The Vision
A shared, standardised communication protocol: it may sound technically complicated, but it is as simple as it is brilliant, and the technical blueprint has long been familiar to all of us: email. Whether your address is hosted by Proton, Posteo, Gmail or GMX, your digital letters reach their destination. This is the idea we build on.
The year is 2028. Thanks to smart investment and political foresight, the Open Social Web has achieved its breakthrough. More than 100 million people connect, communicate and experience the world of open social networks. No platform economy à la Meta, ByteDance, Alphabet and co., no stressful digital moves and no toxic design. It works just like email: whether on Mastodon, Eurosky’s Mu or Streamplace, you have one account, your own posts and content, your own choices, and the freedom to connect with 100 million users worldwide.
A critical mass of users in Europe has turned its back on the platform monopolies and created a free market built on interoperable infrastructure. Today, users decide for themselves which content, which algorithms and which applications they want to use. Closed platforms have become open networks. On the ActivityPub and AT Protocol protocols (as well as Matrix for direct messaging), an ecosystem of non-commercial, public service and commercial offerings has emerged. They enrich and complement public-interest projects such as Mastodon and Eurosky, and they communicate with one another through shared interfaces.
This vision describes the Open Social Web (OSW): a decentralised, public-interest infrastructure for digital communication, based on open standards and interoperable protocols.
The Challenges
The idea of an Open Social Web is not new. The Fediverse has been in development since 2008 and is home to diverse, vibrant communities that build individual applications and run instances. While its focus has so far been on Europe, North America and Japan, there are now more than 100 applications, such as Mastodon, Loops and PeerTube, and more than 42,000 active instances worldwide. Even so, the number of active users, around 13 million, is growing only slowly. The ATmosphere community has been developing since 2022, primarily in North America but increasingly in Europe and beyond. It currently has around 43 million registered accounts and dozens of implementations and applications, such as Eurosky’s Mu, Gander and Sill.
For many reasons, both protocol-based social networks are attractive alternatives to the platform economy dominated by Meta, ByteDance and Alphabet. So why have people been so hesitant to switch?
We have identified five key challenges: infrastructure, governance, funding, appeal and public mandate. Below, we set out how we can overcome them and make the Open Social Web Alliance a shared success.
The Path
An ecosystem like this does not emerge on its own. Our roadmap shows how the Open Social Web could reach a relevant scale within just a few months. It takes political will, smart regulation, sufficient funding and a broad coalition of actors willing to share responsibility. The task is big. But the levers are there.
As a first step, we are founding the Open Social Web Alliance: an open alliance of stakeholders from civil society, research, business, media, culture and the public sector who are committed to the shared governance of the OSW. It brings together a wide range of existing communities and initiatives and is to be supported in future by a publicly funded secretariat. Its central goal: building and operating the OSW’s core infrastructure (see Section 2.1, Infrastructure).
Our roadmap envisions that the German federal government will explicitly support the Alliance, for instance by acting as patron of an Open Social Web Summit in autumn 2026, to which everyone with an interest in the OSW would be invited.
At the summit, the Alliance would adopt its charter, setting out how it admits new members and how it intends to implement its governance going forward (see Section 2.2, Governance). By spring 2027, public funding for the infrastructure would be in place, along with a first core funding round of public and private capital for innovation and applications (see Section 2.3, Funding). The Alliance would publish its first Social Web Health Report, featuring findings from user surveys, legal, technical and academic analyses, and clear recommendations for further development (see Section 2.4, Appeal). In parallel, the federal and state governments would ensure that the legal basis for cooperation between public service media, other media, business and civil society is established (see Section 2.5, Public Mandate). The federal government would also champion the OSW idea at EU level, for instance through an implementation push for effective digital legislation. As key stakeholders such as the federal government adopt OSW applications as their primary channel of communication, influential creators and publishers would follow suit, and central political debates would quickly shift to the Open Social Web. Taken together, these measures would reduce the influence and appeal of today’s dominant Big Tech platforms.