I’ve only been using the Fediverse for a couple months but I think it’s so amazing and super important, and that everybody should be using it right now. My only problem was I was struggling to convince and explain it to people, and I know that many others have been having the same problem. So, in an effort to make it easier, I wanted to make a resource that I could just send to anybody and have it explained in a very clear way so that anyone can understand regardless of their level of digital literacy. I uploaded it around 3 weeks ago and based on the feedback I’ve gotten I think I succeeded in doing that.

I definitely didn’t go super in depth, 1 because I didn’t want to confuse anybody, and 2 because I myself am definitely not an expert, and I probably even got some stuff wrong or not 100% all the way right, so if you have a correction or clarification I’d highly encourage that you leave a comment with it for others to read and continue building their understanding.

But please feel free to share this around so that we can help more people understand the how and why of the Fediverse, it’s uploaded on Tilvids and Youtube, or I’ll be including the entire script in this post as well as a link to my Neocities site for people to read it if you or the person you’re sharing it would prefer that.

PeerTube Link YouTube Link Read it

References

https://paulmcbride.com/posts/what-is-the-fediverse
Instagram Thread's explanation of the Fediverse
https://fediverse.party/ - useful for learning about and discovering some of the biggest platforms
https://fediverse.info/explore/projects - For very deep dives into all the different kinds of software and instances
https://fediverse.to/ useful for finding instances across many different platforms and many different categories
https://fediverse.info/explore/people People Directory
https://fedidevs.com/starter-packs/?tab=community Starter Packs

Potential rewrite (ended up being the final rewrite)

The Fediverse is what social media should be

Intro

How familiar are you with “dead internet theory”? You’ve probably heard it thrown around a bit but in case you’re not aware let me give you a quick definition. According to Wikipedia, “The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that, due to a coordinated and intentional effort, the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation to control the population and minimize organic human activity. Proponents of the theory believe these social bots were created intentionally to help manipulate algorithms and boost search results in order to manipulate consumers.”

I don’t know if I can really say that’s true or not, I do feel like it has been pretty relevant lately. I find myself scrolling through social media, mostly Instagram, and I feel like I rarely ever get content that’s actually from the people I follow. Now it’s mostly just for scrolling through reels and sharing them. It’s for viewing hours and hours of algorithmically curated content to keep me engaged, giving me tiny hits of dopamine and wasting my time while Meta claims a bunch of ad revenue. I used to give it a pass saying “social media is good because it helps me stay connected with my friends”, and while that might’ve been true at one point I really don’t think it is any more. Every passing day social media becomes less “social” and more so just “media”.

This is something that I feel really strongly about, so I went looking for something else. Something that could bring social media back to truly being about connecting with others. Something that doesn’t use my data for monetary gain or control the content I see, and puts the power back in my hands. And that’s where I found “The Fediverse”

So, what exactly is the “Fediverse”?

The Federated Universe, or “Fediverse” for short, is a collection of different social media platforms and servers that interact with each other over a protocol called “ActivityPub”.

I know that that sounds a little technical and confusing, so let’s put it this way. Imagine that Instagram for example, is a house owned by meta where there’s a big ol party going on. You can go over there and join in on the party, hanging out and chatting with all the people there, seeing all the stuff they’ve got going on, and it’s a grand old time.

Then, let’s say that your friends let you know about another party happening on Twitter, which is a house that Elon Musk owns of course. You could go, but you take a step outside of Instagram, and realize that your surroundings are pretty much empty. Sure, there’s a couple other houses like Facebook or Threads, but that’s about it. All of the Meta platforms are self contained in their own little neighborhood where it’s just their houses.

This is what we call “Centralized” social media. Most popular social media’s are like this, they’re all contained in their own little space where one person or corporation is in control. If you’re hangin out at Instagram’s house then you only get to interact with other Instagram users, or sometimes a Facebook or Threads user. And since this is all in control of Meta, they get the final say in what you’re allowed to post or talk about.

But what if social media worked a little bit differently, giving you the control, preserving your privacy, and connecting you to others regardless of what platform you use, or what house you hang your hat in? This is how Decentralized Social Media works.

Decentralized social media is like if instead of going to a house party, you went to a city-wide party, where there’s different districts and different houses, that are all interconnected. No one person is in control of the party either, it’s just being controlled by the community at large. This is how the Fediverse works, so let’s break it down.

Let’s imagine that the Fediverse is this city where the party is taking place. Within this city there’s different districts, comprised of houses and buildings. We’re going to define the districts as different platforms, and the buildings and houses as servers or instances.

What is a platform?

Different Fediverse platforms are pretty much exactly what they sound like. They’re just different kinds of social media, like the difference between Facebook and Twitter. Sure they’re both just “social media”, but different platforms are used for different things. A primary benefit of the Fediverse is that it provides you with all of these different platforms while in essence being just one big platform itself. You might already be familiar with a few. For an example, we’ll start with Mastodon.

Mastodon at it’s core is pretty simple. It’s a social media platform built for microblogging, an alternative to Twitter. Mastodon prides itself in being decentralized, open source, free of ads and algorithms, and independent. There are a few other platforms that aim to do the same thing, but Mastodon is the biggest, and it might just be the biggest platform on the entire Fediverse as well.

Users on mastodon can make posts, add polls to their posts, use hashtags, upload various files including images, videos, and audio, and the ability to add descriptions to these files for accessibility, you can add content warnings or custom emoji, and much more. They’re very big on expression and creativity. Mastodon is one of the “districts” in the Fediverse city.

What is an instance?

I mentioned earlier that Mastodon is open source. In case you don’t know what that means, it basically means that the code that Mastodon is made of is all public for anyone to look at or use for themselves. Anybody can use it to start their own social media website that’s powered by Mastodon. This means, that unlike most social media, Mastodon is not contained on a single website, there are several of them, just short of 9 thousand actually.

We call these different websites “servers” or “instances”, and these are the buildings and houses that make up the district. Mastodon, and the larger Fediverse as a whole, is comprised entirely out of these servers. But they all interact with each other seamlessly. So when you go to joinmastodon.org, they suggest joining the official one run by the mastodon team, which is located at mastodon.social. But, they also give you suggestions for plenty of others.

You can join mas.to, or mastodon.world, there’s one called sunny.garden, or wehavecookies.social. Many of these servers are just for general use, but some of them are for specific things. The aforementioned sunny.garden is an instance made specifically for indie creators of all kinds. Artists, writers, musicians, whatever. It’s run by a team 5 people in Canada, and has over 500 users.

Every server is run independently of each other, some are run and most are run by small teams or maybe even just one person. The people that run these servers make the rules for what kind of content is allowed and how these rules are enforced, they can be as strict or as lenient as they like because they have full ownership over that server.

If you don’t like what they’re doing, then you don’t have to sign up on their server you can just go somewhere else. Maybe you even looked through every server all 9 thousand of them and couldn’t find anything that matched what you’re looking for. This is where the crazy part comes in, because it’s all open source you can just go make your own. Many people across the fediverse host their own servers so that they have ultimate control over how they use it without anyone being above them.

If that sounds like something you wanna do, then you should absolutely go for it. Regardless of what server you end up on, you can still interact with any other Mastodon server that the admins of your server choose to federate with, and even nearly every server across the Fediverse, regardless of the platform. This connection between servers and platforms is called “Federation”, the “Fedi” part of “Fediverse”

The many different platforms of the Fediverse

So far we’ve only really covered Mastodon, but pretty much everything we discussed is true for every other platform, and there are many platforms. Just to name a few, Misskey and Pleroma are also microblogging platforms like Mastodon, Lemmy, Piefed and Kbin are link aggregator and forum platforms similar to Reddit, Writefreely and Plume are blogging platforms like Blogspot or WordPress.

Pixelfed is a photo sharing platform like Instagram, BookWyrm is an alternative to goodreads, Friendica acts a lot like Facebook, and PeerTube is a YouTube alternative (link to my peertube page in the description by the way). That’s really just a few of the more popular and active platforms, there are so many more that do so many things, and they all interact with each other. If you wanted to and had the know how, you could even just make your own platform.

A majority of platforms also interact with each other, meaning you can see posts from other platforms, and even like, comment or follow others outside of your own platform. But, it doesn’t always work perfectly. For example, Pixelfed is a platform for sharing photos, so every Mastodon post with a photo attached can be seen and interacted with like it was a post natively made on Pixelfed. But not every Mastodon post has a photo, and the ones that don’t will not be seen by Pixelfed. But that’s about as bad as it gets, just little compatibility issues like that.

ActivityPub

In the Fediverse city, ActivityPub is the streets, backroads and sidewalks that connect everything together. ActivityPub is the protocol that every fediverse platform is built on. It’s the language that they speak and understand, and it’s what makes it all connect together. It’s kind of like how email works.

Regardless if you have a gmail.com, icloud.com, outlook.com, or any other kind of email address, you can email anyone else because they use the same protocol to speak to each other. ActivityPub works in much the same way, but with social media.

The Fediverse without ActivityPub wouldn’t even exist. The developers behind Mastodon probably never would’ve made it, and if they did it would have to be more centralized and locked in like other more popular platforms.

Without ActivityPub, if you wanted to communicate between platforms you’d have to hop some fences or dig some tunnels, or find some other weird sketchy way to access other places. But because of it and some other similar protocols, we have the decentralized social spaces that I’ve been talking about today.

How the Fediverse improves upon traditional social media

Now that we’ve figured out what the Fediverse is and how it works, let’s answer the question of why you should use it and why you should care about it.

I briefly mentioned earlier the concept of centralization. Traditional social media is centralized, and controlled by one entity. Twitter is owned by Elon Musk, and I hope that I don’t have to explain the negative impact that’s having on the platform.

Mastodon on the other hand is owned by no one in particular, but also everyone at the same time. sunny.garden is owned by those Canadian guys, masto.nyc is owned by the Five Borough Fedi Project, a nonprofit corporation based in NYC, these people that own and operate these servers are in charge of making the rules and deciding how things run.

And if you don’t like any existing servers you can just make your own, so you can make the rules and and you can control your own data. You can have as much or as little autonomy as you want.

Current social media is also largely built around algorithms.

In the digital age there’s a saying that goes “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” And on traditional social media this is 100% true.

Most social media is a free service for the userbase, which may seem great to the average user, but beneath that is algorithms designed to serve you as much content that it thinks you will like as possible, getting you completely hooked so that you’ll spend several hours a day scrolling, and serving you as many ads as possible.

You might not even realize it but every day, especially on social media, you will see hundreds and hundreds of ads, and every time you see one that means the platform giving it to you is making money.

The Fediverse is an antithesis to that model. The Fediverse is free of advertisements and algorithms, even on the biggest platforms like Mastodon. Every platform puts the power in your hands, showing you only content from the accounts you follow, and usually with an option to see a live feed of the newest content across the platform as well.

There will never be data collected on you to serve advertisers, so you’ll never get advertisements. The Fediverse is all about the social part of social media, and not monetary gain.

Because it’s decentralized and free of any advertising data collection, it’s also a great place if you’re an advocate for digital privacy and controlling how your data is used.

There’s no big corporation building a profile of you, and every instances manages the little data that they do have independently, and most are very transparent with how they handle it. And if you’re uncomfortable with anyone having any amount of control, you can always host an instance yourself.

Challenges with the Fediverse

The Fediverse isn’t without it’s challenges. It’s still a relatively new thing, ActivityPub, the aforementioned protocol that the whole thing is built on, was only introduced in 2018. We’re still kind of figuring things out as we go, and we’re still very much in the early adopters phase.

Things are always changing and improving, and nearly every platform is still receiving big feature dropping updates, as they’re still pretty much in their infancy. The lack of algorithms also means it can sometimes be hard to find new people.

And given the current state of things and how early it is, admittedly most users are tech enthusiasts. This in addition to having a significantly smaller user base compared to traditional platforms, can be a lot to get used to and even a bit underwhelming to your average new user.

Federation between different platforms isn’t always perfect. Some will work perfect together, viewing posts from other microblogging services such as Pleroma from your Mastodon account will work just fine, you won’t even be able to tell it’s from a different service. But some combinations don’t work quite as well, like earlier when we were talking about posts between Pixelfed and Mastodon.

Another example, Bookwyrm supports following of users across every platform but doesn’t really show any activity from them, and there’s a couple other examples of these kinds of things just not translating quite as intended.

The community driven aspect can also be a double edged sword. Being largely run by volunteers, small teams, or even just hobbyists doing it in their free time, means that there’s no mega corporations ensuring that things go smoothly.

Your favorite instances might struggle with outages from high traffic, or lengthy bits of downtime from maintenance, which can definitely be a bit frustrating coming from bigger platforms where things work effortlessly.

Some solutions

But many of these issues of simple solutions, that in my opinion can sometimes be even better than what you’d find on a traditional platform.

If you wanna get to know new people outside of just tech enthusiasts, many people create user directories for the public. Think of it like a phone book for the Fediverse city.

For example, fediverse.info has a directory of people where you can find people across many different categories. You can browse by accounts that talk about music, tech, photography, art, and a few other things. You can also submit your own profile to this as well to make it easier for others to find you.

Or there’s a section on the website fedidevs.com called “starter packs”, where users create their own “starter packs” of accounts they think are worth following for a specific thing, or you can create your own starter pack.

Koree A. Smith created a starter pack called “Funny People”, containing “accounts that post funny things on the Fediverse.” It even gives you an easy button to follow all of the people in that starter pack.

If you try to log in to your favorite instance to do some browsing but find that it’s down, the amazing thing about the Fediverse is that you can just use a different instance for the time being until your favorite instance is back up.

Most instances will also let you donate to them, which I’d highly recommend doing if you spend a lot of time there and enjoy it. Just to reiterate, across the Fediverse nobody is making any money off of their use and they do it just because they like doing it, so a donation can go a long way to help keep the server running or just show your appreciation.

These might not be perfect solutions, and I didn’t even propose a solution to every problem, but those are just the trade offs that you have to accept when you have a community driven ad free platform. I for one am fully willing to accept these struggles as the platform grows, but it definitely might not be for everyone just yet.

Getting started with the Fediverse

Regardless of the issues that are currently present, the Fediverse is a fun and exciting place to be. If you have any desire to check it out I’d encourage you to give it a try, make an account or two across different platforms and look around a bit.

Some social medias, like Facebook, will do everything in their power to lock you in to their platform, becoming an everpresent part of your life from the moment you register to the moment you die. But I promise you, the Fediverse is not like this whatsoever. It’s nowhere near as big a commitment, it takes nearly no time to sign up and it’s just as easy to delete your account if you decide it’s not for you.

To get started all you really need to do is pick out a platform that you think looks interesting, and then pick an instance. Do some research for this, I’ll leave some resources below to help you find the right platform and instance for you. Once you find an instance that looks like it’s the right spot for you, all you have to do is sign up.

Many platforms will let you sign up and log in right away, but others may have admins manually review your registration requests to ensure you’re not a bot or someone suspicious, which can take a few hours or a few days depending on how big or active it is, which is something to take into consideration. Platforms that have this manual review system will let you know before you finish the registration process.

After that you’re all set to just do some browsing and exploring of the Fediverse! If you find a different instance where you think you’d be happier, many platforms provide easy to use tools to migrate your account elsewhere without losing your posts, followers, and other data.

If you’re worried that you’re missing out due to mistranslation or defederation between platforms, you can always just sign up on multiple platforms. But remember, no matter where you sign up, you can always interact with thousands of others on different instances and platforms, and you won’t be missing out on too much.

Outro

And with all that being said I hope that I’ve made a good case for what the Fediverse is and why you should be a part of it. I want this to be a solid jumping off point for getting into the Fediverse, as there’s so much to explore and you can take it as deep or as shallow as you want.

To me it really is redefining what current social media is, taking it back to the idea that it’s a place to connect with people and stay up to date on what’s going on in their lives, rather than it being a place to endlessly scroll through brain rotting content and endless ads.

I love that it’s free from corporate control and Elon Musk using everything you post to fuel his personal AI projects, and if breaking free of that sounds good to you, and you want a better and healthier alternative, then I promise you that the Fediverse is worth at the least giving a try. It might be a bit different, but with some time I don’t think you’ll ever want to go back.