ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Users are frustrated with restrictive, AI-first social platforms.
- Decentralized platforms give users more customization and moderation options.
- Sozial.Wiki goes a step beyond options like Mastodon.
Big tech platforms are increasingly frustrating users, in part because of their constant introduction of new AI features and the privacy concerns that accompany them. In response, researchers at MIT created Social.Wiki, an editable platform for social apps that lets users build and fix what they don’t like.
What Sozial.Wiki does and why
Much like Wikipedia, Social.Wiki is a platform that allows users to create and then edit social apps. Social.Wiki only works with sites created internally – it can’t be used to edit proprietary apps like Instagram or X. Every Social.Wiki site had an “Edit” button that allowed users to change the source code, either manually or via an AI assistant (vibe-coding friendly).
Users can name “trusted editors” to prioritize changes made by certain people or organizations, and can “choose which of the changes made by others they want to see,” meaning it offers a high level of customization, the researchers said in a blog about the project. If a group of people using a messaging app prefers a restaurant selection feature to an AI chatbot, for example, they can replace the chatbot.
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“A user could customize their rules, or ‘governance policy’, so that they would only see changes to a site that were endorsed by at least two of their friends,” the blog said. “When the Social.Wiki browser loads a site for a user, it applies the government policy the user has chosen to decide which version of the site to present.
In case studies, the researchers found that people used Social.Wiki to create more community-oriented versions of daily centralized apps. In a test, people created a rideshare app where users suggest what they are willing to pay, for example. Social.Wiki also hosts a new version of the now defunct Club Penguin.
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Beyond customization, Social.Wiki is built to keep privacy in the hands of users.
“Social.Wiki employs a decentralized infrastructure that allows users to maintain ownership of their data as they create, edit and navigate social websites within the platform. It also includes a ‘data protection’ that protects user data from malicious or buggy applications,” the blog said.
The next step for researchers is to add end-to-end encryption to private messages and improve developer tools.
How decentralized apps work
Twitter’s shift to Elon Musk’s X (and its Grok-ification), as well as the sale of TikTok this year, has brought public concern about the disadvantages of centralized systems. X spawned the decentralized Bluesky, and before the TikTok sale closed in January, a proposal attempted to decentralize the social app.
Social media has never been one-size-fits-all, but increasingly customized algorithms have only added echo chambers to this problem—users still don’t have much agency over how the big apps they join work. How can decentralized technology serve the needs of different communities? Sozial.Wiki uses what researchers call “plural governance,” which seeks to account for the varied needs of different groups.
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“Instead of a central moderator deciding what content users will see, each Social.Wiki user can choose the rules that determine what changes they see on Social.Wiki websites,” the blog explains.
Critics of decentralized apps often cite content moderation as a challenge. But the creators of Social.Wiki believe that filtering, rather than total removal, is the solution.
“It’s nice to have a moderator who can ban abuse and harassment, but the same moderator could ban criticism of the government,” David Karger, one of the project’s researchers, told ZDNET via email. He added that Social.Wiki lets anyone post what they want, but also lets them see only what they choose, “unlike the centralized platforms that inject all kinds of content we don’t want into our feeds.”
“Freedom of speech, but also freedom from forced listening,” he said. “We have learned to accept that there are repulsive things on the Internet, and therefore do not force ourselves to see them” – which is what Sozial.Wiki’s voluntary governance system does.
The next phase of decentralized apps
Decentralized social networks like Mastodon, a platform similar to X, try to address these content issues, but Karger said Social.Wiki goes a step further. In Karger’s view, Mastodon is only partially decentralized because it still requires “gatekeepers”: the administrators who operate individual servers. They can still configure a server in ways not all members want and can remove users.
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“Mastodon is better than the centralized platforms because there are many administrators instead of one (company), but unless you are willing to run your own Mastodon service, you are still subject to someone else’s choices,” he said.
Theia Henderson, another researcher on the project, added that “ActivityPub (which Mastodon makes) and the AT protocol (which BlueSky makes) require that if people want to build their own social app, they build and run their own server. For most people, that’s an insurmountable barrier to entry. In contrast, Social.Wiki only requires you to choose a name.
“It’s like the fun of building a Minecraft castle together – it’s your own social world that you create together with all its own quirks and inside jokes,” Henderson added.
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Karger also noted that decentralized systems can be difficult to efficiently streamline tasks, including the massive computation required for a recommendation algorithm.
“It’s going to take a lot more work to figure out how to do such calculations in Social.Wiki,” he said. “But a significant amount of what people want to do on social apps—stay in touch with friends, support discussions in their groups and organizations, and keep up with news—can be done efficiently on decentralized platforms.”
Where does that leave adoption? Karger thinks that public frustration with big platforms is finally high enough to make decentralized alternatives.
“Most of our real social interactions happen in small communities,” he said. “We don’t need everyone in the world to jump on social wikis at the same time. We just need individual small communities—a book group, the residents of an apartment building or a small town, fans of a local sports team, a parent association, a food pantry, a neighborhood watch, a bowling club, or a veterans post—to decide that they want an app better suited to their activity than their activity.”
Henderson added that Social.Wiki is also not “trying to be a global city site like Facebook or X”, but connects like-minded users in micro-settings, including the conference the two researchers attended this week. There they used Social.Wiki to connect participants based on common interests.
“The app connects researchers based on academic papers they like – not something you’d want in most social apps, but something that’s just great for us!” she said. “Maybe these communities will grow and merge and we can establish a meta-community, but that’s not how I measure success.”
How to try Social.Wiki
To start building your own decentralized community, go to Social.Wiki and click “Create your own!” box in the lower right corner of the home page. There you will find instructions for making your own site. Simply enter the name of the page you want to create in the search bar at the top of the page.
Once you’ve chosen a name, you’ll see a blank page with a large edit button. Click it to build your page. (You can also hit Edit in the upper-right corner of the screen.) You’ll see three options: Create with AI, Use a local editor, and Edit in the browser.
If you don’t want to make a site yourself and just want to edit other sites, click on the edit button in the upper right corner. You will get a disclaimer about the trusted editor function and several options with which to start editing. You can also create an account to log in and start engaging with communities on existing sites by clicking Log In on the home page or in the upper right corner.
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