Bridging the Open Web and APIs: Alternative Social Media Alongside the Corporate Web

Abstract

Concentrations of power over the internet among a small number of corporate platforms have motivated attempts to build alternative social media. Using the contemporary internet routinely involves relying on a small number of dominant corporate platforms. In reaction against this centralization of power, there are many attempts to build alternative Web technologies that reconfigure the internet’s power structures and enact their own values. However, given the entrenchment of large corporate platforms, this typically involves co-existing with rather than replacing them, at least in the present. Accordingly, it is important to investigate challenges arising when alternative social media operate alongside and even within the systems to which they propose an alternative. We investigate this through an empirical study of the IndieWeb, a community of personal websites with social networking features including syndication to and from corporate platforms. Using GitHub data, we study the development of a tool for this syndication called Bridgy, focusing on its relationship with the Facebook API. By identifying breakdowns in this relationship, we identify the following challenges: translating differing logics between the open Web and APIs, occasional ambiguity in Facebook’s presentation of privacy settings, and ongoing precarity due to API updates. Our analysis illustrates the reality of maintaining alternative technical systems as part of present-day infrastructures and generates insights for building socially empowering technologies for the future.