Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ Seeing the Politics of Decentralized Social Media Protocols

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

The authors analyze four decentralized social media protocols - ActivityPub (used by Mastodon), AT Protocol (used by Bluesky), Nostr, and Farcaster - "to develop a novel conceptual framework for understanding how protocols operationalize decentralization." In particular, they describe "how control over key components becomes distributed differently across the protocols, allocating decision-making power over questions of identity, curation, and infrastructure." Decentralizing each of these assigns greater power to users, but often at the cost of complexity. Interesting discussion. 23 page PDF.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Jul 20, 2025 08:23 a.m.

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