Speaker: Katharina Nocun The leading social networks are the powerful new gatekeepers of the digital age. Proprietary de facto standards of the dominant companies have lead to the emergence of virtual “information silos” that can barely communicate with one another. Has Diaspora really lost the war? Or is there still a chance to succeed? The Internet today is a giant web, a hilarious copy machine, interlaced into more and more aspects of our lives. What started as a network of equal nodes, has since transformed the layer above the open, decentralized hypertext protocol, and begun to move it towards greater centralization and power in the hands of few large platforms. Social networks are an important benchmark for this trend. Social networks are an important tool for private, commercial and political use. Technological sovereignty can be decisive for political struggles, regardless of whether we talk about elections or revolutions. Privacy gains importance when the Internet becomes interconnected with more and more parts of our lives. The launch of Diaspora in 2010, a crowdfunded free-to-use social network based on free software, was clearly born from these debates. While the appeal of a federated system of social contacts is same in centralized and decentralized networks, they are worlds apart regarding their technical infrastructure, their power structures and their options for business models. Much scientific work has been carried out on the technical challenges that decentralized social networks face. But the underlying economic mechanisms that drive the market towards concentration, promote the dominance of few actors and build high barriers for market entry, have so far been rarely addressed in the context of social networks. The dominance of one network is deeply rooted in the code of the market structure troubled with network effects, lock-in and proprietary de facto standards. Furthermore, privacy restraints through the operator derive from t