Samenvatting

In recent years, in the context of sustained criticism and general fatigue that surrounds largescale corporate social media platforms,1 the desire to build alternatives has grown stronger. This has manifested through the emergence of a wide range of projects, driven by various motives. These projects introduce themselves by emphasizing what makes them distinct from corporate social media, whether it is their ethics, their organizational structure, their underlying technologies, their features, their source code access, or the special interest communities they seek to support. Although diverse, these platforms tend to have one common purpose: to directly question the vendor lock-in of the dominant social media landscape. As a result, they call for different levels of decentralization and interoperability in terms of network architectures and data circulation. These platforms are colloquially known as the ‘Fediverse’, a portmanteau of ‘federation’ and ‘universe’. Earlier attempts to create federated social media platforms came from Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities.