Adam Retchless, Ph. D.

Throughout our history, we’ve cherished the freedom to share information and opinions but often felt that “freedom of the press belongs only to those who own one”. The Internet changed this by providing inexpensive publishing options — first webpages and blogs, then social media. Social media is now central to how news spreads in our society, including health-related science and the rallying cries of politicians.

But instead of guaranteeing a voice for everyone, the social media revolution resulted in a handful of big tech companies acting as publisher for the entire nation (and world), while disrupting the traditional newspaper industry. Many important public discussions now take place within walled gardens, where each social media service not only provides the technical means of communicating with others, but also controls access to the audience they have gathered. These service provider can bury or amplify our messages as they see fit, for whatever purpose, and typically without explanation.

The power of these opaque and monopolistic companies threatens our ability to act as informed citizens and consumers. By tying the community of users to a specific platform, the dominant companies severely limit our ability to choose better service providers. This allows them to act as middlemen for our social interactions online and consequently reap monopoly-like profits while wielding immense political influence. Despite much hand-wringing about “social media bias” from politicians and billionaires, their proposals don’t promote fairness, freedom, or honesty on social media; instead, they’d simply amplify the voices of their own allies and increase their own power. The only real proposal for letting regular people shape their own social media has been in the form of federated social networks like Mastodon. Mastodon is a micro-blogging platform (like Twitter) that is built according to an open standard managed by the World Wide Web Consortium, called ActivityPub. This open standard not only empowers anyone to set up their own Mastodon server, but to build any type of software for sharing messages with Mastodon accounts.

ActivityPub is already being used to share media (writing, photos, videos) and organize discussion boards. This collection of interoperable services is known as the “fediverse” (a portmanteau of “federated” and “universe”) and even includes Meta’s new “Threads” service and the Ghost publishing platform. BlueSky is another micro-blogging platform that likewise embraces federation, but it only works with ActivityPub platforms indirectly. Federation opens up countless opportunities for innovation, letting software developers create new services that work with the existing social network rather than needing to build a critical mass of users before the software has any value.

Many organizations and individuals have established Mastodon servers for their own communities, but all of them work together to connect users from different communities. Some servers aim to be general-interest services, but most are focused on specific communities, such as the Atlanta region (theATL.social), the medical profession (med-mastodon.com), or art lovers (Mastodon.ART). These servers may be hosted by community nonprofits, by membership-based clubs, by start-up businesses, or by large established institutions such as universities, corporations, or government agencies. Despite all this variety, they can all interact and share information, like websites and email servers do.

This variety of organizations and motivations is essential for establishing integrity in social media, just as it is for journalism. We must support a variety of media groups, who act independently and have real connections to the communities they serve, rather than relying on a few giant corporations and billionaires to spoon-feed us information. Social media is now part of our society, with all its advantages and disadvantages. Mastodon does not automatically solve the problems with present-day social media, but it creates choice that is currently missing from social media and creates the option for continual improvement of social media in which everyone can participate.