Foundation for American Innovation

Middleware, third-party software intermediaries between users and platforms, offers a promising solution to counter the concentrated power of social media platforms. The term has referred to a variety of technologies and systems over the years, including third-party provider tools that platforms themselves use internally. In this paper, we focus on “middleware” in the form of open, third-party products and services that are composable—meaning, with multiple providers available to be mixed and matched for specific use cases—and which offer user agency over the selection process and overall experience.

The success of open middleware presently hinges on the adoption and cooperation of established major platforms. For middleware to thrive in the present largely centralized environment, platforms must permit third-party services to operate and enable users to choose between them. However, the growing rise of federated platforms, such as Mastodon and Bluesky, and the increasing participation of major platforms in the fediverse (e.g., Meta’s Threads), creates new opportunities for the development and adoption of middleware as an integral part of the user experience. These emerging ecosystems prioritize user choice and both horizontal and vertical interoperation, allowing for community-driven moderation tools and enhanced user control of the social media experience.