It is impossible for a democratic system to continue functioning when voters are unable to make informed choices. Unfortunately our social media ecosystem has morphed into something that actively interferes with having an accurately informed electorate. (Not that social media is the only thing working against having reasonably informed voters, it’s just the topic I’m addressing today.)
Aside from the issue of short-circuiting our attention with algorithms designed to promote from scrolling we have seen social media grow in the 21st century from non-existent to hardly influential when compared to traditional media to a dominant force in our information ecosystem. Over the last 3 presidential election cycles we have also seen social media being actively used to manipulate public perception by both foreign and domestic actors, primarily Facebook in 2016 and primarily Twitter/X in 2020 and 2024.
After 2016 and 2020 we concluded that social media companies needed to take some responsibility to halt the spread of disinformation on their platforms but Elon Musk proved in the 2024 cycle through his takeover/purchase and subsequent transformation of Twitter/X that any centralized social media platform is at risk of being used to poison the well of public information.
There are currently two open source protocols capable of powering a truly decentralized social media platform: ActivityPub and AT. ActivityPub powers the Fediverse ecosystem (Mastodon, PeerTube, Pixelfed, Frendica and a host of other platforms). AT powers Bluesky. As Musk has made X progressively less welcoming to a wide range of perspectives users have sought out other options users largely have two unsatisfactory options: Fediverse (primarily Mastodon where the Twitter #eXodous is concerned) with its lack of a universal front door for signing up which was confusing to too many potential users, and Bluesky which has a lower barrier to entry with its one point for users to sign up and get started but is still at risk of an Elon Musk style takeover at some point as it is not truly decentralized and it is still driven by an algorithm (which many users have become understandably way about after their Twitter feeds were forcibly mutilated by Musk).
One thing we need for social media is for either 1: the Fediverse (or individual Fediverse platforms) to get a centralized entry point for regular users, or 2: AT to be adopted across an array of platforms (similar to the Fediverse) to mitigate or eliminate the risk of someone turning it into X 2.0, or 3: a bridge between the two open source platforms that would allow users on both sides to interact in a robust way with each other. In fact, the perfect solution would be for all three of those things to happen.
