The Other Platforms: A Genealogy of Alternatives

Hello, AoIRFriends! I'm Robert Gehl, coming here from York University in Canada. I am going to talk about alternative social media and the platform metaphor.

There's been an explosion of interest in alternative social media ever since this guy bought Twitter.

In the months after Musk's purchase, millions of people tried out Mastodon, and while not all of them stuck around, Mastodon's member base is far, far above where it was in 2021.

Others tried out different corporate social media, such as Bluesky, and within that system emerged a Black-run, nonprofit microblogging service called Blacksky, which runs hardware and moderation independent of Bluesky and yet is fully reachable from Bluesky. Blacksky is, in my view, one of the great alternative media success stories of the past few years.

A confession for you: I often get asked to write about these systems, and often the framing of the prompt is "what are alternative platforms?" or, as is the case with this panel, "beyond corporate platforms." But I struggle with this, for a simple reason.

That is, can the term "platform" be easily ported over to alternative social media?

So for a recent book chapter, I've decided to conduct a genealogy of alternative social media, following in the footsteps of philosophers such as Colin Koopman and Ladelle McWhorter. I'm using "platform" as a sensitizing concept to consider alternative social media's history.

The source material for the histories of alternative social media can be found at the Network of Alternative Social Media Researchers site, where we have an extensive Zotero library, an Omeka archive of early alternatives, and various other resources.

So if we consider "platform" as a sensitizing concept, we start to run into some problems -- problems that have, of course been well documented. Tarleton Gillespie's work, particularly his 2017 essay looking back at the platform metaphor, is instructive here, as is the broader literature on platforms. From it we see at least three contradictory meanings -- a technical, programmable platform, a political platform, and something that elevates people so they are more visible. The contradictions here are usually handled quite elegantly or generatively in the literature on corporate social media, but in the case of alternative social media,...

I am not convinced that the concept "platform" works to describe alternative social media systems.

First, let's talk about a computational meaning of 'platform'

As Gillespie writes in 2017, this particular meaning of "platform" was drawn from computational thinking. As McKelvey argues, this meaning invokes things like technical standards, protocols, and programming interfaces -- the stuff of things like operating systems or hardware. For Anne Helmond, the platformization of the web via Facebook was about the extension of a sort of social operating system. My favorite example of this is Montfort and Bogost's 2009 book Racing the Beam, about the creative ways Atari programmers worked within the constraints of that computer. At first glance, alternative social media systems might adhere to this aspect of the platform metaphor.

For example, GNU social, an early alternative to Twitter, allowed people to build a Wordpress commenting system on top of it.

Or another example: Mastodon has an API that's widely used to build clients or other applications.

But most ASM go far beyond being a mere platform upon which to build applications. The awkward "GNU" in the name of GNU social indicates this. Drawing on Free Software practices, many ASM are licensed to allow people the 'four freedoms', including the ability to modify their code and share those modifications.

For example, consider the Hometown fork of Mastodon, which includes the major modification of instance-only posting.

So we move from an obdurate, hard platform upon which to program social applications to a malleable system that can be radically altered. To be sure, GNU social et al could be treated as a platform -- one could build on top of them without altering them. But the possibility to alter them was always present, undermining any conception of them as mere platforms for applications. Contrast that with, for example, Facebook and the "Social Operating System." That was never meant for just anyone to alter -- its underlying structure has always been controlled solely by Meta.

Let's talk political platforms.

As Gillespie writes in his classic "Politics of Platforms" essay, "Curiously, a term that generally implied a kind of neutrality towards use – ‘platforms’ are typically flat, featureless and open to all – in this instance specifically carries a political valence, where a position must be taken." That is, a "political platform" is a political party's collection of proposals and policies. This is a very normative meaning. As platform scholars observed, of course, corporate social media disavowed having an explicit politics, beyond something inane like "connecting the world". Corporate social media claimed a neutral stance -- everyone can stand and speak. (I will talk more about this in a bit.)

While corporate social media used the platform metaphor to imply a sort of neutrality -- anyone can build upon us or stand upon us -- as we've seen, that "platform excuse" has been shredded in the past decade, as corporate social media have increasingly shaped interactions, either subtly with algorithms or overtly with changes to content moderation practices.

Or even more overtly in the form of public allegiance to Trumpian fascism.

With rare exceptions, there never really was a "platform excuse" with ASM. Right-wing alternative social media, for example, explicitly positioned themselves as opposed to the ostensibly Leftist oppression found in Facebook or Twitter.

Gab social, for example, is a decidedly right-wing alternative social media system, whose founder is openly antisemitic, transphobic, Islamophobic -- you name the loathesome bigotry, he'll supply it. And unsurprisingly, Gab is populated by self-identified Nazis. It's never been a neutral platform, but certainly a kind of political platform.

Indeed, there was a moment in 2016-2018 when "alternative" got articulated with "alt-right" to the exclusion of a whole range of Left, progressive alternative social media. But, the upshot here is far more attention was given to content moderation. If we look at the Mastodon Server Covenant, we can see a progressive, political stance about social media content moderation.

Likewise, consider Blacksky, which is a community-run fork of Bluesky's infrastructure. Blacksky is governed by its members.

To quote from their community guidelines, "Blacksky is a protected digital space built by Black people, for Black people. These guidelines reflect the clear will of our community, gathered through democratic assemblies where community members shaped what Blacksky should be."

This aspect of alternative social media is perhaps most in line with the platform metaphor: they are inherently political – even the neutral FOSS approaches are not neutral. But, if "platform" was initially deployed by corporations to invoke neutrality – not a political stance -- then the applicability of "platform" to ASM seems even less useful. They were rarely ever positioned as "neutral."

Perhaps the most divergence between ASM and the platform metaphor appears when we think about visibility.

Crystal Abidin, aptly calls the work of influencers "visibility labour," highlighting this aspect of the platform metaphor. We can hear this in phrases such as "I have a platform", "I use my platform," or "YouTube is a platform for creators."

To be clear, this is a tense idea within corporate social media: e.g., consider anger in the 2010s among genderqueer folks over Facebook's real-names policy.

And it almost goes without saying that, when one stands upon a corporate social media platform, one is most visible to capital: users are monitored and their profiles auctioned off for profit. This aspect of platform visibility is outright rejected by most alternative social media.

The sharpest contrast between the platform-for-visibility idea and alternative social media can be found among Dark Web alternatives. The ironically named Visibility.i2p, for example, was a microblog running on the Invisible Internet Network, a dark web system where both the technical structure as well as cultural practices enforced anonymous or pseudonymous social networking.

Resistance to corporate visibility can be found elsewhere in alternative social media. For example, Mastodon is going to implement a long-demanded feature: end-to-end encryption.

But even earlier efforts to reduce visibility in ASM can be seen in addressing practices, such as Blacksky-only posting in Blacksky, which prevents those posts from flowing out to the broader ATProto network.

None of this is to say that going dark is the entire focus of ASM. There are aspects that are far more visible in ASM than in their corporate counterparts. As Gillespie noted in his 2017 reflection, "platforms" hide the labor that goes into their operation -- the machinery underneath the platform is obscured. Well, in the case of alternative social media, their internal operations are far more visible -- they are anything but hidden. As I hope my most recent book makes clear, the work of social media is very visible when we study the history of Mastodon. Not just the code: we also see the labor of running and moderating social media. (if anyone wants to ask more about that, I help run AoIR's Mastodon server.)

So, can we call alternative social media "platforms" in any meaningful sense?

As you can tell, I'm going to say no.

We might see them from the computational angle, as things to build on, but they are so much more. They are far more malleable than something like a stage -- they can be rearranged in radical ways, thanks to their being FOSS. If we limited ourselves purely to political platforms, what Nate Tkacz calls "platform polities," we are perhaps most in line with the platform metaphor. However, this is really not how the term is used in relation to social media.

The idea of a platform for visibility is perhaps the most common meaning of the term in relation to corporate social media, but in alternative social media, there are rejections of the demand to be visible. Surveillance capitalism -- making users visible to capital -- is not practiced by many alternative social media systems. And, to torture the metaphor a bit, if there is an ASM platform, it doesn't hide the underlying structures, as in the case of corporate social media -- those are inverted, made visible.

It may be wise for alternative social media scholars to abandon the platform metaphor in their analysis. It doesn't work very well as a shorthand. It doesn't work very well as a metaphor -- what aspects of platforms are we saying alternatives are like? And it crumbles under closer scrutiny. I love a good contradiction, but the contradictions of "platforms" really does not work in relation to alternative social media.

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