The second presenters in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City are Leonardo Foletto, Guilherme Flynn Paciornik, and Damny Laya, whose focus is on the Brazilian Fediverse, and on what happens after people move from corporate platforms to the Fediverse environment.
This is understood as a case of decentralised deplatforming: the voluntary, horizontal migration of users and communities from corporate to non-corporate spaces. This is neither deplatforming nor replatforming, since it involves a collective but non-centralised migration mediated by open protocols and autonomous governance.
The team studied this through interviews with instance maintainers, rather than ordinary users, since these users embody the technical and political materiality of the federated network. Such interviews showed that monthly active users account for only one third of registered users on most instances, which may indicate dormant accounts or users leaving the platform altogether.
More privacy and data protection, greater control over the algorithm, and better content moderation are key motivators for moving to such federated platforms; a lack of a critical mass of users and content, the steep learning curve compared to other platforms, and an addition to Big Tech algorithms and affordances seem to be the main reasons for why they don’t stay.
This complicates the narrative of decentralised replatforming as a straightforward act of resistance or escape. This remains a fragile process which faced considerable challenges and obstacles; these are also infrastructural constraints which may be especially pronounced in the Majority World where substantial underlying digital inequalities persist. More research is required to explore the gap between what users say they want from an alternative platform, and what actually keeps them engaged with them.
