Is it time to ditch social media as we know it?

The recent drama at TikTok, Meta, and X (Twitter) has caused a lot of us to wonder: Are we stuck with these Big Tech social media platforms?
Over the past week, there was a 5000% increase in Google searches for alternative social media options. Those searches resulted in massive spikes for platforms like RedNote, Bluesky, and others.
That set the stage for a trend that’s been developing for a while, and this may just be the push that we all need to make it stick.
Decentralized Social Media
Until recently, the idea of decentralized social media has been popular among the very early adopters and tech enthusiasts, but it hasn’t really threatened the dominance of the centrally-owned social media giants like Meta and TikTok.
The basic idea is that social media can be open in the same way that email and the internet are open for anyone to build on them. We are so used to privately-owned social media that it can be tough to wrap our minds around the concept, but to me, email is a good parallel that helps to clarify what we’re talking about.
We all use email, and a lot of businesses have been built to send and receive emails, like Gmail, Hotmail, and Outlook; However, all of those services work on an open protocol, meaning that a Gmail user can easily send a message to a Hotmail user, and vice versa.
Decentralized social media works in a similar way. Posts, messages, and videos can be created and shared using any one of the services, such as Bluesky, and those posts can be shared (or restricted) to any other open service.
The beauty of the decentralized service, as Bluesky’s CEO recently described, is that they can be “Billionaire Proof” meaning that even if one private company controls the most popular service, they can’t lock their users in. In the same way that we could move our email from one service to another, if a tech billionaire introduced policies we didn’t like, we could simply shift to another service without losing any of our content, or even our followers.
The Push to Decentralize
This is no longer some aspirational idea — there is real progress being made to lure users to decentralized options.
For example, Bluesky (which is built on an open protocol) has added a custom feed for vertical videos that looks a lot like Reels or TikTok, and it’s also launching a separate app called Flashes that will be exclusively for photo sharing.
But even as Bluesky is leading the way, the whole point is that we don’t get locked into another version of the same tech monopoly, so Mark Cuban is actively funding people who are trying to build a TikTok alternative using Bluesky’s open protocol.
So What?
For businesses, this could be amazing news, because instead of being forced to play by whatever rules Zuckerberg, Elon, or any other tech leader feels like imposing, we can build our brands across the open platforms and shift our focus to whatever service makes the most sense for our communities.
Given all of the excitement and energy around this shift, we should all be paying attention, and probably starting to allocate some of our time to developing a presence on decentralized social media.
And remember, this time we don’t have to try to guess which platform is going to be the winner. Whether we choose to build on Bluesky, Mastodon, Lens, or others, we won’t lose our progress if we choose to shift to a different platform in the future.