Welcome to Platformocracy #30! This newsletter has grown over 20% since Platformocracy #20, and is now well out of the “friends and family” stage of its lifecycle. I am grateful for each of your interest and continued attention. I am hoping to reach even more people this year, so could you do me a favor and encourage at least one person you know to subscribe to Platformocracy this week? Free, weekly, ten minutes or less, and increasingly snarky. What’s not to like? Thank you.
Published in July 2025, the Social Media Bill of Rights is a declaration of five fundamental rights that all online communities deserve. More than a statement, it’s also meant to start a movement, with detailed guides for how individuals, community leaders, and developers can take action.
Here are the five fundamental rights, but I also encourage you to read the whole thing, which is impressively brief.
Privacy & Security: The ability to communicate and organize without fear of surveillance or exploitation.
Ownership: People and their communities must own their digital identities, connections and data, including the right to be forgotten.
Interoperability & The Right To Exit: The freedom to port your community in its entirety to another app without losing your connections and content.
Algorithmic Transparency & Control: Choosing the algorithms that shape your interactions: no more black box systems optimizing for engagement at the expense of community well-being.
Self-governance: Crucially, communities need the right to self-govern, setting their own rules for behavior which are contextually relevant to their community.
Who wrote it?
Evan Henshaw-Plath, aka Rabble, an old-school Internet original. He was involved in the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, building the protest.net platform for organizing activism and the Indymedia network for activist journalism. He was the first employee and de facto CTO of Odeo, the company that gave birth to Twitter, and has continued to be active in social media technology from his home in New Zealand.
Is this just a one-off essay?
Nope. Rabble is working actively to advance these ideals. He launched a weekly podcast, Revolution.Social, where he discusses online rights with Internet luminaries such as Bluesky CEO Jay Graber and coiner of “enshittification” Cory Doctorow. He’s also part of the leadership team of AndOtherStuff, a collective funded with $10 million from Jack Dorsey to build social apps based on open protocols.
AndOtherStuff supports Rabble’s current projects – Nos.social, an independent social media app, and diVine, which is bringing the Vine short-form video platform back to life. These are built around a decentralized social media protocol called Nostr, which launched in 2022.
Hold up. Nostr? I’m still trying to wrap my head around Bluesky and the Fediverse.
Nostr is a third approach to decentralized social media, separate from the AT Protocol (which powers Bluesky and the ATmosphere) or ActivityPub (which powers Mastodon and the Fediverse). It’s not as big as those two, but one study in 2024 estimated there are over 9 million user accounts in the Nostr ecosystem, so it’s not nothing.
Nostr is designed to give individuals almost total control over their social media presence. This plays out in two key ways.
1. You create and control your own identity by setting up your own cryptographic key. (As always, just think of this as fancy math that makes it almost impossible to fake or steal.) There’s no central authority to take your identity away from you, and everything you publish is signed with your key so people know it’s really from you.
By Nostr’s standards, this compares favorably with ActivityPub, where (as I explained back in November) your identity is tied to the server you choose. The AT Protocol gets closer to the Nostr ideal by letting you use your own Decentralized Identifier (DID), but this is mostly useless if you aren’t listed in the Public Ledger of Credentials (centralized directory of DIDs).
The Nostr approach is great if you don’t want to be at the mercy of an identity authority, but it creates new headaches around managing keys and having people find you online. This thoughtful essay from 2023 and this recent proposal suggest bringing Nostr keys into the DID world, which could solve these problems without giving up control.
2. You control publishing by choosing one or more servers (called relays) for your posts. Nostr relays don’t share content, so anyone who wants to read your stuff has to directly contact one of your chosen relays. There is no central authority to prevent you from publishing or others from reading, which makes Nostr highly censorship-resistant.
By Nostr’s standards, this is much better than the AT Protocol, which is designed to publish everything to everyone. AT Protocol relays combine everyone’s posts into giant feeds called Firehoses, which can be edited or censored by their operators. The Fediverse gets closer to the Nostr ideal by letting server operators decide which other servers to federate (share content) with, but that still doesn’t put control directly into the hands of the individual.
Sure. I love it. Rabble’s manifesto brings together almost everything I’ve been writing about here at Platformocracy into one tidy package. If I were involved in writing a version two, there are a few points that I might debate or at least seek to clarify, but that shouldn’t take away from the accomplishment here.
I do think two material changes would make this even more influential.
A sixth right: Due Process. The right to a fair, public trial is a key bulwark against tyranny. It has been a foundation of democratic legal systems going back to Athens and the Roman Republic, and continues through the Magna Carta (1215) down to the current day. Just a few examples: the US Declaration of Independence (1776) specifically calls out King George III for “depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury,” and article 6 and 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights (1950) guarantee the right to a fair trial, and no punishment without law.
I have written before about my objection to platform secrecy around policy surveillance and enforcement. Back in July, I proposed rights to understand, consent to, and inspect the safety systems that control our online lives. The Social Media Bill of Rights alludes to some of this under Self-governance as “Protection from arbitrary deplatforming,” but I would go further and make this a sixth fundamental right.
Call this what it really is: a Declaration, not a Bill. A bill requires a government in which it can be proposed, debated, and adopted, but we have no Internet Constitution to amend. For all of the recent progress of decentralized social media platforms, the social media ancien régime still reigns supreme, rules by decree, and has demonstrated active antipathy toward just about everything in Rabble’s document.
The Social Media Bill of Rights is more in the tradition of the US Declaration of Independence (1776), French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789), or the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). However, this is still not a perfect analogy, because these were ratified by representative assemblies united in a common cause. We don’t even have that, yet.
Instead, I would take inspiration from even more (pardon the pun) rabble-rousing manifestos written by passionate individuals, like the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude by Étienne de La Boétie (1577) or The Rights of Man by H.G. Wells (1940). These documents were written to inspire movements when success was very much in doubt. Their passion and audacity changed the world. Let’s do that here, too.
If that revolution is to be brought off successfully and give a renewed lease to human happiness and effort, it is to be brought off only by the fullest, most ruthless discussion of every aspect and possibility of the present situation. Nobody and no group of people knows enough for this immense reorganization, and unless we can have a full and fearless public intercourse of minds open to all the world, our present enemies included, we shall never be able to establish a guiding system of ideas upon which a new world order can rest.
Ideas? Feedback? Criticism? I want to hear it, because I am sure that I am going to get a lot of things wrong along the way. I will share what I learn with the community as we go. Reach out any time at [email protected].
