Why the social web must work together

In case you missed it, a lot has happened in the European social web community over the last few weeks. We’re thrilled about these developments and wanted to share our perspective on what ties them together.

Until now, many have thought of the open social web as a technical movement. It’s so much more. The social web is a social movement. Of course there is no one true path to success for all social movements, but there are themes across every resource you can find. Social movements that succeed distribute leadership and empower everyone to participate, they stay grounded in practical and incremental steps, they change hearts before they change minds, and most saliently, they reach across divides to find common ground with unlikely allies.

For the open social web movement, to do anything besides collaborate across the aisle would be to betray the values we hold most dear: interoperability, user autonomy, and freedom of choice.

PublicSpaces & The European Social Stack

Our Executive Director Felix Hlatky and Technical Director Renaud Chaput attended PublicSpaces in Amsterdam a few weeks ago. They were delighted to be surrounded by so many contributors to the open social web, and to celebrate the winners of the first annual Open Social Awards: Newsmast Foundation, Blacksky Algorithms, and Sill.

During PublicSpaces, a group of social web builders led by Save Social announced the European Social Stack Open Declaration. Mastodon joined the Declaration as a Founding Signatory. We also contributed to drafting the Declaration, and participated in the forum which precipitated the Declaration.

What our conversations at PublicSpaces made clear is this: the resources and marketing reach available to incumbent and extractive social media platforms present a genuine competitive challenge that no single open project can address alone. Organizations working on the fediverse possess complementary capabilities—design expertise, protocol innovation, and community trust. Pooling resources and coordinating development efforts strengthens the entire ecosystem and it reinforces the fundamental promise of what we are building.

As Felix put it, “our protocols and the incentives they create matter. Our backgrounds influence what we build. Our financing models bind and enable us. But I felt all of us belonging to “Team Open” very strongly in Amsterdam. I am excited to see where this will bring us and what we can do together.”

European Technological Sovereignty and Open Source Strategy

Just before PublicSpaces, the European Commission released a Technical Sovereignty Package with an Open Source Strategy that directly mentioned Mastodon and the social web. The Commission noted their commitment to “strengthen the open source social media space by supporting open and decentralised social media solutions and platforms,” and highlighted that they run a Mastodon instance with plans to extend access to EU institutions.

This signals something important: Europe understands the social web in ways the rest of the world is still catching up to (read more of our thoughts in this blog post). This recognition exists at both supranational and national levels, and the Dutch government exemplifies this. Their Mastodon experiment, social.overheid.nl, started in 2024 with 20 government organizations participating. In the first year, the number of participants doubled. After this success the Dutch Government began offering Mastodon accounts to all government organisations at all levels of government as a shared service. You can read more about how their using Mastodon on their website.

What comes next

The concentration of power in Silicon Valley happened partly because we let it. We accepted a few platforms as inevitable. We built our communities there because that’s where everyone was. It wasn’t because their technology is better. It was a choice—made again and again by the people on those platforms, by investors, and by policymakers.

A different choice is possible, but it requires that those of us building alternatives actually believe what we say about cooperation. It means assuming good faith from people building different projects. It means investing in infrastructure that doesn’t benefit us alone.

We, the builders of the open social web, are the only ones who can make that choice.

It starts with deciding that our mission matters more than winning alone.