Decentralized social media platforms offer the promise of alternative governance structures that empower consumers and rebuild social media on a foundation of trust. However, over two years after Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter sparked an exodus of users seeking new homes on the social web, federated platforms remain ill-equipped to meet the threats of abuse, harassment, coordinated manipulation, and spam that have plagued social media for years. Given the porous nature of decentralized services, these limitations will not just affect individual servers, but reverberate through the social web.

Federated platforms face considerable obstacles to robust and scalable governance, particularly with regard to persistent threats such as coordinated behavior and spam.

The broader challenge here — and perhaps, the inescapable one — is the essential humanness of online trust and safety efforts. It isn’t machine learning models and faceless algorithms behind key content moderation decisions: it’s people. And people can be pressured, intimidated, threatened and extorted.

Many discussions about social media governance and trust and safety are focused on a small number of centralized, corporate-owned platforms. The emergence and growth in popularity of federated social media services introduces new opportunities, but also significant new risks and complications.

Major social media and technology companies continue to make algorithmic, user interface, and policy changes to their products to address information integrity challenges on their platforms.