Online Safety and the “Great Decentralization” – The Perils and Promises of Federated Social Media
Samantha Lai is a senior research analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Technology and International Affairs Program, and Yoel Roth is a Non-Resident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Head of Trust & Safety at Match Group.
Decentralized social media platforms offer the promise of alternative governance structures that empower consumers and rebuild social media on a foundation of trust. However, over two years after Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter sparked an exodus of users seeking new homes on the social web, federated platforms remain ill-equipped to meet the threats of abuse, harassment, coordinated manipulation, and spam that have plagued social media for years. Given the porous nature of decentralized services, these limitations will not just affect individual servers, but reverberate through the social web.
These are not unrealized fears from a faraway future, but a creeping reality. Already, signs of inauthentic behavior can be found on federated platforms. Take, for example, pravda.me, an instance of the federated social media platform Mastodon that had over 17,000 active users in 2023. According to the metadata the instance’s operators provide to the Mastodon network, pravda.me is hosted in Saint Petersburg, Russia, home of the disbanded Internet Research Agency (IRA), the infamous “troll factory” responsible for meddling in American elections in 2016.
