Decentralization as Democratization: Mastodon as an Alternative to Platform Power

An oft-heard criticism of the digital age is that too much power is concentrated in the hands of too few individuals. An infrastructure that is both democratic and designed to serve the common good, particularly one utilized by social platforms, conflicts fundamentally with the business models of large commercial platforms. Unsurprisingly, current debates about common-good alternatives to the standard commercial platforms are thus increasingly focusing on the so-called fediverse. As a portmanteau combining the words “federation” and “universe,” the term “fediverse” refers to a collection of interoperable, decentralized social networks and other online services that are independent but able to communicate with each other. 

By moving away from profit-oriented logics, decentralized networks for the purpose of communication pose a genuine threat to dominant power structures. As decisions relevant to technical design, user management, and content moderation are now distributed among various instances (i.e., communities with their own rules and culture), the focus is once again on communication and interaction, rather than advancing the profit maximization of platform economies.