ASM Bibliography
This is an alternative social media (ASM) bibliography, a collection of scholarly articles exploring the world of social media beyond corporate sites (such as Facebook and Twitter).
This page will be updated monthly. For more up-to-date access to the bibliography, request to join the Social Media Alternatives Project Zotero group.
Note that inclusion in this bibliography does not mean I endorse the study. Watch the blog for critiques of some of these studies.
Also: is something missing? Let me know!
Abbing, Roel Roscam, Cade Diehm, and Shahed Warreth. 2023. “Decentralised Social Media.” Internet Policy Review 12 (1). https://policyreview.info/glossary/decentralised-social-media.
Abbing, Roel Roscam, and Robert W. Gehl. 2024. “Shifting Your Research from X to Mastodon? Here’s What You Need to Know.” Patterns 5 (1). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patter.2023.100914.
Ackermann, M., K. Hymon, B. Ludwig, and K. Wilhelm. 2008. “Helloworld: An Open Source, Distributed and Secure Social Network.” In W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking-Position Papers. Http://Www. W3. Org/2008/09/Msnws/Papers/HelloWorld_paper. Pdf Checked: February, 21:2009.
Allen, Samantha. 2014. “Ello, Is It You We’re Looking For?” The Daily Beast, September 26, 2014. https://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/09/26/ello-is-it-you-we-re-looking-for.
Bakardjieva, Maria. 2014. “Social Media and the McDonaldization of Friendship.” Communications: The European Journal of Communication Research 39 (4): 369–87. https://doi.org/10.1515/commun-2014-0017.
Bielenberg, A., L. Helm, A. Gentilucci, D. Stefanescu, and Honggang Zhang. 2012. “The Growth of Diaspora - A Decentralized Online Social Network in the Wild.” In 2012 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS), 13–18. https://doi.org/10.1109/INFCOMW.2012.6193476.
Bin Zia, Haris, Aravindh Raman, Ignacio Castro, Ishaku Hassan Anaobi, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Nishanth Sastry, and Gareth Tyson. 2022. “Toxicity in the Decentralized Web and the Potential for Model Sharing.” Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems 6 (2): 35:1-35:25. https://doi.org/10.1145/3530901.
Cabello, Florencio, Marta G. Franco, and Alexandra Haché. 2013. “Towards a Free Federated Social Web: Lorea Takes the Networks!” In Unlike Us Reader: Social Media Monopolies and Their Alternatives, edited by Geert Lovink and Miriam Rausch, 338–46. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.
Caelin, Derek. 2022. “Decentralized Networks vs The Trolls.” In Fundamental Challenges to Global Peace and Security : The Future of Humanity, edited by Hoda Mahmoudi, Michael H. Allen, and Kate Seaman, 143–68. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79072-1_8.
Coleman, Biella. 2005. “Les temps d’Indymedia.” Multitudes no 21 (2): 41–48. https://doi.org/10.3917/mult.021.0041.
Colglazier, Carl. 2024. “Do Servers Matter on Mastodon? Data-Driven Design for Decentralized Social Media.” In Workshop Proceedings of the 18th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. Buffalo, N.Y.
Colley, Thomas, and Martin Moore. 2022. “The Challenges of Studying 4chan and the Alt-Right: ‘Come on in the Water’s Fine.’” New Media & Society 24 (1): 5–30. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820948803.
Dunbar-Hester, Christina. 2019. Hacking Diversity. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ Press. https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691192888/hacking-diversity.
———. 2024. “Showing Your Ass on Mastodon: Lossy Distribution, Hashtag Activism, and Public Scrutiny on Federated, Feral Social Media.” First Monday, March. https://doi.org/20240313092153000.
Flowers, Johnathan. 2022. The Whiteness of Mastodon Interview by Justin Hendrix. Audio. https://techpolicy.press/the-whiteness-of-mastodon/.
Freitas, Miguel. 2013. “Twister - a P2P Microblogging Platform.” arXiv:1312.7152 [Cs], December. http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.7152.
———. 2015. “Twister: The Development of a Peer-to-Peer Microblogging Platform.” International Journal of Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems 0 (0): 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/17445760.2015.1053808.
Frost-Arnold, Karen. 2024. “Beyond Corporate Social Media Platforms: The Epistemic Promises and Perils of Alternative Social Media.” Topoi, October. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-024-10102-2.
Gehl, Robert. 2015. “Building a Better Twitter: A Study of the Twitter Alternatives GNU Social, Quitter, Rstat.Us, and Twister.” The Fibreculture Journal, no. 26 (December), 60–86. https://doi.org/10.15307/fcj.26.190.2015.
Gehl, Robert W. 2014. “Power/Freedom on the Dark Web: A Digital Ethnography of the Dark Web Social Network.” New Media and Society, October, 1–17.
———. 2015a. “Critical Reverse Engineering: The Case of Twitter and TalkOpen.” In Compromised Data: From Social Media to Big Data, edited by Ganaele Langlois, Joanna Redden, and Greg Elmer, 147–69. New York, N.Y.: Bloomsbury.
———. 2015b. “The Case for Alternative Social Media.” Social Media + Society 1 (2): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115604338.
Gehl, Robert W., and Julie Snyder-Yuly. 2016. “The Need for Social Media Alternatives.” Democratic Communiqué 27 (1): 78.
Gehl, Robert W., and Diana Zulli. 2022. “The Digital Covenant: Non-Centralized Platform Governance on the Mastodon Social Network.” Information, Communication & Society 0 (0): 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2022.2147400.
Gow, Gordon A. 2020. “Alternative Social Media for Outreach and Engagement: Considering Technology Stewardship as a Pathway to Adoption.” ERA. January 1, 2020. https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-xy8j-w962.
———. 2022. “Turning to Alternative Social Media.” In The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods, edited by Anabel Quan-Haase and Luke Sloan. 1 Oliver’s Yard, 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP: SAGE Publications Ltd. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781529782943.
Greschbach, Benjamin, Gunnar Kreitz, and Sonja Buchegger. 2012. “The Devil Is in the Metadata—New Privacy Challenges in Decentralised Online Social Networks.” In Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops (PERCOM Workshops), 2012 IEEE International Conference On, 333–39. IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/PerComW.2012.6197506.
Guy, Amy. 2017. “The Presentation of Self on a Decentralised Web.” Edinburgh, Scotland: University of Edinburgh. http://dr.amy.gy/.
Hesmondhalgh, David, Ellis Jones, and Andreas Rauh. 2019. “SoundCloud and Bandcamp as Alternative Music Platforms.” Social Media + Society 5 (4): 2056305119883429. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119883429.
Huang, Tao. 2024. “Decentralized Social Networks and the Future of Free Speech Online.” https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4863943.
Hwang, Sohyeon, Priyanka Nanayakkara, and Yan Shvartzshnaider. 2023. “Whose Policy? Privacy Challenges of Decentralized Platforms.” SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4416746.
Jasser, Greta, Jordan McSwiney, Ed Pertwee, and Savvas Zannettou. 2021. “‘Welcome to #GabFam’: Far-Right Virtual Community on Gab.” New Media & Society, June, 14614448211024546. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211024546.
Karell, Daniel, Andrew Linke, Edward Holland, and Edward Hendrickson. 2023. “‘Born for a Storm’: Hard-Right Social Media and Civil Unrest.” American Sociological Review, March, 00031224231156190. https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224231156190.
Koll, David, Jun Li, and Xiaoming Fu. 2013. “With a Little Help from My Friends: Replica Placement in Decentralized Online Social Networks.” Technical Report IFI-TB-2013-01, Institute of Computer Science, University of Goettingen, Germany. http://user.informatik.uni-goettingen.de/~dkoll/files/pubs/SOUP_TR_2013.pdf.
———. 2014. “SOUP: An Online Social Network by the People, for the People.” In , 193–204. ACM Press. https://doi.org/10.1145/2663165.2663324.
Kor-Sins, Ryan. 2021. “The Alt-Right Digital Migration: A Heterogeneous Engineering Approach to Social Media Platform Branding.” New Media & Society, August, 146144482110388. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211038810.
La Cava, Lucio, Sergio Greco, and Andrea Tagarelli. 2021. “Understanding the Growth of the Fediverse through the Lens of Mastodon.” arXiv:2106.15473 [Physics], June. http://arxiv.org/abs/2106.15473.
Larimer, Daniel, Ned Scott, Valentine Zavgorodnev, Benjamin Johnson, James Calfee, and Michael Vandeberg. 2016. “Steem: An Incentivized, Blockchain-Based, Social Media Platform.” https://steem.io/SteemWhitePaper.pdf.
Lázaro-Rodríguez, Pedro. 2024. “Análisis de la investigación sobre el Fediverso: Mastodon, Lemmy, Pleroma y otras de sus plataformas.” Infonomy 2 (2). https://doi.org/10.3145/infonomy.24.017.
Leistert, Oliver. 2012. “How to Put Up a Facebook Resistance.” Blog. Centre for Internet and Society (blog). February 21, 2012. http://cis-india.org/digital-natives/media-coverage/facebook-resistance.
Liao, Kai Hung. 2023. “Exploring User Perceived Beliefs, Evaluations, and Gratifications in ASM: Applying Expectancy-Value Approach for U&G Theory on Mastodon Instance Liker.Social.” Frontiers in Communication 8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2023.1288614.
Lister, Pen. 2024. “Creating a City for All of Us: The Possible Role of the Fediverse in Archiving Civic Urban Memory.” Digital Society 3 (3): 53. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44206-024-00137-8.
Lovink, Geert, and Miriam Rasch, eds. 2013. Unlike Us Reader: Social Media Monopolies and Their Alternatives. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.
Madouh, Mohmmded, and K Kwon. 2023. “Evolving in the Shadows: A Media Ecology Study of Dark Web Social Networks.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 0 (November):1–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/01968599231210776.
Mahdian, Alireza, John Black, Richard Han, and Shivakant Mishra. 2011. “MyZone: A Next-Generation Online Social Network.” arXiv:1110.5371, October. http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.5371.
Mannell, Kate, and Eden T. Smith. 2022. “Alternative Social Media and the Complexities of a More Participatory Culture: A View From Scuttlebutt.” Social Media + Society 8 (3): 20563051221122448. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221122448.
mansoux, Aymeric, and Roel Roscam Abbing. 2020. “Seven Theses on the Fediverse and the Becoming of Floss.” In The Eternal Network, edited by Kristoffer Gansing and Inga Luchs, 124–40. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2056305115604338.
Mauro-Flude, Nancy, and Yoko Akama. 2022. “A Feminist Server Stack: Co-Designing Feminist Web Servers to Reimagine Internet Futures.” CoDesign 18 (1): 48–62. https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2021.2021243.
McSherry, Corynne. 2022. “User Generated Content and the Fediverse: A Legal Primer.” Electronic Frontier Foundation. December 20, 2022. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/user-generated-content-and-fediverse-legal-primer.
Mönnink, Skip de. 2024. “From Network to Platform to Protocol: Mastodon’s Ethos and the Sociotechnical Imaginary of the Fediverse.” Master Thesis. https://studenttheses.uu.nl/handle/20.500.12932/46353.
Mott, Gareth. 2019. “A Storm on the Horizon? ‘Twister’ and the Implications of the Blockchain and Peer-to-Peer Social Networks for Online Violent Extremism.” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 42 (1–2): 206–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2018.1513986.
Nagappa, Ashwin. 2023. “Narratives of Change to Platform Governance on DTube, an Emerging Blockchain-Based Video-Sharing Platform.” Social Media + Society 9 (3): 20563051231196881. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231196881.
Narayanan, Arvind, Vincent Toubiana, Solon Barocas, Helen Nissenbaum, and Dan Boneh. 2012. “A Critical Look at Decentralized Personal Data Architectures.” arXiv:1202.4503, February. http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.4503.
Nicholson, Matthew N., Brian C Keegan, and Casey Fiesler. 2023. “Mastodon Rules: Characterizing Formal Rules on Popular Mastodon Instances.” In Companion Publication of the 2023 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, 86–90. CSCW ’23 Companion. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3584931.3606970.
Nobre, Gabriel P., Carlos H. G. Ferreira, and Jussara M. Almeida. 2022. “More of the Same? A Study of Images Shared on Mastodon’s Federated Timeline.” In Social Informatics, 181–95. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19097-1_11.
Papacharissi, Zizi. 2009. “The Virtual Geographies of Social Networks: A Comparative Analysis of Facebook, LinkedIn and ASmallWorld.” New Media Society 11 (1–2): 199–220. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444808099577.
Pincus, Jon. 2024. “The Free Fediverses Should Support Concentric Federations of Instances.” Blog. The Nexus Of Privacy. January 5, 2024. https://privacy.thenexus.today/strategies-for-the-free-fediverses/#concentric-federations.
Quian, Alberto, Xosé López-García, and Xosé Soengas-Pérez. 2024. “Periodismo y Redes Sociales Alternativas Del Fediverso: Estudio de La Presencia de Medios Nativos Digitales y Matriciales En Mastodon.” Revista Latina de Comunicación Social, no. 83 (September), 1–40. https://doi.org/10.4185/rlcs-2025-2338.
Roscam Abbing, Roel. 2022. “On Cultivating the Installable Base.” In Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference 2022 - Volume 2, 203–7. Newcastle upon Tyne United Kingdom: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3537797.3537875.
Roscam Abbing, Roel, and Ann Light. 2024. “Make Friends Not Art: Mapping Law, Power and Participation in Designing an Online Platform during Documenta Fifteen.” In Participatory Design Conference 2024, 86–97. Sibu Malaysia: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3666094.3666107.
Roth, Yoel, and Samantha Lai. 2024. “Securing Federated Platforms: Collective Risks and Responses.” Journal of Online Trust and Safety 2 (2). https://doi.org/10.54501/jots.v2i2.171.
Rozenshtein, Alan Z. 2022. “Moderating the Fediverse: Content Moderation on Distributed Social Media.” SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=4213674.
———. 2024. “Moderating the Fediverse: Content Moderation on Distributed Social Media.” In Media and Society After Technological Disruption, edited by Justin (Gus) Hurwitz and Kyle Langvardt, 177–92. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009174411.019.
Salaverría, Ramón, María-Pilar Martínez-Costa, and Clara González Tosat. 2024. “Decentralised Networks as a Tool for Fighting Disinformation and Censorship: The Fediverse and Free, Collaborative and Open Networks.” In Journalism, Digital Media and the Fourth Industrial Revolution, edited by José Sixto-García, Alberto Quian, Ana-Isabel Rodríguez-Vázquez, Alba Silva-Rodríguez, and Xosé Soengas-Pérez, 15–25. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-63153-5_2.
Sevignani, Sebastian. 2013. “Facebook vs. Diaspora: A Critical Study.” In Unlike Us Reader: Social Media Monopolies and Their Alternatives, edited by Geert Lovink and Miriam Rausch, 325–37. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.
———. 2015. “The Problem of Privacy in Capitalism and Alternative Social Media: The Case of Diaspora*.” Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism, 413.
Siapera, Eugenia. 2023. “Alt Tech and the Public Sphere: Exploring Bitchute as a Political Media Infrastructure.” European Journal of Communication, July, 02673231231189041. https://doi.org/10.1177/02673231231189041.
Smith, Matthew E. 2023. “Decentralized Social Media Rises as Twitter Melts Down - IEEE Spectrum.” March 18, 2023. https://spectrum.ieee.org/mastodon-social-media.
Sorci, Giuliana. 2021. “New Virtual Communities for a Renewed Digital Activism in Italy: A Case Study of the Bida, Cisti and Nebbia Mastodon Instances.” Journal of Alternative & Community Media 6 (1): 87–101. https://doi.org/10.1386/joacm_00095_1.
Sparrow, Elijah. 2012. “Pitfalls of Building Social Media Alternatives (Debate).” Presented at the Unlike Us #2, Amsterdam, March 10. http://vimeo.com/39257353.
Spideralex. 2012. “Pitfalls of Building Social Media Alternatives (Debate).” Presented at the Unlike Us #2, Amsterdam, March 10. http://vimeo.com/39257151.
Stevenson, Michael, and Carolina Valente Pinto. 2024. “Distinction and Alternative Tech: Exploring the Techno-Critical Disposition.” New Media & Society, March, 14614448241239579. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448241239579.
Stocking, Galen, Amy Mitchell, Katerina Eva Matsa, Regina Widjaya, Mark Jurkowitz, Shreenita Ghosh, Aaron Smith, Sarah Naseer, and Christopher St Aubin. 2022. “The Role of Alternative Social Media in the News and Information Environment.” Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project (blog). October 6, 2022. https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2022/10/06/the-role-of-alternative-social-media-in-the-news-and-information-environment/.
Struett, Thomas, Aram Sinnreich, Patricia Aufderheide, and Robert W. Gehl. 2024. “Can This Platform Survive? Governance Challenges for the Fediverse.” International Journal of Communication 18 (0): 22.
Tiffany, Kaitlyn. 2022. “What If Rumble Is the Future of the Social Web?” The Atlantic. October 31, 2022. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/10/what-if-rumble-future-social-web/671926/.
Velden, Lonneke van der. 2013. “Meeting the Alternatives: Notes About Making Profiles and Joining Hackers.” In Unlike Us Reader: Social Media Monopolies and Their Alternatives, edited by Geert Lovink and Miriam Rausch, 312–22. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.
Wähner, Marco, Annika Deubel, Johannes Breuer, and Katrin Weller. 2024. “‘Don’t Research Us’—How Mastodon Instance Rules Connect to Research Ethics.” Publizistik, August. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11616-024-00855-6.
Wang, Xinyu, Sai Koneru, and Sarah Rajtmajer. 2024. “The Failed Migration of Academic Twitter.” arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2406.04005.
Wolf, Hellekin. 2014. “Social Networks and Decentralization.” GNU Consensus. December 12, 2014. https://www.gnu.org/consensus/talks/quito-2014/gnu-consensus-quito-2014-en.html.
“Workshop: ‘Infrastructuring Alternatives: Mastodon, the Fediverse and beyond’, 6th April 2023 – KCL Digital Humanities.” 2023. March 14, 2023. https://kingsdh.net/2023/03/14/infrastructuring-alternatives/.
Zhao, Mengyang. n.d. “Ghost in Dissent: Artifacts and the Architecture of Activism in Digital China.”
Zia, Haris Bin, Jiahui He, Aravindh Raman, Ignacio Castro, Nishanth Sastry, and Gareth Tyson. 2023. “Flocking to Mastodon: Tracking the Great Twitter Migration.” arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2302.14294.
Zignani, Matteo, Christian Quadri, Alessia Galdeman, Sabrina Gaito, and Gian Paolo Rossi. 2019. “Mastodon Content Warnings: Inappropriate Contents in a Microblogging Platform.” Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 13 (July):639–45. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v13i01.3262.
Zulli, Diana, Miao Liu, and Robert Gehl. 2020. “Rethinking the ‘Social’ in ‘Social Media’: Insights into Topology, Abstraction, and Scale on the Mastodon Social Network:” New Media & Society, July. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820912533.