Growing the open social web

This short position statement was prepared for the FediForum Growing the Open Social Web Un-Workshop, which is held online on March 2, 2026.

The question is: why do we want to grow the open social web, and for whom? Presumably we don't want to become just another in a long line of gatekeepers.

If the open social web is an alternative social network — Twitter but without the corporate structure — then why will it succeed this time when we have multiple decades of failed attempts behind us?

Is it because Elon Musk owns Twitter now and American technology companies are increasingly allied with Trump? That seems like a failure of imagination: not only does it define the open social web in terms of what it’s not — it’s not Twitter, not Trump, not American big tech — there will come a time when neither Musk nor Trump are as dominant as they are today and those oppositions matter far less.

We’ve seen a lot of projects along the lines of “Twitter but European”, “Twitter but Canadian”, and so on, but these are very brittle provocations. While they do address risks posed by an America-centric internet, they don’t at all speak to why this is actually valuable to real communities, real people, real movements. They take the same power dynamics and transplant them across borders. Nothing fundamentally changes except the nationality of those involved. That’s not without value, but so much more is possible.

The real value is in the protocols themselves — but only if we can share ownership of them.

There are billions of people who are not well served by the existing social web, particularly in global majority countries. Open social web protocols have the potential to allow them to not just build communities that better address their needs, with features and cultural assumptions that veer far from US and European norms, but to own them. These aren’t communities that need to be spoken down to or harvested by American projects and non-profits; they haven’t been spoken to at all, except as communities to strip-mine by companies like Meta.

They need to be first-party participants in the communities that are building the open social web. Palestinians should be building ActivityPub. People of African nations should not just be running PDS servers but defining the protocols that rule them. The Kalaallit in Greenland are dominated by Facebook, their online communications templated to American norms even as America seeks to acquire their land. We don’t just need Mastodon; we need thousands of Mastodons, open source projects built in their own ways by their own communities, supporting a plurality of cultures, assumptions, and norms.

There are plenty of communities building technology in all corners of the globe. They are the future of the social web. Are our standards bodies, communities, documentation, libraries, events, and conversations accessible to them? They need to be. Do the assumptions built into our protocols support their cultural needs? They must. The only way to achieve that is to not just co-design with them but distribute equity. They must be full co-owners of the open social web.

That also means there’s a role for funders. Undeniably, the US has been the center because that’s where the money is. Building a more global open social web creates a world where communications, memes, and the flow of news and information are not dominated by the interests of one country. The most important place to start is the people who have been served the least well. Grant-makers need to understand this and need to provide funding to communities in the global majority, who in turn need to build their own networks and make their own decisions. We should take a position of being of service to them, and be honored if we can help.