I Believe In the Fediverse
In 2022, tech magnate and bombastic personality Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion, thumbing the scales of an already polarized social media website further toward censorship, misinformation and ideological warfare. Twitter once was—and arguably still is—the closest thing to an open forum on the internet with widespread participation among people of all social status, from A-list celebrities to run-of-the-mill crackpots. While this may be true, it hasn't stopped millions of people from completely abandoning the site as the quality of the user experience continues to degrade beyond our wildest imaginations.
The critical weakness of Twitter was exposed during the aftermath of this multi-billion dollar transaction: a forum cannot actually be open when it is owned and operated by a central authority with a transparent political agenda. Much digital ink has been spilled over when exactly Twitter was ruined, but it's hard to deny that it got there. People have begun to understand the need for an alternative, seeking it out in new and familiar destinations alike.
The new social web, in many ways, looks like the old social web. The kinds of people who were on Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and Vine in the early 2010s are likely spending more time on Instagram, TikTok, Threads and Bluesky in the mid-2020s. We're still tapping out ten-second, hundred-character ephemera into our pocket rectangles, the parameters have just shifted slightly. While I'm glad to see people recognize the need to cut ties with a burgeoning hotbed of reactionary ideology in the case of Twitter, I worry that many have not learned the correct lessons from this saga and are setting themselves up to repeat the same mistakes.
As we continue down a path toward tech oligopoly and unfettered transfer of wealth to the upper echelons of society, it should be clear that another centralized, corporate platform cannot be the key cornerstone of a free and open internet. An alternative will always be necessary when the entire infrastructure of a communication service can be acquired with a cash transfer. Enter Mastodon: an open-source, decentralized Twitter equivalent that could be a viable solution to this growing problem.
Mastodon is part of a vast social networking platform known as the fediverse. This platform makes use of the ActivityPub protocol, a framework for seamless communication between various interlinked, disparate services. In practice, a Mastodon user can see content and interact with profiles from all over the fediverse, well beyond anything that exists under the Mastodon umbrella. Fediverse servers (referred to as “instances”) are comparable to email servers, hosted by different kinds of people from around the globe and able to communicate with each other by design.
The fediverse is as much a part of the small web as your personal website or blog. Its utility in your life is as shallow or deep as you want; your experience will be the priority every step of the way. Fediverse services are never going to harvest your data, advertise to you or psychologically manipulate you into scrolling further—they only seek to connect you with other fediverse users. The fediverse is also literally a “small web” in the grand scheme of social media. Mastodon only has about 7,000,000 users, around half of the total Bluesky userbase and about thirty times smaller than the population on Meta's Threads app.
Threads is technically part of this federated network, though its users currently cannot follow or see replies from other fedizens, demonstrating Meta's lack of good faith commitment to the concept. Bluesky is another popular refuge for Twitter expats, developed on a similar protocol to ActivityPub. The Authenticated Transfer protocol is not linked to the fediverse or any other service outside of Bluesky, suggesting this for-profit service's touted openness could end up being more style than substance. It's possible to bridge profiles between Mastodon and Bluesky using hacky third-party methods, but this is not quite the same as the intercommunicability you'd find between fediverse instances.
Most people are not thinking too deeply about the technical minutiae, they simply go where other people are. Once you get used to a certain place, it's difficult to see the point of spending time anywhere else. Enmeshing yourself in any given service will eventually expose you to its limitations, there might be ways around them but you're going to be aware of them regardless. There's a certain Stockholm syndrome-like quality to social media partisanship; I can't confidently say I've been above it in all my years of using the internet.
I've always been fascinated with the abundance of social media apps that all end up doing the same thing. If social media is supposed to be a place on the web to share shortform text, pictures, video and audio clips, why do we need so many places to do it? At a certain point after uploading videos to Twitter, posting a Notes app essay on Instagram or publishing an animated photo album reel on YouTube, how have we not discovered that this is all the same?
The beauty of the fediverse is a distinct recognition of this fact; the entire utility of social media has been flattened into one logical, streamlined plane of deployment. The services that make up the fediverse aren't deadlocked in competition, instead collaborating with each other to popularize the ActivityPub standard. Rather than being driven by market forces that funnel development efforts toward unwanted features, fediverse apps endeavor to provide the best possible experience for their intended use cases and nothing more.
Mastodon is the premier service, it's practically synonymous with the fediverse among the uninitiated. There are also several other federated Mastodon-likes offering comparable features and exclusive benefits, such as Misskey, Sharkey, Friendica and Pleroma. Pixelfed is the designated Instagram replacement, about as straightforward as it gets. A TikTok competitor called Loops was also recently made available by the Pixelfed developers. Peertube remains criminally underutilized as people clamor for a viable YouTube alternative, though it can be challenging to find a suitable instance. Lemmy successfully gained a foothold among disillusioned Reddit users, but it's still too niche to be useful for certain interests due to lack of engagement. WriteFreely is a solid, if bare-bones choice for blogging in my experience, seemingly lacking functionality offered by other free services.
The fediverse as it exists today is clearly a mixed bag. It's nice that all of these services can talk to each other, but the practical application of this is questionable at best from my vantage point. Further buy-in is required from wealthy, technically-skilled people to keep the project sustainable. Prominent instances that serve a specific niche on the fediverse like botsin.space are forced to shut down due to lack of support, exposing a weakness of this concept and demonstrating why it might not actually be the one-size-fits-all solution needed to fix social media altogether.
It's been a great service for my specific interests as a tech blogger, but I worry the evangelists can't see past their nose when it comes to clarifying the benefits of joining for other kinds of people. The sign up process is notoriously confusing for those who are more familiar with conventional social media. The actual usability of fediverse apps is almost never a clear upgrade over their mainstream counterparts. We've reached a point with computing—and every experience downstream from it—where the focus has shifted away from providing a quality product and more toward extracting value out of those who are too dug in to learn a new way of doing things. The alternatives don't currently have the infrastructure or cultural cachet to compete, requiring more effort and compromise than the average person may be interested in.
All I can do is share bits of personal experience in hopes that it resonates with people. I've enjoyed my time on the fediverse, but I'm just not as deep into it as other folks. While I think it would be a fun project to start my own instance from home, I don't exactly have the time, money, housing continuity and technical competence to get it done right away. Still, the act of remaining on a large general-purpose instance like mastodon.social does not make me less of a fediverse user in the same way that relying on a desktop environment does not make me less of a Linux user—yes, it's true.
I decided to join Mastodon in the summer of 2023 when I became fed up with the direction of Twitter under its new leadership. By this point, Twitter had become more of a news tool than a social media site for my uses. I was drowning in a sea of voices; nothing I shared had any amount of penetration, and the mutual acquaintances I once kept up with grew distant or dropped off completely. I chose mastodon.social because it seemed like the most logical starting point for getting into an ecosystem I knew practically nothing about.
It took a period of months to start coalescing around like-minded individuals on Mastodon. Posting in several hashtags, monitoring the various timelines, filtering out obnoxious keywords and vigilantly muting obviously fake, spam-ridden and low quality accounts worked wonders for discovering people. I can proudly say I've made more genuine connections on Mastodon in under two years then I ever did on that Twitter account I made in 2009. Though I may not have the energy to post multiple times a day, every day, I'm likely to get something out of it when I do.
I believe in the fediverse as a Utopian concept for a social web unconstrained by corporate influence. I've been exposed to avant-garde ideas and artistic creations I wouldn't have encountered anywhere else. I've met some wonderful people who've encouraged me to be more creative, put myself out there, think in different ways and grow as an individual. There is a personal touch to the fediverse that can be difficult to describe. Fedizens appreciate your contributions in a way you won't find as easily in other communities focused on cultural narratives and clout chasing. It can be easy to forget how small Mastodon is when you're reaching an engaged audience without much barrier to entry.
That being said, it's important to recognize that the fediverse may never end up being a snug fit for everyone. It's not likely to win over anybody who is averse to using social media or those who struggle to find a healthy balance with online activities. While it's not as explicitly hierarchical and addicting-by-design as some of the other corporate services I briefly mentioned, the perverse incentive structures baked into the concept of social media are inextricably linked to fediverse apps as well. The ways that social apps shape our behavior are beyond the scope of this piece, but suffice to say, the fediverse won't likely be a panacea for anybody's social isolation or attention span issues. All the negative factors I've discussed add up to a potentially tough sell, hence why I don't normally extol the benefits of the fediverse to everyone I know.
The irony of this ambitious interlinked system of cooperative social media services ultimately having limited appeal beyond a thin slice of diehard enthusiasts is not lost on me, but at the same time, that lack of reach might actually be a good thing. The small web is experiencing a revival, in part because previous attempts to create a central location on the internet for every kind of person to mingle have mostly proven to be a failure, a net negative for society at large. The internet was always better when there were degrees of separation between demographics—the evolution of the new social web is bearing this out. It would be great if humans could get together, sing Kum Ba Yah and find ways to appreciate each others' differences, but that's simply not the world we live in. Until that day comes, I'll keep sharing periodical musings with the handful of people in my circle over here.
(Originally published in Ctrl-ZINE Issue #17: https://ctrl-c.club/~/loghead/zine/Ctrl-ZINE.issue.17.pdf)