Privacy, political, and ethical concerns are pushing people to look for alternative social media platforms. What are the options? Are they the solution? Euronews Tech Talks tries to understand.
Following Elon Musk’s acquisition of X (formerly known as Twitter) in October 2022, and his support for US President Donald Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign, many users abandoned the platform over political and ethical concerns.
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These developments revived a long-standing debate, already prominent during the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018: the trust relationship between users and the online platforms, and the need for new options.
But are there alternatives to mainstream social media platforms?
Open-source and decentralised social media
Social media plays a crucial role in many people’s lives, yet some of the basic rules and definitions surrounding it remain blurry and difficult to grasp.
First, social media platforms are different from social networking sites. “The difference between a site and a platform is really the role of algorithms,” Michael Bossetta, associate professor of communication at Lund University, told Euronews Next.
“A social networking site, as many were in the early days, is really just facilitating communication between people, so you don’t really need an algorithm there,” he added.
Second, most social media platforms are built as closed-source software. “Closed source means that we don't know what is the technical operations underneath the platform, we don't know how it's working,” Bossetta said.
The codes of mainstream social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok are secret. However, there are other websites such as Mastodon, the European alternative to X, that are built on an open source structure.
In fact, anyone can download, modify, and install Mastodon on their server, and its code is publicly available.
In addition, Mastodon is built on a decentralised model. While on X, Facebook and Instagram, all users' interactions and content are managed by a single company, Mastodon operates through a distributed network of servers, where each server is an independent entity.
Open source platforms also face some difficulties: “The problem is that the user experience on these open source platforms is just not close to how major platforms like TikTok and Facebook operate,” Bossetta said.
In addition, moderation and regulation are difficult to implement on decentralised networks, as there’s not a single company managing the platform.
European social media: The experience of Monnett
Open source and decentralised platforms can serve as alternatives to the mainstream social media we are familiar with, as they challenge the widespread model on which these platforms are built.
Other alternatives also aim to challenge the geographical dominance of social media firms, most of which are based in the United States.
Among them is Monnett, a Luxembourgish company founded in 2025.
“Algorithms dictate our democracies, they dictate our societies, algorithms have become our dictators. And we need to build alternative social platforms that enable people to have agency again,” Christos Floros, founder and CEO of Monnett, told Euronews Next.
Monnett is similar to Instagram, but takes a step back to the social networking era. “The main promise that we make is that there's no algorithm,” Floros said, adding that when you sign up, you just see your friends.
Due to this structural difference, Monnett is not free, but rather built on a membership-type model, starting at €2.99 per month.
In addition, Monnett’s artificial intelligence (AI) policy is strict. “We don't want AI-generated content, and we also don't want to feed people's content into AI for moderation. So our goal is to have human moderation on the platform,” Floros said.
Do we need more made-in-Europe social media?
Monnett is not the only project working toward the construction of a European social media ecosystem.
The Danish NGO Rebuild, which counts former European Commissioner Margrethe Vestager as a patron, is trying to support this leap, connecting entrepreneurs with investors in the sector.
Yet, whether European social media can change the rules in the social media sector is highly debated.
According to Bossetta, the issue is not where a technology is created, but rather the priorities it sets.
“We have very talented, well-paid people who are spending their lives trying to get a couple of extra seconds of you on your phone rather than working towards solving some of the biggest challenges we face as a species, things like climate change,” he said.
Others, such as Sandra Wachter, professor of technology and regulation at the University of Oxford and the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, are more optimistic.
“If alternatives would pop up, then this could be like a unique point for other competitors to come into the market, which is one of the reasons why we have this Digital Markets Act, which is trying to revive healthy competition,” she said.
The Digital Markets Act is one of the multiple European Union (EU) regulations aiming at limiting the power of big social media platforms and, more generally, big tech firms.
This law entered into force in November 2022 and on 22 April was used by the European Commission to impose fines of €500 million on Apple and €200 million on Meta.
Wacther said regulations such as the DMA might not be perfect, but are important in shifting the balance of power in the social media environment.
“We don't have to fall into the trap of this ‘too big to fail’ narrative and to see them as demigods and tech giants whose power cannot be yielded anymore.
“I think that's a popular narrative that plays into their hands, but in reality, nobody is really above the law,” she said.
