Alternatives to Instagram: where should artists go?

When Meta’s CEO Zuckerberg openly supported Trump’s ideology short before the start of Trump’s second term as president, it suddenly opened my eyes. Of course, I knew that Meta and the whole Silicon Valley scene was a stronghold of ruthless capitalism and clearly on the right in the economic sense, but I considered those tech companies as rather leaning to the left on cultural topics, such as migration, diversity and LGBTQIA+ rights, with their multinational teams and tech conferences where all speakers were introduced with their pronouns besides their names.

It appeared that I was misguided and the tech bro’s ideologies had been more and more drifting to the toxic manosphere. It was un unpleasant wake up call, that caused a new urgency to question even more the music business’ dependency on monopolist platforms like Instagram and Spotify.

I was not the only one who was worried about this and with a couple of friends we formed an ad hoc group and organised two workshops for music professionals under the name “Independent Music 2.0 - Fighting the Broligarchy”. The main idea was to feel less alone with this problem, exchange ideas and expertise, and to brainstorm about some ideas to fight back. There were two strands of thought:

Scenario STAY: what can we do if we stay on platforms like Instagram? What are the strategies to reduce hate speech and keep the opinions diverse? If all left wing people leave, will it become even more a right wing echo chamber?

Scenario LEAVE: what are the alternatives? Which choices are viable for musicians? Will we lose our existing relationships and fanbases or can we convince them to switch?

Because I am a rather technical person working as a software to engineer to fund my musical projects, I was mainly researching the alternative platforms. I looked at them from a technical point of view (what are the assumptions and architectural decisions they are built on?), but I also researched what kind of people are building them, how big the teams are and how their work is sustained financially.

Roughly, there are two different bigger ecosystems that want to reshape our relationship with social media: the Fediverse, with Mastodon as the biggest player, and the much younger ATProtocol, with Bluesky as its main actor. They both want to give power back to the social media users, with slogans like “Your timeline, your choice” and “Your home feed should be filled with what matters to you most, not what a corporation thinks you should see.”

The technical implementation of these two ecosystems is very different and is based on diverging philosophies on what it means to set up an infrastructure where power dynamics are better kept in check.

The idea of the Fediverse has been around since 2016 and is mainly popular among techie people and open source software developers. As a first time user, it is a bit difficult to wrap your head around the best way to get started. The Fediverse is kind of a network of smaller networks and online communities. To break the power dynamics of big silos like Instagram or Twitter, the Fediverse builds many much smaller-scaled networks and communities, called servers or instances. However, these servers can communicate with each other, and therefore, it is possible to follow people on other servers and to see and interact with their posts. There are servers for all kinds of communities and they generally have very clear ethics about the safety of their members, with anti-harassment moderation towards vulnerable communities like LGBTQIA+ or disabled people, among others. There are also servers with very right wing people and trolls and most of the servers block traffic from those servers.

I liked a metaphor of Aendra, who described Mastodon (or the Fediverse) servers as a network of clubs like on a university campus: once you are in, people stick together and they are protective about their values and their people, but sometimes it can be a bit difficult to get in from outside.

One of the stumbling blocks when you want to join Mastodon is the fact that you have to choose a server, one of the many communities. Most people just blindly choose mastodon.social, the biggest one that is run by the team that builds the Mastodon software. However, there are actually 8400 different Mastodon servers. That is only if you look at the Mastodon version of the Fediverse, which is focussed on Twitter-like microblogging. However there are alternative user experiences, like Pixelfed, that has more an Instagram feeling, PeerTube that is more like YouTube, etc. There are actually 172 different software implementations plugged into the Fediverse ecosystem and all of them can have many servers or instances.

Does it matter who you choose? It could, because a lot of those servers are run by volunteers, who often cover costs out of their own pocket. You are dependent on the goodwill of your server administrators and moderators. They might shut you off from accounts that you actually want to follow or they can just close it down because they feel burnt out. Theoretically, you can migrate your account to another server, but only to a certain extent, especially if you compare with the approach that Bluesky is taking towards account mobility.

Bluesky’s main point about redistributing power in social media is a clear focus on giving people agency over their account data. The system is designed around what they call ‘credible exit’: the power to move your personal data and content to another player or network if you don’t like the one you are on any more. Instead of scaling down all the parts of the social network infrastructure (like in the Fediverse), they unbundle all the different parts into separate entities, that can be run by different organisations or companies. The naked data are stored in one place, the so called Personal Data Server or PDS. There are different applications that can use these data to provide different user experiences (a microblog feed, a photo feed, or video feed or all kind of possible combinations thereof). As a user you can choose how your timeline is moderated by choosing settings and so called labellers, who can be run by the same or by other organisations.

That’s the theory of what Bluesky, the company, started showing to the public at the beginning of 2024. The company is building two things at the same time: the ATproto protocol, which is the technical implementation of the unbundling philosophy I just described, and Bluesky, the app, a microblogging app that very much looks like Twitter, and which is actually a proof of concept to show that the said protocol can work. In comparison with Mastodon, Bluesky has a very easy onboarding experience, and the network is growing rapidly because lots of people are looking for alternatives for volatile platforms like X and Tiktok. Bluesky users can offer ‘starter packs’ to their friends, where you can follow a whole bunch of accounts in one go, and there are tons of custom feeds around specific interests: art, news, cats, Queer+Trans Studies, Fungi friends, books, you name it. These algorithmic feeds are not created by the company, but by the users.

This is a quite a difference from the first experience with Mastodon, where there is a deep distrust of algorithmic feed curation. Mastodon’s timeline is strictly chronological and there are not more than three feeds to choose from: the accounts you chose to follow, all posts on your own server (which can be very empty if you start on a small server), and all posts on the entire network (which is very overwhelming).

Mastodon and the Fediverse are very clear about their ethical principles, but Bluesky clearly wins in giving mainstream, non-technical users something pleasant to work with right away. Of course, each approach comes with its pros and cons.

In practice, more than 99% of the ATproto infrastructure is still run by one company, Bluesky PBC. The developer community that wants to build their own infrastructure and applications on the protocol is just emerging. Being a coder myself, I am personally getting involved into this community, and I must admit that I am excited about what is buzzing there. This ecosystem is on a practical level still dominated by one US company, but during the first ATmosphere community conference in March 2025 in Seattle and the European version of it, AHOY!, in Hamburg in April, you sense the spirit of resistance towards the tech broligarchy and the Trump administration. There is an optimism that it is possible to reshape the social media landscape and give the power back to the people.

However, if you think that the resistance should be radically anti-capitalist and anti-US, you might better stick with Mastodon and the Fediverse. Bluesky is often criticised in Fediverse corners because it is funded by venture capital money. When I started my research, I was also quite sceptical about this, but the people inside Bluesky and the ecosystem gradually convinced me. The popularity of ‘Public Benefit Corporations’ as a legal form to organise themselves (for profit, but with the aim of making a positive societal impact) is closer to the American way of thinking than the donation based foundations and non-profits on the Fediverse side. However, I consider Bluesky’s CEO Jay Graber cut from a different cloth as, for instance, Mark Zuckerberg. With a background in digital rights activism, she presents herself as the antipode of the Meta CEO, with her “a world without Caesars” shirt. I am also happy about the attention that some people from vulnerable communities get from this developer community. Rudy Fraser is the mastermind of Blacksky, a community building ATProto infrastructure for the black community. He is clearly a very tech savvy coder, building everything new from scratch to be independent of Bluesky PBC’s infrastructure, but he is also a clear supporter of community and mutual aid ethos. Aendra Rininsland built a name for herself as an early adopter who made influential tools like the News Feed and XBlock (a tool that labels Twitter screenshots so that you can hide them from your feed), but she is also a highly visible representative of the queer community in the ecosystem and involved in Northsky, a Canadian cooperative that tries to build infrastructure outside of the US to give more security to the LGBTQIA+ community.

I also think that ATproto and Bluesky have a bigger potential for musicians, because as artists we want to gain reach to a broader audience. Because it has a better user experience, Bluesky is more rapidly growing amoung mainstream, less techie users. Mastodon and the Fediverse is lacking good discovery tools, and discovery is essential for artist growth. I see a bright future in setting up music related feeds on Bluesky, where you have a good calendar of upcoming live shows in your area, where you can discover new artists in feeds by human curators that match your taste, etc.

It is finding a delicate between ethics and pragmatism. I rather made up my choice in favour of Bluesky, but I still stay critical about the current power balance in the ecosystem. Let us see what the future will tell.