Shaping the Future of Social Media with Middleware

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.