Although middleware may serve as a user agent for many purposes, scholars who study the impact of concentrated platform power on democracy and society have speculated about middleware’s potential benefits for increasing user agency over content curation and moderation specifically. But lately, recent technological trends and user adoption of protocol-based social media communities (such as Bluesky or the Fediverse, which use open technical standards - or protocols - that allow different apps to connect and share content across a common network) suggest that middleware adoption now has the potential to follow one of two paths: via integration within centralized platforms or via the expansion of decentralized, federated networks.