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With today’s news of a new leadership team for Mastodon, I thought it would be a good time to take stock of the state of the open social web.

I’m not new to this space, or an impartial observer: I co-founded Elgg, one of the first open source social networking platforms, over twenty years ago. It was used by governments, Fortune 500 companies, global NGOs, and universities, and embraced early open standards. Known, a social publishing platform I co-founded, was used by media companies to build award-winning communities. And I’m on the board of A New Social, a non-profit dedicated to bridging open social platforms.

What is the open social web?

When you think of social media, many of the platforms you think of are what we call proprietary: their underlying software is private to the companies that build them, and it’s very difficult to move your data or your connections anywhere else. They are, in a very real way, closed. The indie web movement goes so far as to call them silos.

These proprietary silos include:

X (formerly Twitter): now owned by Elon Musk, who actively promotes far-right voices on the platform and in its algorithms.

Meta’s platforms: chiefly Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp. (A caveat for Threads follows below.) Meta was, of course, credibly accused of substantially contributing to the genocide in Myanmar by Amnesty and others. Owners of pages across Meta properties increasingly find that they need to pay to reach their followers.

TikTok, which is now controlled by the Trump-aligned Ellison family.

LinkedIn, the business network owned by Microsoft, which has placed itself in the middle of many hiring and job-seeking processes, and whose professional subscription costs between $30 and $100 a month.

Anyone whose brand or livelihood depends on these networks has created risk for themselves: there’s nothing to stop any of them from changing their business policies in a detrimental way, as X did when it labeled NPR as state-affiliated media. Any of these networks could disappear, as TikTok almost did in the US before being strong-armed into selling its US business to a Trump ally. And referrals to websites could dry up, as happened in Canada when Meta stopped linking to news sites.

Proprietary silos each have an owner that can, ultimately, do what it wants with them. At best, that can mean that users receive content through curated feeds that might suppress certain kinds of content (including links to certain publishers) and promote others. At worst, it means that traffic and reach could disappear at any time.

In contrast, open social web platforms are designed not to be silos. While each platform is built by a core vendor or community, they run on open protocols that anyone can build software for.

Why should you care?

Remember AOL? That was a closed silo. To publish content, you needed to have a relationship with AOL the company. But you don’t need to have a relationship with anyone in particular to publish a website.

The open social web works the same way as the web itself: it’s permissionless. You don’t need to have a relationship with anyone in particular to have a profile and gain reach. And that means nobody can take it away from you.

Just as AOL became less and less relevant, because maintaining a relationship with AOL the company was more friction than simply publishing a website, silos will become less important and the open social web will become more important over time.

It’s early days in that movement. The user bases are still small in comparison. Today, these networks are still mostly filled with early adopters. In my direct experience working with ProPublica, they’re more likely to engage with journalism and information, more likely to donate to non-profit causes, and more likely to re-share according to their values — perhaps because they’re people who have self-selected to move away from proprietary silos. That means these networks are worth engaging with now — and because they will continue to grow, doing so is a good investment in the future.

So what are those open social web platforms and what is their status today?

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Prevailing open social web networks

There are two main open social web networks. This isn’t so much a rivalry as a technical consideration: each is based on a different open protocol.

I’ll describe them both in turn.

The Fediverse

You’ve probably heard of Mastodon. When Musk bought Twitter in late 2022, this was the first network that people flocked to, although it had been running for many years before that.

It can be hard for newcomers to get their head around. Whereas to join a silo network you just go to that network’s website and sign up, Mastodon is best thought of as a co-operative network of smaller communities, each with their own rules and culture. That means that signing up involves choosing a community you trust and signing up to that, which is a big ask. How, after all, do you know? In reality, you can’t go wrong by joining mastodon.social, the flagship community run by the project itself.

Source: Mastodon blog

But you don’t need to use Mastodon’s software to join the network. This brings us back to Meta’s Threads: it has support for the underlying protocol, so you can actually talk to and follow Mastodon users from there (and they can follow you). For publishers, Flipboard has become “a Fediverse browser” (particularly in tandem with its newsreader Surf, which I use every day), while the Newsmast Foundation is working to onboard newsrooms and surface trustworthy journalism on the network. Ghost and WordPress both now have extensive support (Ghost's keeps getting slicker and slicker). And there’s a long tail of other platforms like Bonfire and Friendica that are compatible, too, all powered by the underlying ActivityPub protocol.

Source: Flipboard Surf, via TechCrunch

Regardless, Mastodon is definitely the flagship. It’s also the only European major social network. A longtime German entity, its non-profit status was stripped some years ago (the team says it was never told why), and it’s now in transition to becoming a Belgian AISBL. Backers include Craig Newmark, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone (who once sat on the advisory board for Elgg, the open source social networking platform I co-founded), and Stack Overflow co-founder Jeff Atwood.

Critics say it hasn’t focused enough on user experience, that it feels too different from other networks, and that it can be a bit nerdier. The thing is, there’s still everything to play for here: a solid foundation, millions of dedicated users, and a governance and business model that’s very different to the Silicon Valley norm. And at the time of writing, Mastodon just announced a new executive team that includes a lead dedicated to the communities it runs. That new lead, Hannah Aubry, is incredibly important. Bluesky has made great strides by focusing on the culture of its own flagship site, and there’s much more that Mastodon could do here.

I’m personally more excited about Mastodon than ever. Even if it fails — which I don’t believe it will — it’s forging a brave and different path.

Quick facts about the Fediverse:

Flagship platform: Mastodon

Fastest place to sign up: mastodon.social

Other platforms: Ghost, Flipboard, Pixelfed, Friendica, etc

Funding model: Mastodon is becoming a Belgian non-profit. It also has a US 501(c)3 and an original German entity that it is moving away from. It is funded through donations and its own managed hosting services.

Advocacy groups: Social Web Foundation

Underlying protocol: ActivityPub

The ATmosphere

The network built on the AT Protocol — often playfully called “The ATmosphere” — functions a bit differently. On Mastodon, you join a neighborhood; on Bluesky, you rent a storage unit that any app can access.

Bluesky began as an internal Twitter project championed by then-CEO Jack Dorsey. Concerned about political pressure on Twitter’s content decisions, he imagined moving parts of the platform’s governance onto an open protocol that nobody could fully control. In that vision, Twitter itself might eventually run on the underlying protocol.

In its earliest phase, Bluesky was essentially a working group of open-source developers exploring what a “locked-open” social protocol might look like. Jay Graber quickly emerged as the clearest technical and organizational leader, and she ultimately convinced Dorsey to spin the project out as an independent company.

Because of that lineage, the flagship Bluesky app looks and feels like Twitter in many ways. When the site opened to the public, most of the people who left Elon Musk’s X chose Bluesky because it felt more familiar and easier to understand than Mastodon. Over time, the team found itself building not just a protocol, but a full social platform with moderation, recommendation features, and active community management. It’s now the de facto open social web network for journalists, writers, and other public intellectuals.

Source: Bluesky blog

Dorsey’s involvement has been a point of criticism, but ironically, Bluesky’s emphasis on community health is part of what pushed him away. His original aim was to avoid building trust and safety systems altogether: he sees moderation as a path to censorship rather than a requirement for healthy online spaces. Once Bluesky embraced trust and safety as core ethical work rather than something to outsource to the protocol, he walked away and shifted his support to Nostr, a more libertarian network designed to minimize moderation.

All of this sits on AT Protocol’s underlying model. While Mastodon is a series of federated communities, on Bluesky, every profile is actually a storage unit containing that user’s data. When you follow someone, you’re really subscribing to updates to their data. Other applications beyond the flagship Bluesky app can also write to your data store: Leaflet is a blogging platform, Graze lets you build custom feeds according to your interests, and so on.

Source: Graze blog

By default, your data is stored with Bluesky, but there are other options. The best known and in many ways the most exciting is Blacksky, Rudy Fraser’s Black-owned datastore and social application. Eurosky, meanwhile, is an emerging attempt to build outside of North American jurisdiction.

Quick facts about the ATmosphere:

Flagship platform: Bluesky

Fastest place to sign up: bsky.app

Other platforms: Blacksky, Graze, Leaflet, Flashes, etc

Funding model: Bluesky is a VC-funded startup that has raised at least $36M to date. It hasn’t deployed a business model yet.

Advocacy groups: Free Our Feeds

Underlying protocol: AT Protocol

Protocol TL;DR

If you don’t care about protocols at all, here’s the summary:

The Fediverse = small communities talking to each other

AT Protocol = personal data pods that apps plug into

Both = avoid lock-in, centralized power, and unpredictable corporate incentives

Other alternatives

The Fediverse and the ATmosphere aren’t the only open social web networks, although they are by far the most prominent.

Nostr and Farcaster have both attracted a crowd that’s heavy on crypto and libertarian ideologies. (diVine, funded by Dorsey and run by Twitter OG Rabble, rebuilds Vine on the Nostr network.) Jack Dorsey has poured money into Nostr in particular. Given his relationship with trust and safety, it shouldn’t be a surprise that these networks are very technically pure but low on community safety or culture-building.

Source: Nos Social blog

Meanwhile, Project Liberty is a $500M endeavor funded by Frank McCourt, which has built its own open social layer, Frequency. It’s also funded policy blueprints and real legislation designed to give users more control over their social media.

And the indie web, which builds decentralized social functionality on top of web fundamentals like HTML, should not be discounted. Its focus on a world where everyone’s profile is a website that is completely unique to them but can still communicate and share together has led to an enthusiastic community that’s been growing for over a decade. I think the indie web and the open social web are complimentary: you can build a following on the open social web and build an amazing indie web website that really represents you.

Working across networks

The protocols are not as important as the people and communities who connect across them. Part of the ethos of openness is that it’s not about building a “winner”: nobody should be locked into any platform or technology. These movements are also too young for everyone to have converged on one underlying protocol; we’re still at the early innovation stage.

I’m on the board of A New Social, a non-profit whose mission is to provide bridges between protocols, creating a single, unified open social web. Its product Bridgy Fed has long allowed you to follow Fediverse profiles on the ATmosphere and vice versa. And its new product, Bounce, allows you to easily move your profile from one network to the other, bringing your network with you. The result is even less lock-in: you can decide which network makes the most sense for you.

Earlier in this piece, I also mentioned Surf, which allows you to find news stories and conversations you care about across all the open social web networks. I’ve curated a feed of non-profit US newsrooms and one of investigative tech journalism that are also available as Bluesky feeds.

Buffer is one of many social scheduling tools that support both networks. Fedica allows you to analyze your stats and surfaces characteristics of your community.

These are the kinds of tools that could only exist on the open social web. A network like X would charge these providers a ton of money; others would simply block them as a threat to their business models. But on the open social web, where the open protocols are permissionless and open to all, they can thrive.

It’s not zero sum

There’s no reason you need to pick just one. Like many people, I maintain profiles on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as through my blog and on Threads, and I’ve found that the conversations across all of them are different. There’s a lot to be gained on each — but, again, Bridgy Fed and Bounce mean you can try one without worrying about missing out.

The most important thing is to take back ownership of your community and your relationships online. The silo networks have done their best to become intermediaries between you and your connections, forcing you to pay to reach people who have already subscribed to you. They’ve partnered with authoritarian governments and caused great harm through their negligence and blinkered self-interest.

Another world is possible, and it’s only just beginning. Go grab your profile and get started.

# preview.content
A comprehensive look at Mastodon, Bluesky, and the growing ecosystem of open, interoperable social networks.

# summary
A comprehensive look at Mastodon, Bluesky, and the growing ecosystem of open, interoperable social networks.