In 2023, Bandcamp users watched helplessly as Epic Games sold the platform to Songtradr, who immediately laid off half the staff. Years of collections, community connections, and artist pages were suddenly at the mercy of a company most users had never heard of. Shifting the entire culture of the bandcamp community. This wasn't the first time this happened and it won't be the last.
From MySpace's catastrophic server migration that wiped over a decade of music to Tumblr's censorship fuled purge. a platform owns your content and connections and can whenever they want
digital sovereignty is the idea that individuals should have control over their online identity, data, and connections rather than being fully dependent on a single platform. Without digital sovereignty, platforms can suspend accounts and just outright erase communities on a whim. Users have little or no recourse against these type of actions. There's no serious due process. digital sovereignty challenges this model by arguing that users should not be locked into any one service and should retain ownership and portability of their identity and content
The need of digital sovereignty in social networks a result of the shift from the open web to today’s platform-dominated internet. There was a time when the Internet was wide open. People hosted websites and blogs with reckless abandoned and their content was their own. The downside is the content was hard to find. Centralized systems offered discovery tools and curated feeds that made content easier to surface and engage with at scale. This came with the trade-off of being locked into a wall garden. Platforms came in went and with them the went users's content,
In response a lot of projects have been forming around decentralization. Most notably Activitypub, An open social networking protocol standard developed by the W3C. Activitypub provides a client-to-server API for creating and modifying content, as well as a federated server-to-server protocol for delivering notifications and content to other servers. If you build a platform that speaks ActivityPub, it can talk to everything else in the Fediverse. This means you can create an account on a mastodon instance. If you're not happy where you are or if the instance closes up shop you can simply move your content to another instance more to your liking. This also allows instances to set their own policy. They can also close themselves off to instances that they find offensive. Instances themselves run the gamut. This lets you choose a community more at tuned to your personality and interest than the drinking from a fire hose method of other platforms.
You can begin your digital sovereignty journey by visiting joinmastodon.org. Here you can choose a mastodon instance. If you want a more expansive experience, Check out fediverse.party for a Birdseye view of all activity pub has to offer. Your digital life doesn't have to belong to someone else.