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When a system becomes too tightly-controlled and centralized, the people being squeezed tend to push back to reclaim their lost autonomy. The internet is no exception. While the internet began as a loose affiliation of universities and government bodies, that emergent digital commons has been increasingly privatized and consolidated into a handful of walled gardens. Their names are too often made synonymous with the internet, as they fight for the data and eyeballs of their users.
In the past few years, there’s been an accelerating swing back toward decentralization. Users are fed up with the concentration of power, and the prevalence of privacy and free expression violations, and many users are fleeing to smaller, independently operated projects.
This momentum wasn’t only seen in the growth of new social media projects. Other exciting projects have emerged this year, and public policy is adapting.
Major gains for the Federated Social Web
After Elon Musk acquired Twitter (now X) at the end of 2022, many people moved to various corners of the “IndieWeb” at an unprecedented rate. It turns out those were just the cracks before the dam burst this year. 2023 was defined as much by the ascent of federated microblogging as it was by the descent of X as a platform. These users didn’t just want a drop-in replacement for twitter, they wanted to break the major social media platform model for good by forcing hosts to compete on service and respect.
The other major development in the fediverse came from a seemingly unlikely source—Meta.
This momentum at the start of the year was principally seen in the fediverse, with Mastodon. This software pr
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