Social Media Architectures and Their Consequences

This is an outcome of a session I ran at last week’s “Logging Off Facebook – What comes next?” unconference. We explored what technical architecture choices have which technical, or non-technical consequences for social media products.

This table was created during the session. It is not complete, and personally I disagree with a few points, but it’s still worthwhile publishing IMHO.

So here you are:

	Facebook-style ("centralized")	Mastodon-style ("federated")	IndieWeb-style ("distributed/P2P")	Blockchain-style
Moderation	Uniform, consistent moderation policy for all users	Locally different moderation policies, but consistent for all users on a node	Every user decides on their own	Posit - algorithmic smart contract that drives consensus
Censorship	easy; global	one node at a time	full censorship not viable	full censorship not viable
Software upgrades	Fast, uncomplicated for all users	Inconsistent across the network	Inconsistent across the network	Consistent, but large synchronization / management costs
Money	Centralized; most accumulated by "Facebook"	Donations (BuyMeACoffee, LiberaPay); Patronage (Patreon)		Paid to/earned by network nodes; value fluctuates due to speculation
Authentication	Centralized		Decentralized (e.g. Solid, OpenID, SSI)	Decentralized (e.g. wallets)
Advertising	Decided by "Facebook"	Not usually	Determined by user
Governance	Centralized, unaccountable	Several components: protocol-level, code-level and instance-level	Several components: protocol-level, code-level and instance-level
Search & Discovery
Group formation
Regulation
Ownership	Totalitarian		Individual