Alternative Platforms Aren't Fringe Anymore
Emerging social media sites remain a critical piece of the online ecosystem, even as their roles in it are changing
Where We Are Now
Two days after supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol Building in 2021, the social media platform Twitter (now called X) announced its team’s decision to indefinitely suspend Trump’s account “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.” Other major tech companies followed with similar actions following the violent insurrection.
These decisions were unprecedented in the US, even if consistent with respective site policies, eliciting outrage among Trump’s supporters and stirring unease among others concerned about big tech companies’ abilities to shape global affairs. But even before mainstream platforms banned Trump, their efforts to limit and remove harmful material on their sites had become the basis of dubious narratives among right-wing communities, who alleged that social platforms were systemically censoring conservative political beliefs.
As buy-in for these claims increased, a niche industry of alternative platforms marketing themselves to aggrieved communities as “free speech” havens began to proliferate. I refer to emerging social media platforms as “alternative platforms” (rather than “alt-tech” or “alt-platforms”) intentionally, here and throughout, to avoid misleading political connotations. “Alt-tech” is a more recent phenomenon, but alternative platforms have existed since the very beginning of social media and have hosted many different online communities.
Ideological Investment in a ‘Parallel Economy’
High-profile users and communities who saw their accounts banned or limited under evolving moderation policies at major platforms sought refuge in these alternatives, bringing their audiences with them. Right-wing investors and political leaders supported many alternative platforms throughout the late 2010s and early 2020s; some even theorized they could form the foundation of a new “parallel economy.” And Trump’s bans from major platforms drove ideological investment in alternative platforms to its peak.
In 2022, Trump debuted Truth Social: his own alternative platform that he claimed was meant to “stand up to Big Tech.” Later that year, billionaire and Trump ally Elon Musk bought Twitter, renamed it X, dismantled trust and safety programs, and ordered site-wide policy changes – all in the name of saving “free speech.” Musk also reinstated accounts that were previously banned on the site, including Trump’s, and tweaked its algorithms to amplify posts expressing far-right views.
In the years that followed, other major platforms would reshape their own approaches – a shift that accelerated after Trump won the 2024 presidential election. Many have since deprioritized their prior efforts to address online harms and adjusted their political postures to please government officials. TikTok recently sold a majority stake of its US operations under pressure from the US government to an investor group that included right-wing billionaires like Larry Ellison, and has since been accused of censoring content that may displease the Trump Administration.
The clawback of content moderation efforts on mainstream social media sites has effectively undercut the “free speech” sales pitch that many alternative platforms used to grow their user bases, forcing their role in the wider online ecosystem to change.
Open Measures’ team has seen many analysts and reporters interpret those shifts as signs that alternative platforms are dwindling, or even becoming irrelevant – but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Alternative Platforms Aren’t Going Away
Suggestions that alternative platforms are losing their influence are unfounded – platforms like Bluesky and Fediverse have seen huge growth, while others like 4chan have proven their unique staying power on an always-changing internet.
Open Measures recorded more than 2.4 billion posts for the 2025 calendar year across the 35+ unique platforms we cover. Our datasets included:
More than 1.7 billion posts on microblogging platforms like Bluesky, Fediverse sites, Gab, Gettr, and Truth Social, among others
More than 459 million posts on channel messaging apps like Telegram and WhatsApp
More than 222 million posts on forum boards like 4chan, 8kun, and Scored
More than 82 million posts on video platforms like BitChute, LBRY, Rumble, and RuTube
Those figures carry additional weight when we consider the unique roles many alternative platforms have played in online harms and offline organizing. The posts on these platforms aren’t merely data points; they are a window into the ways digital chatter translates into material risk.
Impacts on Broader Online Trends
For all that has changed in recent years, Open Measures’ researchers have repeatedly seen alternative platforms continue to shape online discourse and drive harmful activities (often regardless of their relative size). Studying these platforms can often surface information that is virtually impossible to find elsewhere.
Many criminal networks and extremist groups use alternative platforms to organize members, plan attacks, and even evade international sanctions. Perpetrators of mass shootings and other violent attacks turn to anonymous forum boards for inspiration and encouragement. Threats against organizations and individuals spawn within fringe communities that fixate on them.
High-profile influencers on mainstream platforms crib content from niche sources to shape their own narratives. Global conflicts play out on messenger apps in areas where other platforms are inaccessible or unpopular. And today’s political leaders invest resources into alternative platforms as part of their public messaging strategies.
As social networking tools, alternative platforms often function as organizing hubs and “training grounds” – where users can coordinate as networks, develop group identities, and hone strategies for escalating harmful campaigns. In some environments, AI tools have accelerated these dynamics, in turn scaling their online harms.
Research has repeatedly shown that content from alternative platforms migrates onto larger ones, amplifying its reach and normalizing extremist ideas along the way. The January 6 Capitol attack, for instance, was organized across a constellation of alternative platforms before spilling into the physical world. That pattern has since been repeated in violent mobilizations around the world.
What Has Changed
The reordering of priorities at mainstream platforms has changed the roles that many alternative platforms play in the wider online ecosystem. While we’ve seen waves of users rejoin mainstream sites under loosened content moderation policies, we’ve also seen others refuse to do – alongside other, more recent and novel developments.
The political changes among mainstream platform leadership have instigated a new left-leaning diaspora, whose users have sought out online spaces aligned with values related to security, politics, and functionality. Bluesky’s open AT Protocol and the ActivityPub protocol used by federated networks allow users to carry their identity and social graph across platforms, reducing the centralized control that any single company can hold over public discourse.
Similarly, TikTok users’ concerned about the platform’s new ownership caused an influx of activity on UpScrolled, a platform advertising transparent content moderation and an algorithm that they claim isn’t engineered to keep users hooked.
These alternative platforms tell an arguably different story – where a move away from the mainstream is driven by a desire for more transparency, accountability, and user control. That said, this set of alternative platforms are not without their own range of online threats (crypto scams, astroturfing, proliferation of abuse material, among others) and are well-worth researchers’ time and attention.
Where We Go From Here
To keep up with the evolving social media ecosystem, we are constantly updating our platform with features and datasets to provide others with a more complete understanding of online activity – and to move beyond the false premise of a clean distinction between “mainstream” and “alternative” online spaces.
We’ve designed our platform with the intention of offering researchers a wider field of vision – both to clarify cross-pollination between platforms and to make mainstream investigations more robust. With our alternative platform datasets, researchers can surface influential posts from elsewhere that are less natively-searchable, while avoiding other financial and architectural restrictions.
Open Measures remains committed to tracking all these shifts in real time by paying attention to platforms that others can’t. As the complexity of online ecosystems increases, so does our conviction in the vision of a more transparent and understandable internet.
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