From Control to Connection: Social Networks Beyond Big Tech

This article is possible to read both in both English and Spanish, click here for the Spanish version.

The Internet has changed the way we communicate, learn, live and form relationships. The Internet is many things, but perhaps it is currently best known for social networks. There are concepts we are all familiar with but have a hard time defining, social networks is one of those concepts. One possible definition of social networks is that they are “digital platforms that form communities of individuals whose objective is to communicate and share information by and for the community”. Actually, according to this definition, we could classify forums, mailing lists and many other platforms as social networks. Today, large corporations sell us commercial and massive social networks as “The Social Networks”, equating the general concept with their particular products. Simply put, when we talk about social networks, we think of Facebook, Instagram or TikTok, and this narrows our gaze. Thus, today it is difficult for us to imagine, familiarize ourselves with or participate in social networks that do not belong to Big Tech.¹

The toxicity of commercial social networks is becoming increasingly evident to many. For several months now, various campaigns have been warning us of the dangers associated with social networks promoted by large technology companies and some have urged us to seek an alternative in the Fediverse.² The main international coordination campaign in Europe is “EscapeX: Improving Digital Public Space”. It is specifically on the X platform that we can best see the consequences of the reactionary and turbo-capitalist turn after the company’s acquisition by Elon Musk in 2022. “This movement urges individuals, institutions, media and policy makers to break free from the X platform and move to more democratic and decentralized digital spaces,” says the campaign on its website. In fact, they have created an application called Open Portability that helps you migrate your X account to Mastodon or BlueSky, facilitating the transition. In addition, technology collectives and digital resistance movements are organizing websites and campaigns that explain in detail how the alternatives works and how to start using its applications, especially Mastodon³, which is the most popular of them due to massive migration from X.

There is a universe of alternatives to Big Tech social networks, in fact, it is known as the Fediverse. The Fediverse is developing into a safe space for many minority groups, especially for the LGBTQIAPN+ community and the visually and hearing impaired. The communities take great care to make the Fediverse a safe and accessible social network. That is why there are different ways to label content that may be offensive, by placing a “content warning”. Similarly, the practice of adding ALT descriptions to images to facilitate their accessibility is widespread. In addition, the protocol and construction of these social networks are designed to protect private data, collecting less metadata and not generating any profiling. Typically, administrators safeguard their users’ data and never ask for identifiable information, such as a phone number, physical address or date of birth.

But how did all this come about? Social networks are just over two decades old and have become an indispensable part of the lives of millions of people. Nowadays, many of us are looking for safer and friendlier spaces for digital sociability, and potentially betting on the Fediverse as an alternative to the big commercial social networks. But to answer why this alternative is important, we must first ask ourselves…

What are commercial social networks and how did they come into being?

Social networks, as we know them today, were born between the late 1990s and early 2000s. For example, Facebook was created in 2004 and Twitter in 2006, both gained popularity during the first decade of the 21st century. Social networks had a significant impact on the organization and dissemination of the large mass protests of 2011 and 2012, including the Arab Spring, 15M and Occupy Wall Street. Social networks would also become crucial later in the mass protest campaigns of #MeToo or #BlackLivesMatter.

Many of us considered these social networks to be a new “public square” where anyone should be able to express themselves and be heard. They were tools for social and political organizing, spaces to discredit and dismantle the monopolized discourse of the mass media, and places where everyone could have their own voice. But this utopia lasted only for a short time. Like any product generated under the capitalist system, social networks are subsumed by it, suffocating other modes of expression and organization that are not marketable and profitable for the system. We should not fool ourselves into thinking the platforms we learned to use differently and creatively were conceived as a democratic public square, rather than as products with expectations of extracting economic or political profit. A clear example is the case of Cambridge Analytica in 2016, which used the private data of 87 million Facebook users to send personalized messages in favor of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

Coinciding with the vision of Marta G. Franco, expressed in her book “The Networks are Ours”, commercial social networks have been stolen from us in recent years through a clear alliance between extreme right-wing movements and large technology corporations. Today, commercial social networks have been taken over by reactionary ideologies through fake news and armies of trolls and bots, supported by opaque algorithms directed by the billionaire owners of these platforms. The takeover and use of social networks is another tactic in the rise of the global far right. To this must be added the domination of the television space and traditional media; the use of other types of digital spaces (4chan, Forocoches or Telegram) to spread hate messages; the extremist political discourse of openly fascist parties; the use of educational spaces in universities and schools as spaces for indoctrination; as well as the sermons of certain sects in churches and other religious centers. Legal, political and social resources that exist, both in public and private institutions, are being used without hesitation. Fascism and capitalism have always gone hand in hand, especially in times of crisis.

The objective of these platforms, initially very open and versatile, has always been to get us hooked on their services. They achieve this goal through different methods. On the one hand, Meta and Google use different tactics to make themselves indispensable among users, such as reaching agreements with telephone companies to offer their services free of charge as part of their pricing plans. This technique is especially useful in countries with high poverty rates and among the most disadvantaged classes. Or we also see how Google creates a monopoly of practically the entire cell phone software market with Android and imposing the use of its digital services (Gmail, Google Play, Google Maps,…etc.).

On the other hand, these companies have invested millions in studying how our brains react to certain stimuli and have modified their platforms to try and make us addicted. Now social networks are a source of so-called fomo (fear of missing out) as well as ads and fake news; an infinite scroll with the sole objective of retaining our attention as long as possible by exposing us to content that generates “engagement”. The main source of profit of these platforms is data extraction; data obtained by keeping us on their platforms, in order to generate user profiles and sell them to different advertisers or companies. This business model thankfully now seems to be reaching its end, and we can see a trend towards the subscription format as the next source of profit.

The reality is that social media, and by extension authoritarian messaging, have indeed managed to attract and capture our attention. It is estimated that 77% of Internet users are active on one of the Meta platforms. In addition, it should be noted that it is us, the users, who generate the content, interaction and data that these companies use to make money. They turn us into workers without salary and rights, since the work of content creators is not regulated. It is also true that maintaining, improving and moderating these platforms costs money, even though there are fewer and fewer moderation controls, and the ethical terms of publication are modified according to political interests.

The fallacy of free Internet services is costing us dearly, since today we have lost control of our personal data, which in many cases can identify us among thousands of people. Information is power, and it is worth remembering the story told by Marta Peirano: “During the interwar period in Europe, the Dutch state had a census that also recorded how many Catholics, how many Protestants and how many Jews there were in the country. So when the Nazis came, they had already done their ‘homework’ and only 10% of Dutch Jews survived the Holocaust.” The problem with that data is not only that a person or a company is collecting, analyzing and using it today to sell us something. The bigger problem is that we don’t know how it will be used in the future.

A vast majority of social media users are partially aware of these issues. So we have to ask ourselves why we are still on these platforms. We must start from the premise that people are not stupid, in many cases we are not even ignorant, we simply have other priorities. Many of us use social networks to disconnect, to keep up with “trends” or fleeting news that matter very little in our actual day to day lives. Many of us have built great networks over the years on a personal or professional level, and many others feel comfortable on platforms that we know inside out. The issue is not to choose one social network over another, but to do so knowing what we are giving up and what we expose ourselves to when we make a choice. It is true that there are also those who cling to worn-out arguments to justify their choice. Fallacies such as not losing visibility on X or not abandoning those “digital spaces of struggle” to the ultra-right. Anyone who creates content knows that it is very difficult to achieve success on these networks without having premium accounts or dedicating a frenetic pace to publishing. The algorithms of these platforms may be opaque, but we all observe how they prioritize content that interests their owners or aligns with their economic interests.

The Fediverse, an alternative to commercial social networks

The word Fediverse comes from the words “federation” and “diverse/universe” and it includes a set of services that operate federated in a decentralized interoperable network. Here are some examples to facilitate the understanding of the main characteristics of the Fediverse, which are federation, decentralization and interoperability.

The Fediverse is decentralized, which means that for each of the existing social networks there can be more than one server or instance, as they are commonly called. In fact, those with the right knowledge can create their own instance of one of the social networks. The benefits of decentralization are many, among them we have the distribution of data load and Internet consumption, and dismantling the need for large data centers. The users’ information is distributed across different servers and is not under the control of a single company. Furthermore, if one of the nodes goes down for any reason, users can always migrate to another instance and continue with their accounts.

Federation allows us to unite with those instances that are aligned with our principles. In this way, one instance that federates with another can act as a bridge between several instances, connecting us in a network. When one instance does not adhere to the moderation principles of another, it can be blocked. When an instance gives room for denigrating behavior or actions against people’s rights, it is usually blocked by the rest and thus isolated from the network.

Interoperability means that the different services can communicate with each other because they all share the same protocol, called Activitypub. Imagine that from your Facebook account you could see tweets from X and follow Instagram accounts, without having to open an account on each of these social networks. This is exactly what happens between the various Fediverse social networks and those commercial ones that adopt the ActivityPub protocol, such as Threads and WordPress. Technically, all the platforms that include the protocol are part of the Fediverse since they can communicate with each other. Although we must underline the great procedural and structural differences between proprietary software, for example Threads owned by Meta and the rest of the Fediverse native programs.

The case of BlueSky is special, since it developed its own protocol called AT and declined to include the ActivityPub protocol, so we cannot consider this platform part of the Fediverse. Currently there are “bridge” programs that link BlueSky publications with those of the Fediverse.

It is necessary to highlight the other differences between BlueSky and Mastodon, its Fediverse counterpart. Mastodon is a social network maintained by a set of volunteers and funded through donations, which are managed under the umbrella of a non-profit company (Mastodon gGmbH). The Russian-German programmer Eugen Rochko developed Mastodon from the outset under the principles of free software, betting on the decentralization of the Fediverse as an infrastructure. BlueSky, on the other hand, was born as a startup in Silicon Valley, thanks to a $36 million financial boost from Big Tech and cryptocurrency investors. Its code is not fully released and is under the MIT license, while its infrastructure is not decentralized, despite the promises of its developers.

Fediverse instances are created and maintained mainly by their own community and some volunteers. They have to cover the server, electricity and Internet as essential requirements. That is why it is important to support the instance in which one participates with financial contributions. Another point to take into account is that each instance establishes its own rules and is moderated manually by its administrators. In the Fediverse there are no recommendation or prohibition algorithms. There are filters for moderating, but none of them are automatic. This implies a fairly high voluntary workload, so co-responsibility of the users in these platforms to comply with the agreed rules and contribute to a good environment in the network are essential.

As there are no recommendation algorithms at the beginning, it can be a bit difficult to find the community you want. In the Fediverse, we will be the ones to build our timeline little by little, no one will direct our attention. We have to go back to searching by tags and diving into the network to find what we are interested in. In fact, there are campaigns to recommend accounts among users (for example, at Mastodon, it is a practice we do every Friday with the hashtag #FridayFollow) as well as directories of accounts to start following. This is one of the most difficult aspects for people coming from commercial social networks, as our timelines are initially boring and won’t build without our time and dedication but they also protect us from getting hooked on an infinite scroll.

Certainly, the Fediverse is more complex than the social networks proposed by Big Tech, but it also offers us many more options adapted to the needs of each user. There are different social networks among which we find microblogging with Mastodon or Pleroma (Twitter or BlueSky), sharing photos with Pixelfed (Instagram), having a profile on Friendica (Facebook), or watching videos on Peertube (Youtube). Each of these may have multiple instances that often bring people together by common interests (instances with LGBTQ+ community themes, video games or art) or by language (English, Spanish or Italian). One of the most important steps is to choose an instance in which you feel comfortable, both with the principles and rules it has and the topics you are interested in. But don’t worry too much, one of the advantages of the Fediverse is that you can migrate your accounts from one instance to another, keeping your followers and who you follow, although you will not be able to migrate the content of your posts.

Notes

1.  “Big Tech” is the name given to the largest technology companies on the planet, including GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, and Microsoft) for the Western world and BATX (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and Xiaomi) for the Chinese sphere of influence. ↩︎
2. Fediverse: a set of social networking services that can communicate with each other using a common protocol. ↩︎
3. Mastodon is a microblogging social network operating similarly to X (formerly Twitter). ↩︎