Abstract
The overreaches of mainstream social media platforms have been extensively reported and studied. For activist communities, these platforms pose risks including surveillance, censorship, or erasure. Decentralized social networks (DSNs) serve as alternative online spaces that appear to prioritize values such as user privacy, free speech, and community control. However, the decentralized ecosystem is vast and complex, making it difficult for communities to understand how to best use these platforms for their organizing aims. We aim to fill this gap, proposing a framework for navigating the DSN landscape that defines core activist community needs—access, community building and reach, on- and offline safety, and operational sustainability—and links them to concrete platform affordances such as resource efficiency, interoperability, and data ownership. We apply the framework to (1) evaluate and compare the sociotechnical tradeoffs of four contemporary DSNs (Briar, Warpcast, Mastodon, and Bluesky), (2) understand broader community configurations that emerge across different DSN infrastructures and their implications for collective action, and (3) explore how two distinct activist communities facing infrastructural and political constraints might use the framework to find platforms that align with their needs. We conclude by reflecting on the theoretical promises of DSNs and the structural conditions that shape and constrain participation across them.