What is it about?
Decentralized social media promises an alternative to platforms controlled by a single company, but does it actually give users more power? This paper examines four decentralized social media protocols—ActivityPub, AT Protocol, Farcaster, and Nostr—to understand how their designs shape online identity, content curation, and the data ownership. Through technical analysis and interviews, we argue that decentralization is not an end goal in itself, but a starting point for deeper questions about where power resides, how it is distributed, and who gets to shape the social networks we use.
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Photo by Eddi Aguirre on Unsplash
Why is it important?
As decentralized social media grows, labels like "open" or "user-controlled" don’t always show how a network works in practice. Our framework gives researchers and builders a shared way to compare different designs and understand their trade-offs. It can help readers assess new systems more carefully and guide choices that make networks more useful and accountable to the communities that rely on them.
Perspectives
This paper was a work in progress for over two years, and seeing the idea make it across the finish line is a testament to the importance of not giving up on an idea you believe in. I am deeply grateful to my three coauthors for their thoughtfulness, collaboration, and persistence in helping bring this work to completion. I hope the paper gives readers a useful way to think about the choices behind decentralized social media and encourages further conversation about who these systems serve and empower.
Tolulope Oshinowo
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Seeing the Politics of Decentralized Social Media Protocols, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, September 2026, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3816995.
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