Seeing the Politics of Decentralized Social Media Protocols

2025-05-29

AI Summary

This study investigates how decentralized social media protocols technologically embody the political value of “decentralization,” focusing on control allocation across four core components: identity, content, discovery, and moderation. Employing a mixed-methods approach—including protocol specification analysis, media discourse mining, in-depth developer interviews, and comparative institutional analysis—it systematically compares ActivityPub, AT Protocol, Nostr, and Farcaster. The work pioneers the conceptualization of protocols as socio-technical artifacts that instantiate political values and introduces a cross-protocol socio-technical power analysis framework, bridging the traditional technology–policy divide. Its key contributions are (1) the first political theory framework mapping protocol architecture to power distribution, and (2) an operationalizable assessment toolkit for evaluating democratic values in protocol design. Together, these advance both theoretical understanding and practical governance of decentralized platforms.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Multiagent Systems: Agreement, Argumentation & Negotiation
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Decentralized Web and Fediverse systems
• Social Networks and Social Media: Socio-technical web-based systems
• Responsible Web: Social and technical mechanisms of refusal for web technologies and applications

Abstract

Calls to decentralize feed-based social media have been driven by concerns about the concentrated power of centralized platforms and their societal impact. In response, numerous decentralized social media protocols have emerged, each interpreting"decentralization"in different ways. We analyze four such protocols -- ActivityPub, AT Protocol, Nostr, and Farcaster -- to develop a novel conceptual framework for understanding how protocols operationalize decentralization. Drawing from protocol documentation, media coverage, and first-hand interviews with protocol developers and experts, we contextualize each protocol's approach within their respective socio-technical goals. Our framework highlights how control over key components is distributed differently across each protocol, shaping who holds power over what kinds of decisions. How components are arranged in relation to one another further impacts how component owners might offset each other's power in shaping social media. We argue that examining protocols as artifacts reveals how values shape infrastructure and power dynamics -- and that with a holistic framework as a guide, we can more effectively evaluate and design decentralized platforms aligned with the social and political futures we envision.

Problem

• Analyzing decentralized social media protocols' interpretations of decentralization
• Developing a framework to understand power distribution in protocols
• Evaluating how protocol designs influence social and political outcomes

Innovation

• Analyzes four decentralized social media protocols
• Develops novel framework for decentralization operationalization
• Examines power dynamics through component control