The final session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City for the day is a panel on alternative social media platforms, and starts with a look back at some of the old questions about independent and networked platforms to which the recent move to the Fediverse and other alternatives has returned us again.
We begin, though, with a paper by Robert Gehl, who presents a genealogy of these alternative platforms. The takeover and enxittification of Twitter by Elon Musk pushed many users to explore Mastodon, Bluesky, and other platforms running on their underlying protocols (such as Blacksky as an alternative to Bluesky); however, are these alternative social media really ‘platforms’ in any meaningful sense?
The Network of Alternative Social Media Researchers has begun to compile the histories of and literature on these social media. Platforms in this literature means computational platforms for applications (such as Android), political platforms, and platforms for visibility – but do any of these work for alternative social media?
To some extent, social media APIs and protocols might be understood as platforms for building alternative social media; but most alternative social media don’t just build on technological platforms, but also embed specific social protocols that may vary from instance to instance, and therefore build much more malleable systems – this is impossible when building on commercial systems and platforms. The only shaping of such platforms that is possible is by their corporate owners, for instance when Meta tweaks its algorithms.
Most alternative social media are overtly political instead, and so perhaps the ‘political platform’ understanding of platforms might be more appropriate here: each alternative social media instance represents a distinct political platform, from progressive (Mastodon) to fascist (Gab), even when they are based on the same infrastructural frameworks.
Further, are such alternative social media also platforms for visibility, then? In corporate social media, such visibility is really directed to capital: visibility is mined for corporate gain. Meanwhile, alternative social media are sometimes rejecting such visibility practices outright, going dark instead; others restrict visibility to local instances or close networks only. Meanwhile, they often make the work of content moderation more visible and transparent than it is elsewhere. This is not visibility as envisaged by corporate social media platforms.
So, perhaps the ‘platform’ metaphor is no longer particularly helpful here, and scholarship should abandon the term in favour of other terms, such as ‘systems’
