Big Tech, Mutual Aid, and the Social Web

June 18, 2026

I've been thinking a lot about Big Tech and the various ways people have proposed fighting back. I think most people would agree that what's been happening to the internet over the last few years has been egregious, and definitely crossed a line. I also think that in recent years, especially after the pandemic, we're all online a lot more than we used to be. That's not necessarily a bad thing — the internet is an easy place to have access to all kinds of educational information — but it does mean that we can no longer skirt by on the delusion that the politics of the internet don't matter.

As we see traditional news and journalistic institutions being threatened by online platforms, we can't sit idly by when the infrastructure that's replacing it starts getting worse. I say this because it's easy to feel like the internet is just a silly thing we use to pass the time. It's not actually as important as real problems, like bias in news media, or historic instances of the FBI spying on suspected political dissidents. And yet, the internet has become the new medium through which many people receive news, and it's an apparatus that has allowed the US government and mega-corporations to conduct leaps and bounds more intensive surveillance on their own citizens then even the dictators of old-fashioned regimes could've ever dreamed of doing. Additionally, due to the bottleneck that has occurred with online platforms, in order to say something online, it has to be approved (or at least, not struck down) by Big Tech. If Facebook or YouTube has a problem with what you're posting, guess what? It's not going to be seen.

Okay, enough justifying the importance of these issues, let's actually discuss them, and also, let's talk about how I think some of us should rise to the moment.

So, I don't think it's really an isolated incident that basically everybody right now gets this feeling that just about everything online that they regularly interact with is kind of awful. Everything's extractive, provocative, intellectually hollow, or otherwise designed without the interests of actual people at heart. I'm not going to be arguing that point forward, since it seems most people are at least vaguely on board with that feeling.

What's less clear to folks, is where the root problem is, and what to tackle, if we want change? Some (knobheads) think the issue is that the internet is too free, and that we need to lock it down by making everybody upload their government ID's in order to go online. This is obviously stupid, but they're promoting it under the guise of "child safety", so naturally, it's captured the imaginations of whole populations, and is being rolled out in various countries.

Another approach — one that I actually respect quite a great deal — is that promoted by Cory Doctorow in his analysis of his theory of Enshittification. He posits that the problem with the internet lies with the consolidation of power — the way in which the entire internet was able to captured by a handful of monopolistic companies. He's absolutely right, and he calls for action at the policy level. Unfortunately, I'm not a politician, so I only can do so much to push on that lever, although being aware of the issue is of course incredibly important. My thinking mirrors his somewhat, but it has a more community-centered focus. My analysis is compatible with his, but I'm trying to emphasize different aspects and facts.

My thinking is that the biggest issue driving the destruction of the internet right now is that we don't control the platforms that we communicate on. Perhaps that sounds silly to read. "Of course we don't control the platforms we use, that's why they're called platforms!" Well, of course, we as individuals are never going to have total control over the entire platform we're on — we share them with other people who don't always see the same as us! That's the price of living in a society with other humans. But that's not usually how the power play works out in disagreements about social media. It's not usually that Alice thinks they should do one thing, while Bob thinks they should do a different thing. More often, in fact almost always, it is the case that some billionaire or trillionaire and a board of shareholders have decided to make a change that will enrich their pockets, while Alice, Bob, and every other user is along for the ride, as everything that was originally good about the platform slowly burns.

I'm of the opinion that there's a better way than this. I believe that we could collectively own the platforms we were on, so that they actually work for us, not against us. And the great thing is that everyone really would have control and the ability to make changes "locally" to whatever online communities they're a part of. It doesn't have to be a machine too big for individuals to affect. And really, if we can get our heads straight and actually push this forward, there wouldn't be (much) that Big Tech could try to do to stop us from liberating ourselves from their walled garden.

The platforms we should be on ought to be owned by the community. We often think of online communities as being organized around a single platform, like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. We are organized in such a way that a single platform has nearly infinite control over community because it's the only place that it exists — the platform has a monopoly on our community, and so they can do whatever they want to us without feeling much punishment in return.

But there's a strain of thought that's been picking up lately that promotes a different model. There's a lot of names for this, but I like calling it the Social Web. The Social Web is kind of like the World Wide Web, in that it's not just one thing. It's made up of a bunch of different pieces all working together, where no single piece is so crucial that we couldn't get along if it broke.^[1]

The idea of the Social Web isn't just to spread everything out so thin that there's nobody to talk to though. The idea is that from any one place on the Social Web, you can talk to anybody else, even people who are on different parts of the social web than you. Beyond just that, if a group of people is ever unhappy about the current offerings of sites where you can talk to your friends (perhaps they don't like the way moderation is being handled, for instance), they can get together and just make their own little space on network. Then they and anyone else who shares their opinions can hangout together under the same policies. Those who disagree can still talk to them, but from a different place on the network.

It's kind of like the Social Web is like Europe, and each little site is a country inside of it, which has its own rules, but each one still works together and interacts with the whole. Sometimes, a user from one site might even migrate to another site because they prefer something about that new place more — but they of course don't have to leave their old friends, since they can still communicate with anyone on the network.

Currently, the best way to enjoy the Social Web is on Mastodon. Pick a site you wanna sign up through, then hangout. It's like Twitter, but with less character limits, and no algorithm. I like it there, but it tends to be much less populated than regular social media apps. It's also mostly made up of nerdy computer scientists who like to use words like "protocol", "instance", "ActivityPub", and "fediverse" — which is somewhat problematic, if we want to actually get this stuff adopted by the world.

I think that if we actually want to rescue our society, we need to lean into the Social Web concept. We need to own our communication. We can't allow some company to shove harmful algorithms down our throats. In reality, I think governments should put up funding for various groups to host sites on the Social Web (they're very cheap to run, it wouldn't be expensive to fund this kind of thing). Government is expected to fund all kind of infrastructure like roads and telephone lines. Why shouldn't they also fund the infrastructure we use to organize and communicate together online?

Unfortunately, I don't think in the US government is going to be picking up that project anytime soon. Short of that, I think it falls down to the community to run these sites. Think of it like mutual aid. We don't want to see our neighbors and friends and family getting stuck watching mind-numbing AI slop that's fed to them by an algorithm that hates them. I don't want to be stuck spending my time interacting with the algorithmic feed, but I'm stuck on it cuz that's the only place that works for talking to my friends. We need to band together and find ways to get our non-technical friends onto the Social Web, and away from corporate social media.

As good as Mastodon and some of these places are, it really could be a lot better. The only people who are on Mastodon are people who already don't like existing social media, and who are technical enough to try to figure it out. That's an issue, because a lot of people are not very technical, but really deserve to have an escape from corporate social media just as much as the computer science nerds. Unfortunately, it's the nerds who are building these apps, and who are hosting the sites. I'm one of these nerds, so I'm deeply aware of how blind this community is to the needs and skills of typical internet users. Those of us who are technical enough to building the software for the Social Web need to be more keen towards the needs of typical users, because those are usually the kinds of people you want to hangout with online.

A "walled garden" in software describes a situation where some company provides a service to users, but those users are forced to interact with that service only in ways that the company allows them too. Furthermore, since we're talking about the internet, the company can change the rules on everybody overnight, after lots of people have already joined in. For instance, Facebook starts up in 2004, provides a social media service to a bunch of people, and promises to never be shitty to its users. A bunch of people join, and eventually, Facebook has practically captured an entire generation. Then they decide to go be shitty like they said they wouldn't do. Nobody on there is able to disable the bad features. Your only option is to leave all your friends, or just put up with it. You have no control in this situation, and Facebook has all the control.

In silicon valley, investors call this Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS. It's a situation where a company creates a server that you have to connect to in order to get what you want. Business people love this, because it means that we're all entirely beholden to them, and they can change the rules on us whenever they want, and we can't do anything about it. Every new tech startup in the past decade or more has operated under this model. It's what social media is, it's what cloud hosting is, it's how "smart" fridges and toasters and washing machines all work. It's how streaming music and movies and audiobooks works. Every AI company is using this model as well, and it works spectacularly for that industry, because of just how hard it is to run AI software on most hardware.

Not that AI is relevant to this post, though. What we should be focusing on is how walled gardens operate. Walled gardens are the result of a Software as a Service business model. If we want to resist Big Tech, we need to be finding ways to flip that business model on its head. Sometimes, we can do that by providing software that lets people do all the computation locally on their own computer for some given task. But a lot of tasks still require access to the internet in order to work. This is the more complicated side. How do we build our own services that free people from Big Tech, without just building new walled gardens of our own?

Well, the important thing is that your service needs to be open. Other services should be able to interact with it (nerds like to refer to this as interoperability), allowing for users to escape the garden, while still participating. It should be possible for anyone to spin up their own site on the Social Web that plugs into the existing sites, and lets somebody look at posts made by users on other sites.

The point of what we should be building is something that is lightweight, and which can easily be shared across a community. Whatever we make to add to the Social Web, it needs to be easy for an individual (hopefully one who is only mildly technical) to host themselves for their community. That way, we can have a large number of different sites operating on the overall network. More nodes (sites) means a stronger network, and less prone to Big Tech coming in and trying to break something.

One of the biggest issues with the Social Web right now is how awful it is for non-technical users to understand. Half of that's a communication thing. For instance, almost none of the language I've used in this blog post is the language that most Social Web users use. They like to use the language of "open protocols" and "federated" or "distributed" networks. This is great for them, but it's not how you start a grassroots movement to push away from Big Tech. The other half of the problem is that it's genuinely just hard from a software point of view. Instead of one site ("go to facebook dot com!"), there's now a bunch of sites, and you have to pick one, even though you've got no experience about which ones are better, or what criteria you should even be picking based off of. I don't know what the solution to that second problem is, but I'm sure it's something that can be figured out if we apply ourselves. On the other hand, the communication problem is easy to solve. People need to stop trying to sell the Social Web using fancy computer science terms. Nobody wants to join your nerd revolution.

People are yearning for a way to escape Big Tech. We cannot afford to waste this golden opportunity of the current moment by being pedantic. We need to invite our less-technical friends into the Social Web without making them feel unwelcome by overloading them with technical jargon. Give them the basics, enough for a regular person to understand, and then help them make an account. This stuff can't be demonstrated as being confusing, or else nobody will want to join us as we push away from Big Tech.