By Val Elefante
On Thursday, September 28, Evan (Rabble) Henshaw-Plath presented “After Twitter: Understanding Social Media Protocols.” Rabble is a technologist passionate about making the world a better place through civic technology projects. From 2004-2006, he was the first employee, lead developer and architect at Odeo, the company that created Twitter. Since then, he has led product and engineering teams on multiple projects including small startups, fortune 500 companies, and nonprofits. He helped found Indymedia network, an independent and alternative group of media activists and organizations that offers grassroots, non-corporate, non-commercial coverage of important social and political issues.
Given his breadth of experience and knowledge, Rabble is well-placed to tell the story of how our current social media landscape came to be–which is where he begins his presentation for TechSoup. The history begins around the 1970s when the internet was just an experimental forum called Usenet being run by university and research labs. It wasn’t until the 1990s with the launch of AOL and CompuServe that companies started enclosing and commercializing the internet.
Then, by 2008, we experienced the rise of social media companies who realized that they could control users, sell ads, and make a ton of money. As this was happening, many of the early internet pioneers became concerned about the internet’s centralization and strived to build and push for open standards and systems, which led to the birth of ActivityPub in 2012 and what we now call the Fediverse.
Today, many activists–including Rabble–are advocating for a return from platforms to protocols where social media can be freed from control by the large corporations and returned to us as individuals through the decentralized web.
Rabble continued by sharing an extensive list of protocols with categorizations including: self-certifying protocols (user-controlled), server-based protocols (Mastodon, Bluesky), pure peer-to-peer protocols (Scuttlebutt), and crypto-currency centric protocols (DSNP/Polkadot)–with a warning against the latter that token or monetary-based incentives can corrupt online social interactions. He also shared a helpful diagram for visualizing the different network structures: centralized, federated, relayed, and crypto-based.
From here, Rabble was able to make the case that while the Big Tech platforms are dominating social media for now, that doesn’t have to be (and hasn’t always been) the case–especially as more users search for alternatives in the wake of Elon Musk’s buying Twitter (now called X). For nonprofits especially, Rabble argues that alternative, more decentralized social media could be more values-aligned.
At the same time, he recommends nonprofits not abandon mainstream platforms but rather pay attention, follow their communities, and perhaps integrate decentralized options into communication strategies. He recommends using supportive tools such as Hootsuite and Buffer for cross-platform publishing. Decentralized social media gives nonprofits the ability to own and control their means of communication with their audiences, rather than relying on corporate platforms.
Finally, Rabble made note that even Meta has acknowledged interest in potentially interoperating with the Fediverse for their newest platform, a Twitter-alternative called Threads. If they do, “the Fediverse would go from a project of a few million people actively using it every day to hundreds of millions of people actively using it… and that's very powerful.”
Rabble is currently working on a social media platform being designed especially for nonprofits called Nos.social, built on top of the Nostr protocol, which he invites people to sign up for and beta test. He also advises folks to get curious and involved in the DWeb community and attend events such as DWeb Camp.