Reasons for optimism at the turn of the year: reflections on the fediverses, the ATmosphere, and whatever comes next

"The song struck me as a message to me, and my own message to others: you should take whatever steps you need to gain autonomy and safety. It also felt like a message I had heard and continued to hear this year in my conversations with folks like Timnit Gebru and Omar Wasow. It also felt like the first DM I got from Blacksky’s first investor, Mekka Okereke, ~1 year ago to this day as I write this. He asked what I would do if I had the funding and freedom to build anything I wanted."

– Rudy Fraser in Anniversary: Blacksy Algorithms Turns One, talking about Sister Nancy's Roof over mi head (1982)

"While the the strong resistance to Threads from the FediPact and the rest of the Free Fediverse is only one of the reasons Meta has shifted 'Threads Fediverse' to maintenance mode, it's still unambiguously very good news for the Free Fediverse. Defederation is a blunt tool, and today's fediverwse still relies far too much on it ... but just as with Gab, it's a very effective tool for defederating fascists.

For the corporate fediverse, it's a disappointment for anybody foolish enough to have believed Meta would actually give anybody else access to their audience, but good news for companies making a bet on descentralization. By contrast, it's a big embarassment for all the "Big Fedi" advocates who were soooo excited back when Threads found it useful to say nice things about fedi ... one more way in which it's good news for the fediverses as a whole!"

– me, in Coda: The View from 2026

"My vision for Mastodon is a different direction than all previous attempts at social media, by focussing on community ownership, Trust & Safety features, slow user & server growth, and financial sustainability - for the non-profit project, the server administrators, the moderators, and creators in the Fediverse."

– Mastodon's new Executive Director Felix Hlaty, November 2025

Don't get me wrong, I could just as easily have done another version of this post called "Reasons for skepticism". Over the course of 2025, the number of active users actually decreased in both the ActivityPub Fediverse and the ATmosphere (Bluesky, Blacksky et al). Anti-Blackness, cisnormativity, ableism, anti-Palestinianism, and other forms of discrimination and bigotry are still huge problems in the ATmosphere and the fediverses. Bad internet legislation in the UK, Australia, across the US, Canada, France and dozens of other countries helps big tech and hurts community-run social networks and LGBTQIA2S+ people. And the list goes on ...

Still, there really is a lot of exciting stuff happening. And the list goes on here too, for example with Christine Lemmer-Webber's thread about the work Spritely is doing; the dozen ATProtocol programs / products dapurplesharpie lists in her Blacksy thread; Newsmast Foundation's work with Bristol Cable deepening community for a UK news co-op; the upcoming launches of Northsky (currently in beta), Gander, and Eurosky; Piefed's steady progress as a news aggregator that goes far beyond reddit; and much much more.

Meanwhile, the big centralized social networks continue to deteriorate – and align with fascist and authoritarian governments. TikTok in the US is now owned by a consortium including Oracle (run by friend-of-Trump Larry Ellison) and MGX (the state investment firm of the United Arab Emirates, currently supporting genocide in Sudan). Facebook is testing a link-posting limit to force people to pay for "Meta Verified." Meta is ratcheting up the censorship, including shutting down accounts linked to abortion advice and queer content. Xitter is .... oh don't even get me started. It really is bleak.

But in bleakness there is opportunity. As Saskia Welch says in Looking to 26

"Instead of rolling over and showing bellies to corrupt politicians and Big Tech egomaniacs, we're seeing the beginning of a revolution....

Organisations and the people who make them are fed up of letting Big Tech platforms take advantage of them and the communities they've built. Local news publishers are no longer trying to play the system, they're moving around it. Academics and researchers are solving the problem by looking in new directions for solutions. Communities are taking ownership and control of their digital space, not just their physical one."

Over the course of 2025, I've been part of a loose working group looking at organizing, mutual aid, and activism on decentralized social networks; while there's been substantial progress on some of the key gaps we identified, there's still a looong way to go. Oh well. If changing the world were easy everyone would do it. But by the end of the year, we had also identified some areas where there are good opportunities right now.

So I for one am going to start the new year in an optimistic and forward-looking frame of mind. With that in mind, let's wrap this article – and 2025 – up with a quote from an upcoming post on organizing:

"The fediverses and the ATmosphere have a great opportunity to play a major role in fighting back on the worldwide assault on our digital rights. Here in the US, the first few months of 2026 will feature legislative battles over age verification in mutliple states (including Washington) and Congress, attempts to regulate surveillance technology like license plate readers in Washington and across the country, resistance to data centers and "AI" as a tool of oppression, and FISA warrantless wiretapping reauthorization. And guess what? Similar issues are cropping up all around the world, for example age verification in Canada, the EU (along with another round of the multi-year Chat Control fight), Australia, South Africa, Brazil ...

These new decentralized social network ecosystems are still much much smaller than centralized big tech networks, but are filled with people who care about these issues. So it's a great chance to develop and leverage new organizing tactics, and create a positive cycle where the fediverses, the ATmosphere, and whatever comes become a nexus of resistance to big tech as well as fascism."

Happy 2026, and stay tuned for more!