The Network of Alternative Social Media Researchers

PeerSoN: The First Alternative Social Media System?

Robert W. Gehl, 10 Oct 2025

PeerSoN was the first alternative social media system.

Along with Roel Roscam Abbing, I have a paper coming out on the history of alternative social media, and in the course of our research, we came across PeerSon.

First discussed in 2008, PeerSon was intended to be an encrypted, peer-to-peer social networking system. According to its website, which is still online, its creators were exploring

a paradigm shift from client-server to a peer-to-peer infrastructure coupled with encryption so that users keep control of their data and can use the social network also locally, without Internet access. This shift gives rise to many research questions intersecting networking, security, distributed systems and social network analysis, leading to a better understanding of how technology can support social interactions.

It was initially described in Doris Schiöberg’s 2008 Master’s thesis (and you can see that document, as well as other PeerSon documents, in the ASM bibliography).

What makes it the first alternative social media? I’m going to hang my argument entirely on the very last sentence of Schiöberg’s thesis:

Depending on the results of the evaluation, it is even possible to bring this project to the real world and offer a privacy saving alternative for Facebook, Orkut, StudiVZ, etc. (44)

This is the earliest document I have found where a maker of what we now call “social media” makes a claim that they are making an alternative to corporate social media.

Caveats

Let’s states some caveats, though.

First of all, I tend to subscribe to Foucauldian genealogical methods, and Foucault famously warns against the hunt for origins – particularly the origin as somehow a pure, unadulturated version of what we currently have. Instead of finding some pure origin, the task is to trace disparate threads forward to create histories of the present. I’m kind of violating that idea here.

Second, I can read Spanish and English, and I do believe I found a very early example of the concept of “alternative social media” in English. But it stands to reason someone somewhere came up with a cognate concept in another language. Or it could have been written in English or Spanish on a long-lost blog.

Third, you might argue that social media and online social networking sites are distinct. I do tend to collapse the two, but keeping a distinction between them can lead to some insights. But I’m just going to call PeerSon social media – since the intersection of social networking among connected people and sharing media has always been blurry, starting at least with Firefly in the mid-1990s.

Finally, the example in question doesn’t really say much about what it means to be “alternative social media” beyond using the word “alternative” and calling the project a “paradigm shift.” The documents about PeerSon just mention of the idea, really. For deeper analysis of “alternatives,” I think that the Unlike Us events, starting 2011, kicked off that line of thinking.

Still, Doris Schiöberg’s thesis is a fascinating early document of the area of study we ASM scholars are exploring.

More about PeerSon

According to Schiöberg’s thesis, sites like Facebook have two key problems: they are centralized, and they violate people’s privacy. That thesis cites problems we have come to see as all too common: behavioral advertising, studies on user data done without consent, and surveillance technologies (such as Facebook Beacon). In addition, Schiöberg also notes that corporate social media users cannot take their social graphs with them if they wish to leave.

“In conclusion,” Schiöberg says, “we note that current social networks have a privacy leak.”

The obvious solution, Schiöberg and her colleagues suggest, is encrypted, peer-to-peer social networking:

Our proposal for tackling the privacy leak is to give the user back the control over his [sic] data by decentralizing the system and using certain encryption mechanisms to make the data accessible only to authorized people. We do so by replacing the server in an online social network with a distributed system of a peer-to-peer network.

PeerSon thus inaugurates a major strand of alternative social media: distributed, encrypted systems that shift data to end clients. The logic is very legible with we think about this period’s focus on “the social graph”: if the social graph is meant to be friend-to-friend-to-family member, then why is there a server at the center? This reminds me of Aral Balkan’s “man in the middle” critique. PeerSon – and many projects that follow it – tried to replace that server with a peer-to-peer network, where a client/device acts as an agent for the user.

But, as Schiöberg observes, such a system must also provide most of Facebook et al’s features. “The challenge is to develop an infrastructure that gives us the possibility to keep as many of the features of existing OSNs, such as Facebook, while eliminating all privacy problems.” This is a perspective that is decidedly linked with alternative social media: it’s about making something that is legible as social media, while trying to stave off the problems of corporate social media.

So, where is PeerSon now?

Building a fully distributed, end-to-end encrypted alternative to Facebook is no easy task. I see no evidence PeerSon achieved much more than some experimental prototypes. Later projects, like Twister, would get closer, and current projects like Secure Scuttlebutt are working on the problem.

Ultimately, I find projects like PeerSon fasciating – whether or not they ever were built. As I always tell people, you can learn a great deal about social media if you look at alternatives, including defunct ones.