The Network of Alternative Social Media Researchers

The ASM Bibliography Reaches 150

RWG, 26 Sep 2026

We’re back after a bit of a summer break! And we have a milestone to report: the Alternative Social Media academic bibliography has reached 150 items!

I’ve been collecting academic items related to alternative social media for a long time now. These include peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings, books, and PhD dissertations. (I’ve excluded things like pre-prints and white papers, though I do collect those separately.)

Of course, the library’s growth has been driven in the past few years due to the Musk takeover of Twitter and an explosion of interest in decentralized social media.

In this post, I thought it would be instructive to look at the last five items added to the bibliography to get a small sense of the current state of the field.

Gao, Min, Wen Wen, Haoran Du, et al. 2026. “FediScan: Collaborative Social Bot Detection in the Fediverse.” In Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2026. ACM Conferences. https://doi.org/10.1145/3774904.3792690.

This research team proposes a scanning system to detect social bots on the fediverse. What I’ve observed is that automated accounts are indeed on the rise across the fediverse – as the admin of an instance, I’ve had dozens of sign-up attempts from bots. And I’ve also noticed that other admins are struggling with how to prevent such accounts from signing up. And, I presume this means that many automated accounts posing as humans are probably on the network. Research into bot detection does seem like an important topic. I can’t say whether or not these authors have developed a successful system, but I can definitely see why they are pursuing the problem. An issue I do see here is whether or not FediData, the dataset they use, was gathered in an ethical fashion. It’s also unclear to me how this system would integrate with governance practices on the fediverse. However, I do know admins are wondering about more tools for the prevention of all those spammy bots – so this line of research is worth keeping an eye on.

Hwang, Sohyeon, Sophie Rollins, Thatiany Andrade Nunes, et al. 2026. “Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media.” Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (New York, NY, USA), CHI ’26, April 13, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3790855.

This paper is very important – the authors convened workshops with various community-run social media instances to find common governance problems. I’ve been wrestling with that question a bit in my work. This team of researchers addresses it through three concepts: modularity, forkability, and polycentricity. This last idea – that various online communities build overlapping “trust bubbles” and share varying degrees of information – has been discussed by admins for some time. Hwang et al propose that future technical developments should integrate these principles. That’s a welcome call, since admins have been asking for better governance tooling for a long time. Indeed, I would like to see bot detection research, such as that of Gao et al, attempt to implement these multilayered approaches to governance.

Quian, Alberto, and Xosé Soengas-Pérez. 2026. “¿Un «efecto Musk» En Funkwhale? Dinámicas de Crecimiento En Una Plataforma de Streaming de Audio Del Fediverso.” Revista Prisma Social, no. 54 (July): 425–49. https://doi.org/10.65598/rps.6159.

As I mentioned above, ASM research has exploded a bit in recent years due to Musk’s purchase of Twitter. So much of the attention has been given to Mastodon or ATProto-based systems (e.g., Bluesky, Blacksky). But there are even more types of ASM out there, including the music-sharing, ActivityPub-based Funkwhale. Quian and Soengas-Pérez take a look at the growth of Funkwhale in the post-Musk period. While Funkwhale is very small (not only in comparison to corporate social media, but even as part of the fediverse), Quian and Soengas-Pérez find that its recent growth tracks with growth of other ASM systems. Capturing these patterns is a valuable part of ASM scholarship.

Sanders, Mathilde, Erna Ruijer, and José Van Dijck. 2026. “What Alternatives for Social Media Do Public Organizations Need? Developing a Value Proposition for Public Service Social Media Design.” Digital Government: Research and Practice 7 (2): 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1145/3809498.

Sanders et al consider how public institutions might develop alternative social media that are based on public values. “As the antidote to commercial social media platforms, a public alternative would offer human (as opposed to automated) moderation, decentralized and local (as opposed to centralized and global) data storage, and privacy friendly and secure identification that does not build profiles of users.” While such systems exist, what Sanders et al are arguing for is public institutions being directly involved in running these. This is not a new call – many folks, for example, have called for public social media for a while. What Sanders et al are doing, however, is further theorizing the values that such publically-run systems will be based upon. As projects promising “digital sovereignty” appear around the world, this paper is a very valuable contribution.

Van Schenck, Reed. 2026. “Replatformization and the Expansion of the Alt-Tech Ecosystem on Kiwi Farms.” Information, Communication & Society 0 (0): 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2026.2713669.

As other scholars have noted, “alternative” is a term that can be quite flexible. It can be deployed in politically neutral or politically explicit ways, and in the case of the latter, they might signify left or right politics. We need more analysis of alternatives in all their variations. Van Schenck offers analysis of the alt-tech (and quite loathsome) Kiwi Farms. Rather than indulge in a conceit that Kiwi Farms is alternative because it’s somehow unmoderated or outside of mainstream logics, Van Schenck argues for a concept of “replatformization.” “Alt-tech replatformization aligns with the market-based model of governance while posturing as an alternative to it,” Van Schenck argues – it’s a way of constructing a platform while at the same time making claims about deplatforming. This is a very important addition to the ASM bibliography.