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[This is an opinionated piece by Renée DiResta, associate research professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown in the U.S.]

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Today [...] user exodus [from large platforms like Facebook and Twitter] to smaller platforms has become increasingly common — especially from X, the once-undisputed home of The Discourse. X refugees have scattered and settled again and again: to Gab and Truth Social, to Mastodon and Bluesky.

What ultimately splintered social media wasn’t a killer app or the Federal Trade Commission — it was content moderation. Partisan users clashed with “referees” tasked with defining and enforcing rules like no hate speech, or making calls about how to handle Covid-19 content. Principles like “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach” — which proposed that “borderline” content (posts that fell into grey areas around hate speech, for example) remain visible but unamplified — attempted to articulate a middle ground. However, even nuanced efforts were reframed as unreasonable suppression by ideologues who recognized the power of dominating online discourse. Efforts to moderate became flashpoints, fueling a feedback loop where online norms fed offline polarization — and vice versa.

And so, in successive waves, users departed for alternatives: platforms where the referees were lax (Truth Social), nearly nonexistent (Telegram) or self-appointed (Mastodon). Much of this fracturing occurred along political lines. Today the Great Decentralization is accelerating, with newspapers of record, Luke Skywalker and others as the latest high-profile refugees to lead fresh retreats.

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The federated nature of emerging alternatives, like Mastodon and Bluesky — platforms structured as a network of independently-run servers with their own users and rules, connected by a common technological protocol — offers a potential future in which communities spin up their own instances (or servers) with their own rules.

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It was once novel features … that drew users to social media sites. Now, it’s frequently ideological alignment.

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For years, loyalty to major platforms was less about affection and more about structural realities; monopolistic dominance and powerful network effects left social media users with few realistic alternatives. There weren’t many apps with the features, critical mass or reach to fulfill users’ needs for entertainment, connection or influence. Politicians and ideologues, too, relied on the platforms’ scale to propagate their messages. People stayed, even as their dissatisfaction simmered.

And so, voice was the answer. Politicians and advocacy groups pressured companies to change policies to suit their side’s needs — a process known as “working the refs” (referees) among those who study content moderation. In 2016, for example, “Trending Topicsgate” saw right-wing influencers and partisan media chastise Facebook for allegedly downranking conservative headlines on its trending topics feature. The outrage cycle worked: Facebook fired its human news curators and remade the system. (Their replacement, an algorithm, quickly busied itself spreading outrageous and untrue headlines, including from Macedonian troll factories, until the company ultimately decided to kill the feature.) Left-leaning organizations ref-worked over the years as well, applying pressure to maximize their interests.

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The Great Decentralization — the migration away from large, centralized one-size-fits-all platforms to smaller, ideologically distinct spaces — is fueled by political identity and dissatisfaction. [...] These [decentralized] platforms prioritize something foundationally distinct from their predecessors: federation. Unlike centralized platforms, where curation and moderation are controlled from the top down, federation relies on decentralized protocols — ActivityPub for Mastodon (which Threads also supports) and the AT Protocol for Bluesky — that enable user-controlled servers and devolve moderation (and in some cases, curation) to that community level. This approach doesn’t just redefine moderation; it restructures online governance itself. And that is because, writ large, there are no refs to work.

The trade-offs are important to understand. If centralized platforms with their centrally controlled rules and algorithms are “walled gardens,” federated social media might best be described as “community gardens,” shaped by members connected through loose social or geographical ties and a shared interest in maintaining a pleasant community space.

In the fediverse, users can join or create servers aligned with their interests or communities. They are usually run by volunteers, who manage costs and set rules locally. Governance is federated as well: While all ActivityPub servers, for example, share a common technological protocol, each sets its own rules and norms, and decides whether to interact with — or isolate from — the broader network. For example, when the avowedly Nazi-friendly platform Gab adopted Mastodon’s protocol in 2019, other servers defederated from it en masse, cutting ties and preventing Gab’s content from reaching their users. Yet Gab persisted and continued to grow, highlighting one of federation’s important limitations: defederation can isolate bad actors, but it doesn’t eliminate them.

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Protocol-based platforms offer a significant potential future for social media: digital federalism, where local governance aligns with specific community norms, yet remains loosely connected to a broader whole. For some users, the smaller scale and greater control possible on federated platforms is compelling.

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While federation offers users more autonomy and fosters diversity, it makes it significantly harder to combat systemic harms or coordinate responses to threats like disinformation, harassment or exploitation. Moreover, because server administrators can only moderate locally — for example, they can only hide content on the server they operate — posts from one server can spread across the network onto others, with little recourse.

Posts promoting harmful pseudoscience (“drinking bleach cures autism”) or doxxing can persist unchecked on some servers, even if others reject or block the content. People who have become convinced that “moderation is censorship” may feel that this is an unmitigated win, but users across the political spectrum have consistently expressed a desire for platforms to address fake accounts and false or violent content.

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There is also the looming question of economics [with regard to federated networks]. Federated alternatives must be financially sustainable if they intend to persist. Right now, Bluesky is primarily fueled by venture capital; it has broached having paid subscriptions and features in the future. But if the last two decades of social media experimentation have taught us anything, it’s that economic incentives inevitably have an outsized impact on governance and user experience.

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Federated platforms will give us the freedom to curate our online experience, and to create communities where we feel comfortable. They represent more than a technological shift — they’re an opportunity for democratic renewal in the digital public sphere. By returning governance to users and communities, they have the potential to rebuild trust and legitimacy in ways that centralized platforms no longer can. However, they also run the risk of further splintering our society, as users abandon those shared spaces where broader social cohesion may be forged.

The Great Decentralization is a digitalized reflection of our polarized politics that, going forward, will also shape them.