The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a U.S. legal defense organization and advocacy group for civil liberties on the Internet, endorses the distributed social network model as one "that can plausibly return control and choice to the hands of the Internet user" and allow persons living under restrictive regimes to "conduct activism on social networking sites while also having a choice of services and providers that may be better equipped to protect their security and anonymity".
[2] In 2013, the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) released a candidate version of the Social Network Web enabler (SNeW) that was approved in 2016.
While ActivityPub (and its predecessors OStatus and ActivityPump) have been used by most services when implementing support for a federated social network, alternatives have been created over the years that attempt to fix perceived issues with the current stack of standards.
The most successful of these alternatives has been the AT Protocol, an open standard created by Bluesky that has been built to solve various portability, discovery and content format issues that have arisen with the adoption of ActivityPub among a variety of social networking services.
A more experimental protocol that has built its own networking stack is Nostr, which has been designed to be simple for implementors to build as it has no dependencies on any existing standards.