Does your organisation use Facebook, Instagram or X? Every day you stay there, you make your audience more dependent on data-guzzling platforms with addictive algorithms, without knowing whether people actually get to see your content. So it’s high time to start using alternatives where you’re in control!
On the open social web, you can also reach your audience through platforms that aren’t owned by a single company, and where people have a choice. By sharing your posts there too, you make your audience less dependent on the commercial platforms.
The big commercial platforms want to keep everything and everyone to themselves, using addictive algorithms and pushing extreme and polarising content, so they can sell people’s attention on an advertising market. Fortunately, there are also social media that do things differently. The key feature of these alternative social media is that they deliberately choose an open structure, in which different sites and apps can work together and form one big network. They give people the freedom to choose which provider they feel comfortable joining and which app(s) they want to use. And should that ever change, they can also switch more easily without losing their social network.
Two roads, one destination
In reality, there are two major developments within alternative social media that share a similar goal (decentralised, free social media), but have taken a slightly different approach to get there: the Fediverse, whose best-known platform is Mastodon, and the ATmosphere, whose best-known platform is Bluesky.
Handles
Both the Fediverse and the ATmosphere use handles to refer to your account. They just take a different form. Here’s how to recognise them:
On the Fediverse, you use: @handle@platform.url. Example: @toon@publicspaces.net.
In the ATmosphere, the handle always takes the form of a domain name, without an extra @ sign. It’s usually @*handle.*server.url. For example: @marleen.oso.social. But it can also just be a domain name on its own, such as @publicspaces.net.
Fediverse
The Fediverse is a gigantic network made up of around 37,000 different platforms, from very large to very small, using more than 550 different software tools, most of them open source. What connects all these platforms is that they use the same protocol to exchange messages and posts: ActivityPub. Thanks to that protocol, people who sign up on one platform can also exchange posts with people who are active on other platforms.
The Fediverse isn’t just federated (a system in which equal platforms can communicate with each other using the same protocol, just like email), it’s also very diverse. The 550 different software tools that make up the Fediverse all have different features. Mastodon, for example, is the most widely used software for microblogging (short posts like the ones you know from X and Threads), while Pixelfed lets you set up a platform that’s all about posting images and photos, like you would on Insta. For TikToks and social video, you can use Loops, and for longer blogs and newsletters à la Substack, you can use Ghost.
You can find an (almost) complete overview of the different software you can use to build a platform on the Fediverse here: https://fedidb.com/software. But before you think ‘Software to set up my own platform???’, don’t be put off. You don’t necessarily have to get to work with this software yourself. There are plenty of options for joining existing platforms. The Fediverse exists thanks to all kinds of initiatives, foundations and organisations that run this software for you and where you can sign up for an account. Often, that’s free of charge for everyone, but on some platforms you first have to go through a screening process to be approved. For example, to establish that you’re a real person, or because the community is made up of a specific target group.
On the Fediverse, the platform you sign up with lets you post messages, images and video, which can then also be seen by your followers who are active on other platforms.
Moderation
Each platform takes responsibility for keeping things orderly and moderates posts when complaints come in or when you break the house rules. A platform can also decide whether or not to allow the exchange of posts with certain other platforms. This can be used, for example, to keep out spam from platforms that allow lots of bots, or when abuse is lurking because a platform is poorly managed. In some cases, blocks are also put in place on principle. For example, when there are clear indications that racist or intolerant content is being posted from those platforms. Each platform can decide how to handle this for itself. So there’s plenty to choose from.
Mastodon.social
Mastodon.social is the largest platform on the Fediverse and was set up by the makers of the Mastodon software. In terms of features, this platform is always a step ahead of the pack, and new things that aren’t yet used on other platforms are regularly tested here. To get an idea of what gets posted on Mastodon.social, take a look here: https://mastodon.social/explore.
Mastodon.nl and mstdn.social
Would you rather sign up with a platform a little closer to home? Then you can join Mastodon.nl or Mstdn.social. Both platforms are run from the Netherlands. Mastodon.nl is managed by Stichting ActivityClub, and Mstdn.social is an independent private initiative. Both are kept running by donations.
But there are many more. For an overview of almost all the Mastodon platforms you can sign up with, see: https://joinmastodon.org/servers
PixelFed & Loops
The Mastodon platforms mentioned above focus mainly on text posts. If your organisation wants to reach a more visually oriented target group, take a look at Pixelfed (an alternative to Instagram) or Loops (an alternative to TikTok). Both platforms have far fewer active users, but might be a better fit for your target group.
So when using a new and unfamiliar platform, it’s not just important to post good content. You also need a strategy for making your target group aware of your accounts. You can use other, existing channels for this, for example. Instead of ‘Follow us on Insta’, why not put a QR code to your Pixelfed account in a leaflet or on a poster? Update the icons on your website so people find not just your Facebook page, but also your organisation’s Loops account. And send out a newsletter when new photos and videos have been posted.
Communities
Because the Fediverse is made up of lots of separate platforms that can connect with each other, it’s also a very suitable system for giving (small) communities a place of their own. It often isn’t a given that every conversation should be shared with the entire global network. Sometimes, sharing selectively with a specific other group is what’s needed. Bonfire responds neatly to this idea, with software that gives you ultimate control over how you put groups together and who you share with.
Read, for example, how Mentaal.nl is experimenting with it: https://publicspaces.net/2026/10/16/mentaal-nl-test-bonfire-voor-communitys-in-de-ggz/
Self-hosting
If you want ultimate control over your platform, you can choose to host a platform yourself for your organisation. One important reason for doing so can be that you want your organisation’s domain name to appear in its accounts, so people can see that the sender is trustworthy. Several organisations in the Netherlands have therefore already set up their own platforms, where staff have accounts and organisational accounts are hosted.
A few examples:
- The Dutch government, with the KNMI (Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute), Rijkswaterstaat traffic information and the Council of State, among others, at: https://social.overheid.nl
- NRC: https://nrc.social/
- City of Amsterdam: https://amsterdam.social
- De Groene: https://social.groene.nl
- Follow the Money: https://social.ftm.nl/
There are various providers who can manage the servers for your own platform. Take a look at Procolix or https://masto.host/, for example, or ask your own IT supplier or web host.
ATmosphere
Alongside the entire Fediverse ecosystem, there’s yet another ecosystem of social media platforms, based on a different communication protocol, AT Protocol, with Bluesky as the best-known platform running on it. Bluesky was started from within the old (pre-Musk) Twitter, with the aim of one day making Twitter more open and more resilient. If there were several large Twitter-like platforms, they could exist side by side and still connect with each other. On the Fediverse, the architecture revolves around a large number of small to medium-sized platforms, each offering a different experience. For their idea of one big, worldwide village square, Bluesky’s founders therefore chose a different technical foundation: AT Protocol, in which your posts and the app that displays them are separate from each other, so that a single app can offer an overview of the whole network.
The big difference
On the Fediverse, the platform you’ve signed up with is in charge. Your posts are hosted on its server, and it decides, through its moderation and federation policies, what others get to see of them. In the ATmosphere, your posts are hosted on a PDS (Personal Data Server), but the app you use to view posts (Bluesky in most cases) decides what you do or don’t see.
Moderation and algorithms
Because Twitter was heavily criticised for how its algorithms worked (deciding what appears in your timeline) and for its content moderation policy (one policy for the whole world: try pulling that off), Bluesky’s founders built options into the protocol to decouple algorithms and moderation from app providers and content hosts. That makes it possible, for example, to plug a different moderation service into an app. One that can flag or tag posts with certain characteristics that matter to you, for instance.
One of the first initiatives to make use of this was BlackSky. They wanted posts to be scanned more thoroughly for racism and to better protect marginalised groups. By starting their own moderation service, run by volunteers, they enabled people to add an extra layer of safety to their Bluesky experience.
Besides microblogging, there are countless other apps and initiatives developing new forms of social media. Just like the Fediverse, the AT Protocol isn’t tied to microblogging alone. Here you’ll find an overview of other apps built on the AT Protocol.
BlueSky
Bluesky is the largest app using the AT Protocol. As the founders and designers of the protocol, they’re the ones at the controls. The Fediverse is based on an open protocol managed by the W3C standards organisation (which also manages the protocols of the World Wide Web). AT Protocol is public and free to use, but its development is less democratic. There are initiatives to turn AT Protocol into a genuine standard too and bring it under the Internet Engineering Task Force, but that’s still in progress.
So Bluesky isn’t a non-profit, but an American company that will eventually need to recoup the money put in by venture capitalists. How it will do that isn’t entirely clear yet. For now, the company doesn’t use advertising and doesn’t collect data to make that money back, but it is exploring options for exclusive content and paid subscriptions.
EuroSky
Because Bluesky is a US-based company, and therefore subject to US law, there’s been a call from the European continent to build a European branch of the ATmosphere network too. In the Netherlands, the Modal Foundation has started building Eurosky. Eurosky will build all the components of the Bluesky infrastructure, but hosted in Europe and managed by the European non-profit. They’re doing this step by step, as it all takes time and money. But you can already fairly easily migrate your Bluesky account to Eurosky, taking all your followers and your posts with you. More than 37,000 accounts have already led the way. A no-brainer: https://portal.eurosky.tech/create-account
The Modal Foundation has also developed the app Mu, a European app where you can simply see and read everything that also appears on Bluesky.
Oso.social
Last week, during Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, our partner Waag launched Oso.social, in collaboration with Eurosky. The platform will be available to everyone in January 2027. Oso.social will be a social media platform like Bluesky and Eurosky, but with a number of unique features and partners. A large number of Dutch journalistic organisations are taking part, for example, and it has a special extension for cultural events.
Self-hosting
Hosting your own Bluesky isn’t easy. But that doesn’t mean you can’t take certain components into your own hands.
Hosting your own PDS, the server where your posts and media are stored, is perfectly doable for a good system administrator or hosting partner. That way, you decide what happens to your data.
If you want to link your account name to your own domain name, so it’s clear who the sender is, you can do that without hosting anything at all. In the AT Protocol, your identity can be decoupled from the platform provider. In the Bluesky app, you can set up your own domain name via Settings → Account → Handle → I have my own domain.
Want to launch your own social app based on Eurosky’s infrastructure, just like Waag? You can do that with Mu Studio: https://eurosky.tech/mu-studio/
W social
And then there’s W Social. W Social was recently widely announced as the European social media platform. It has been warmly embraced by the European Commission, which also has a presence on it. Unfortunately, W Social, which is also based on AT Protocol, is surrounded by quite a few controversies. The company behind W Social wants to use user data to train AI models, it has made its version of the platform’s originally open source code closed source, so that how it works can no longer be verified, and sensitive user data was recently leaked, even though the platform prides itself on its privacy-friendly approach.
As an organisation, you’re of course free to choose which platform you join. But W Social shows that it doesn’t score very well on being OPEN (another key value in the PublicSpaces manifesto). You can read more about the controversies surrounding W Social here.
Hyves
Hyves, once the biggest Dutch social media platform, recently made a comeback. The new Hyves is part of Mediahuis, the publisher of De Telegraaf and NRC, among others. Hyves says it wants to be a privacy-friendly, European social media platform. Unfortunately, research by Follow the Money shows that this claim isn’t 100% accurate yet. And when PublicSpaces asked, it also turned out that, for now, they have no ambition to adopt an open standard to connect with other (open) social media platforms. Want to read more about what PublicSpaces thinks of Hyves?
Bridges
The Fediverse and the ATmosphere are currently two separate worlds. That’s because their underlying technologies are fundamentally different. The Fediverse revolves around a network of connected platforms, while the ATmosphere tries to create one big platform. Yet the timelines in the apps often look more or less the same. Wouldn’t it be great if you could follow people with an ATmosphere account from a Fediverse platform, and vice versa?
There are initiatives that try to connect the two networks. There’s platform software that supports both protocols, for example, such as WAFRN or micro.blog.
Another approach is so-called ‘bridges’: software that builds bridges between the two networks. The largest working bridge between the Fediverse and the ATmosphere is Bridgy Fed. This bridge lets you, for example, link a Bluesky handle to your Mastodon account. And it lets you follow Bluesky accounts via Mastodon.
There is a catch, though. You can’t link two existing accounts to each other. Instead, each account gets a new handle on the other network:
| Fediverse | ATmosphere | |
|---|---|---|
| @publicspaces@publicspaces.net | ➡️ | @publicspaces.publicspaces.net.ap.brid.gy |
| @publicspaces.net@bsky.brid.gy | ⬅️ | @publicspaces.net |
One downside of Bridgy Fed, though, is that it introduces a central dependency, and its software runs on Google infrastructure. That’s why a European collaboration, European.social, which PublicSpaces is involved in, is currently exploring how to build a bridge in Europe that works independently of big tech and keeps data safe and within Europe.
Cross-posting software
Find it a hassle to support yet another social medium and post on it separately? Then take a look at the open source tool Mixpost. Mixpost is a social media tool that makes it easy to schedule your social media campaigns. Besides Mastodon, Pixelfed and Bluesky, Mixpost also supports the other platforms you might not be ready to say goodbye to just yet. That way, you can switch gradually and easily experiment with open social media platforms.
Mixpost offers non-profits a 30% discount on the standard price: https://mixpost.app/pricing
The numbers
We can’t talk about new social media platforms without putting their scale into perspective, although ‘reach’ on these platforms is a hard concept to pin down: a post scrolling past in a timeline says little about its actual impact. What is clear, though, is that the open social web is growing.
According to the Nationaal Social Media Onderzoek 2026 (the Dutch national social media survey), more than 200,000 Dutch people now use Mastodon daily, an increase of over 100,000 compared to 2025. On the ATmosphere, atproto.nl estimates around 230,000 active Dutch accounts. Those numbers are still small compared to the big commercial platforms, but the growth is structural, and reason enough for organisations to be findable on the open social web.
To wrap up
The open social web is still very much in development. Its two flavours, the Fediverse and the ATmosphere, can coexist and each serve a different purpose. The ATmosphere aims to create one big global village square, while on the Fediverse, an archipelago of smaller platforms flourishes. Which part of the open social web you want to establish your organisation’s presence on depends very much on the goal you’re pursuing. Do you mainly want to reach as large an audience as possible? Then the ATmosphere, with its single large network and better searchability, is a good fit. Would you rather find a smaller, close-knit community around a specific topic? Then the varied Fediverse, with its specialised platforms, offers more room for that.
The platforms also differ considerably when it comes to autonomy and control. Setting up your own ATmosphere infrastructure as an organisation might be a bit much to ask. With the building blocks Eurosky offers, though, you can take part of it into your own hands. But for most organisations that want a presence in the ATmosphere, opening an account with the non-profit Eurosky, or soon with oso.social, is probably the easiest first step.
For a 100% independent infrastructure of your own, where you’re in charge and don’t have to depend on third parties, the Fediverse offers by far the most solutions. Among the wide range of open source software packages, you’re almost certain to find one that suits you. Whether it’s a large microblogging platform with Mastodon, a small server on a Raspberry Pi with LittleFedi, a platform for sharing images with Pixelfed, or a safe environment for a community with Bonfire: there’s something for everyone.
Want a more complete overview, handpicked by PublicSpaces, of Dutch-language Mastodon, PeerTube and Pixelfed servers? Check out the Knowledge Base (in Dutch).
