Alt-Tech Movement

The alt-tech movement is the effort to build social platforms, and increasingly payment, hosting and distribution services, positioned as minimally moderated alternatives to mainstream technology companies.

What deplatforming actually does

The movement’s premise is that removal from mainstream services can be answered by building alternatives. Rogers’s study tested what happens when accounts actually make that move, following deplatformed figures to Telegram and other alternative services and measuring the result.

The finding is that migration costs reach. The destination is smaller than the platform left behind, and audiences do not follow in full. That is the single most important empirical result about this movement, and it cuts against its own account of itself.

Why user numbers on these platforms should be treated carefully

The largest company in this space says in its own annual report that it does not publish the metrics that would let anyone check its scale.

Trump Media & Technology Group’s Form 10-K, filed with the SEC in February 2026, states that the company “does not currently, and may never, collect, monitor and/or report certain key operating metrics used by companies in similar industries” — naming signups, average revenue per user, ad impressions, and monthly and daily active user accounts. The filing gives the company’s reasoning: that tracking such indicators “could potentially divert its focus”. It also acknowledges that this is “likely to make it difficult for stockholders in TMTG to evaluate and compare TMTG’s performance to that of companies in similar industries.”

Any user figure quoted for that platform therefore comes from somewhere other than the company. The same caution applies across this sector, and it is the reason no user numbers appear on this page.

What was removed

The previous version carried a four-phase chronology with specific launch years and a claim that one platform reached “millions of registered users”, none of it sourced. It also asserted five categories of political impact, including that the movement’s growth “intensified public and legislative discussion around content moderation practices, Section 230 protections”, caused “infrastructure fragmentation”, and coincided with increased state legislative activity. Those are causal and correlational claims about legislation, none of them sourced, and they have been removed.

The founded field, which read 2016, has been removed with the chronology.