive.”
Building a product that responds to both the market and philosophical implications can be a tough balancing act. As a pioneer, “you have to be willing, to really take the arrows from all sides” Baker said
