A Brief History of Alternative Social Media Scholarship

Robert W. Gehl, 07 Feb 2025

Along with Roel Roscam Abbing, I am working on a paper, tentatively titled “What is ‘Alternative’ about Alternative Social Media?”. Our hope is to write something definitive – describing alternative social media (ASM) as an object and offering advice to those who wish to study it.

As part of this paper, we’ve surveyed the academic literature on ASM (as we’re defining it) and wrote a history of the field. Since this work is directly related to the Network of ASM Researchers, I figured I would post a draft version of the history here.

You should be able to find all the references made here in the bibliography, so I won’t put a full bibliography in this post, but refer to that page.

The short summary of the field, as we see it, is:

• ~2008: Computer science work on decentralization
• 2011: Unlike Us events and book
• 2015: Articulation with alternative media
• 2017: Deplatforming and “alt-tech”
• 2020: Federated social media and governance
• 2025: Bluesky

Note that this is not a history of alternative social media as such. Rather, it’s a history of the research done in this area.

I’ll go through each in turn.

Computer Science Work on Decentralization

Starting roughly in 2008 (Ackermann et al. 2008; Schöberg 2008; Figueiredo et al. 2008), we see a steady interest in W3C, ACM, and IEEE conferences in exploring the making of decentralized social media. There are (as of our estimate at this time) ~18 papers that appear in this area between 2008-2012, and of course the work has continued up to this day.

The predominant concerns in this work are about centralization, privacy, and proprietary control of user data and infrastructure. Most of the papers discuss these concerns in relation to Twitter and Facebook. In response, the authors of the papers tend to propose peer-to-peer (P2P) networking as the solution to these problems (e.g., Buchegger et al. 2009; Buchegger and Datta 2009).

Immediately, we can see this work as alternative social media scholarship in the sense that they are written in relation to dominant social media. These works tend to argue that corporate social media have too much power, and that P2P systems would shift it back to end users. Much of this makes sense – social media at the time was often understood in a “social networking” framework, where real-world social connections were mapped in digital media. Peer-to-peer applications would route connections directly instead of through a centralized “man in the middle.”

However, the works do not tend to say more about the power of corporate social media beyond “they are centralized” and “there is no privacy in them.” In other words, it is hard to view this work is particularly critical. I would consider this period almost “prehistorical” in ASM scholarship – the projects strike me as pursuing an interesting networking challenge instead of explicitly challenging the power of corporate social media.

For a useful review of this period, I’d recommend Narayanan et al (2012).

The Unlike Us Events

Roel and I argue that ASM scholarship as such really starts with the the Unlike Us series of conferences. Inaugurated by Geert Lovink and Korinna Patelis in 2011, Unlike Us held three events and published a collection of essays (Lovink and Rasch 2013).

Unlike Us established alternative social media scholarship as the critical analysis of social media built to explicitly challenge mainstream social media. It did so in two ways. First was developing a fuller critique of corporate social media. Unlike Us was unflinching in this regard, referring to corporate social as dangerous monopolies – a remarkable feat at a time when Facebook and Twitter were being hailed as spreaders of democracy, particularly during the Arab Spring.

Second was a call for alternatives to emerging corporate monopolies. Four of the 31 chapters of the Unlike Us reader explicitly focus on alternative social media, and many other chapters gesture towards alternatives (Barocas et al. 2013; Sevignani 2013; van der Velden 2013; Cabello, Franco, and Haché 2013).

For such chapters to exist, the authors had to have something they could reasonably refer to as “alternative social media.” Unlike Us authors referenced several systems – particularly diaspora*, Lorea, Crabgrass, and GNU social. Lorea, a system closely tied to the 15M social movement in Spain, is discussed in an Unlike Us chapter by several of its activist user/developers (Cabello, Franco, and Haché 2013). diaspora* is another notable case. Founded by four New York University students in 2010, the project was inspired by a presentation from legal scholar Eben Moglen, who warned the audience about the growing power of Facebook (Sevignani 2013). Both Lorea and diaspora* were designed to be a decentralized, self-hosted social media systems – they were in fact federated systems.

ASM as Alternative Media

This is a bit self-serving of me, but if I had to point to my main contribution to this field of study, it would be articulating “alternative social media” with broader histories of alternative media (Gehl 2015). Drawing on alternative media theory, I argued in 2015 that alternative social media carries on the goals of older alternatives, such as citizens’ radio, underground newspapers, and web forums: they mix democratic production with “radical, progressive, socialist, anarchist, feminist, queer, or anti-racist” content (Gehl 2015, 2).

In doing so, I was following an implicit thread from Unlike Us: the idea that alternative social media would naturally be aligned with the politics of the left. Indeed, my contribution here really stems directly from the work found in Unlike Us.

Deplatforming and Alt-Tech

However, my work on ASM in the mid-2015s had a big blind spot.

As Kristoffer Holt demonstrates, alternative media can just as easily be deployed by the political right. This includes alternative social media.

Particularly after the 2016 US presidential election and the Brexit campaign in the UK, many alternative social media scholars have turned attention to the rise of “alt-tech” or “alt-right” social media (Zuckerman and Rajendra-Nicolucci 2021; Dehghan and Nagappa 2022; Kor-Sins 2023).

Deplatforming became a concern, particularly when emboldened far-right actors were removed from Twitter, Youtube, or Meta properties in violation of hate speech rules (Rogers 2020; Shaughnessy et al. 2024). New alternatives, such as Parler, Rumble, and Gab, marketed themselves as free speech havens for those who were removed from mainstream social media (Jasser et al. 2021).

Thus, in stark contrast with earlier alternative social media scholarship, which tended to assume that the alternatives would be progressive, the alt-tech scholarship tended to reduce “alternative social media” to “alt-right social media” (Stocking et al. 2022). I myself critiqued this as too reductive (Gehl 2022).

However, this shift in scholarship has had a hidden benefit. It introduces another aspect of alternative social media that was largely missing in the earlier literature: governance. Much of the earliest scholarship focused on how technical elements such as free and open source software and decentralized architectures would shift power away from corporate social media to end users, but had less to say about how those users might govern themselves. The studies of deplatforming and the alt-right started the exploration of how the technologies of alternative social media would be used in political ways.

Federated Social Media and Governance

This brings us up to today, when much of the latest work focuses on the fediverse. Contrasting visions about allowing for free speech versus strong content moderation in alternative social media has flourished with the rise of ActivityPub-based federated social media.

In contrast to alt-right alternative social media which tout individual freedom of speech, fediverse communities often collectively develop content moderation standards. Particularly due to Mastodon, many fediverse servers articulate the technical structure of decentralization with the cultural practice of codes of conduct (Gehl and Zulli 2022).

Observing this, Mansoux and Roscam Abbing note that the fediverse relies on “neither the model of privacy where technically inclined individuals are in full command of their own communications, nor the model whereby the multitude believes they have ‘nothing to hide’ simply because they have no say nor control over the systems they depend on” (Mansoux and Roscam Abbing 2020, 133). Instead, Mansoux and Roscam Abbing argue the fediverse has a “a social understanding of privacy” which makes the fediverse into “a working laboratory in which questions of social organization and governance can no longer pretend to be decoupled from software” (Mansoux and Roscam Abbing 2020, 134).

Scholarship exploring social organization and governance on federated social media has blossomed in the past few years, particularly after the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk in late 2022 (e.g., Struett et al. 2024; Roth and Lai 2024; Cramer, Maxam III, and Davis 2025).

Part of this work is reflexive, focusing on how alternative social media communities can be co-producers of research. Gow’s (2022) work on technology stewardship and Roscam Abbing’s (2022) participatory design are key works here.

This line of inquiry has also been extended to other alternative systems, such as Scuttlebutt (Mannell and Smith 2022). Related work on how alternative social media may prevent or contribute to the spread of misinformation is also emerging (Frost-Arnold 2024).

What’s Next?

Obviously, the explosion of interest in Bluesky is resulting in a wave of new scholarship on AT proto and Bsky.app (e.g., Failla and Rossetti 2024; Balduf et al. 2024). I think it’s too soon to characterize this line of research, but I would be willing to bet the best work will come from scholars affiliated with the Network of Alternatives Social Media Researchers.

In other words: watch this space!