For journalists, the rise of decentralized social platforms is not about new places to post. When public conversation and media distribution depends on a handful of privately owned platforms, then changes in ownership, moderation, algorithms, or business strategy can quickly reshape how journalists reach audiences and sources.

That became especially clear after Elon Musk acquired Twitter, now X, in October 2022. The platform was later rebranded as X in July 2023, and many users, journalists, and news organizations began reconsidering their dependence on it. Media coverage dubbed this migration the “X-odus,” but the larger shift was not only about leaving one platform. It reflected growing interest in the open social web: spaces where users and publishers could have more control over their networks, distribution, and communities.

At the time of Musk’s acquisition, ActivityPub-based platforms such as Mastodon were more immediately available to the public than Bluesky’s AT Protocol ecosystem, sometimes called the Atmosphere. But both now sit within the broader movement toward federated, decentralized, and open social networking.

At the same time, Threads operates under a different structure from most decentralized social platforms in this landscape. Threads is owned by Meta, one of the same large technology companies that many publishers are trying to become less dependent on. However, its size, popularity, and partial move toward ActivityPub also make it difficult to ignore. Threads is not yet a fully federated alternative to traditional social media, but it has become part of the open social web conversation because Meta is experimenting with letting Threads users interact with users on other ActivityPub-based platforms.

Engagement

WebsitePlanet’s summary of available data reports that U.K. daily active X usage fell by about one-third, EU users declined from 112.2 million in early 2023 to 105.9 million by mid-2024, and X’s claimed global monthly active users remained around 550 million while growth slowed between Q2 2023 and Q2 2024. Reuters reported that X’s monthly U.S. ad revenue declined at least 55% year over year every month after Musk bought the company.

The opportunity for journalists is not that decentralized social platforms currently offer the largest audience, because they do not. The opportunity is that they can give journalists more control over how they build and maintain relationships with readers, sources, and peers.

On some federated platforms, journalists can move accounts or maintain connections across servers more easily than on traditional social platforms, though this portability remains limited and uneven. Even so, the broader promise matters where journalists can reduce their dependence on algorithmic feeds, connect their social presence to newsletters or websites they control, and build communities that are less tied to any one company’s priorities.

• Mastodon’s 2024 Annual Report counted 8,851 Mastodon servers, 9.1 million registered users, and 938,000 monthly active users as of December 31, 2024, down 38% in monthly active users from the prior year but still a significant population.
• Bluesky has grown quickly at moments of dissatisfaction with X. AP reported that Bluesky added 1 million users in the week after the 2024 U.S. election, reaching 15 million total users, while WIRED reported Bluesky had reached 24 million users shortly afterward.
• Threads has reached a much larger mainstream audience through Meta’s existing network. Axios reported Threads had more than 175 million monthly active users at its one-year mark.

The bursts of new users appears to come in waves. A study by journalism professor Simón Peña-Fernández found that the migration away from Twitter/X has not been a clean platform replacement. Peña-Fernández describes the “X-odus” as “unfinished,” where many users opened Mastodon accounts but continued using both platforms rather than fully abandoning X. The same study found that the migration seemed to be a reaction to Musk’s acquisition and was led especially by active academics, scientists, and journalists. This is anecdotally supported by many of the journalists we interviewed throughout our research process.

Additionally, even though the fediverse contains many deep, topic-specific communities, users often cluster on the largest servers, especially mastodon.social. The study found that this resulted in “52% of users [were] registered on only 10% of the servers.”

Journalists should not assume that joining the fediverse automatically places them in a well-matched niche community. The largest servers may offer easier onboarding and a broader potential audience, but they can also make discovery feel more generalized, making it harder to find the smaller communities most relevant to a journalist’s beat.

What this means for journalists

For journalists, the fediverse is valuable less as a replacement for traffic than as an additional channel for audience engagement. In a blog post, Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko described Mastodon’s author-attribution feature as designed for “media organizations, journalists and bloggers.” The feature allows an article preview to display a clickable fediverse account associated with the author, helping readers connect a story to a specific journalist or publication.

This does not fully solve the problem of portable identity. In ActivityPub-based systems, a journalist’s identity is still tied in important ways to their account, server, and handle, and moving between an organizational account and an independent one may not be completely seamless. But, the feature still points to a useful opportunity where journalists and news organizations can make bylines more visible, help readers verify who is behind a story, and create a path for readers to follow journalists beyond a single article page.

This addresses a major problem for journalists. On platforms like X, Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook, a journalist’s reach depends heavily on fixed rules, ranking systems, verification policies, and account status. On the other hand, the journalist’s identity on the fediverse can be attached to a domain, publication, or fediverse handle, and readers can follow that identity from various platforms.

Monetization: how to make a living as a journalist on the fediverse

Monetization depends on converting new channels into attention and more durable relationships. A post on Mastodon, Bluesky, or Threads may not produce revenue by itself, but it can introduce a reader to a journalist’s work, turn them into a consistent audience, and then direct them to funding opportunities.