The Fediverse: What it is, how it (partially) solves the problems of social media's centralization and censorship, and why you should join it (and convince others to do the same)!

In light of an absurd level of increased online censorship lately, it's worth talking about why the centralization of social media makes the problem of censorship particularly bad, and it's also worth talking about a promising solution to the problem of centralized social media called "The Fediverse".

For a tl;dr, just sign up for Mastodon already! Or join another fediverse site. The rest is just explaining why. Also if anyone has any questions, feel free to ask, and I'll do my best to answer them :)

What is the Fediverse?

The Fediverse is an alternative approach to social media that seeks to limit the levels of centralized power in social media. Currently, the vast majority of social media users are on only a small handful of websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube. That gives those few giants an overwhelming amount of power when it comes to censorship and propaganda. For example, if three or four people (Zuck, Dorsey, etc.) decide you shouldn't be allowed to see a certain article (see: NY Post stories about Hunter Biden emails), you don't get to see it! In order to effectively be wiped off the Internet entirely, all it takes is for those same three or four people to decide that you shouldn't be allowed to use their websites anymore (see: Alex Jones, and no, I don't like Alex Jones, but it is creepy how easy it was for him to be removed from the Internet), and poof! You're gone from the Internet, and there's very little you can do about it!

I don't want to get into too much of the weeds for how the Fediverse works from a technical perspective, but I do want to at least give a brief overview of how it works differently from the centralized social media that most people are familiar with and the reasons it mitigates many of the problems that come with centralization.

Probably the best analogy is that it's the social media equivalent to email. By that, what I mean is that if you have an email account with gmail.com, and you want to send an email to somebody with an email address from yahoo.com, you can do that no problem! The equivalent on social media would be if you have an account from twitter.com and you want to reply to someone's post on facebook.com. With centralized social media, you're not allowed to do that, you would need to create an account with facebook.com in order to interact with any posts made on facebook, and you need to create an account on twitter.com in order to interact with any tweets made on twitter. With the fediverse, you are allowed to do things like that, and that's actually the entire point!

To give a specific example, I'll talk about the fediverse equivalent to twitter, which is Mastodon. When you sign up for a Mastodon account, it's a lot like signing up for an email account. There's a lot of different Mastodon "providers" that you can choose from, for example, let's say I decide to sign up on mas.to with the handle @tabesadff, then my full handle would be @tabesadff@mas.to. This would be kind of like signing up for email with the email address tabesadff@gmail.com. If someone else (say u/martini-meow), has an account on mstdn.social with handle @martini@mstdn.social, then martini can still follow me on Mastodon and see my posts, even though we both have accounts on different Mastodon websites. What's more, if, say I watch a video on Peertube (fediverse equivalent to YouTube), then I can leave a comment on that video from my Mastodon account! That would be the equivalent of leaving a comment on YouTube from a Twitter account, something that's impossible to do with centralized social media!

Why does the Fediverse (partially) solve the problems of centralization and censorship?

The reason that the Fediverse (partially) solves the problems with centralized social media has to do with the fact that it offers a high degree of interoperability. If I don't like the decisions made by Mark Fuckerburg, I can't just leave and make my own Facebook. Well... I can, but nobody would use it, and I wouldn't be able to communicate with anyone who isn't on my own personal Facebook server. With Mastodon, if I don't like the decisions made by the admin(s) of the Mastodon instance I'm using, I can make my own Mastodon (it doesn't even require very many tech skills, nor does it cost a lot of money), and I don't need to convince anyone else on the Fediverse to join it in order to interact with them, I just need to notify them of my new account's handle (which that's easy too, and will likely become even easier in the future!).

Now, I have been careful to say that the Fediverse only partially solves the problems of social media's centralization and censorship. That's because there are some limitations that the Fediverse has, and I don't want to give the impression that it's a perfect solution by any means, it's just simply a better solution than what we currently have, and for that reason I think it's worth joining. Like with other federated services such as email, there's still some degree of centralization. While it's possible to sign up for an email account with many different email providers, certain ones such as gmail still tend to dominate, and so a large portion of email users are still subject to the rules that Google makes for them. Likewise, a large percent of Mastodon users are concentrated on a small number of instances, so they're subject to the rules that the admins of those instances make for them. In other words, you still have dictators, but they're not as powerful, and if you don't like your own dictator, you can easily choose a different one who's less strict, or even become your own dictator. So yes, maybe not completely perfect, but still a vast improvement over the way things are done with more centralized social media where lack of interoperability creates a "lock-in" effect that makes it difficult for users to credibly threaten to leave in the event of an abuse of power.

Another limitation of the Fediverse is that it only addresses the issue of centralization within the context of social media, not with centralization of the Internet as a whole. For example, it has the potential to limit the power of entities such as Facebook and Twitter, but it does nothing about the fact that Amazon Web Services essentially has a monopoly on being a cloud provider. So even if the fediverse does manage to grow large enough to supplant some of the social media giants (which isn't necessarily the goal of the fediverse, but would be a nice bonus!), you would still likely need government action to break up a lot of the other tech giants (good luck boycotting Amazon Web Services, you're already failing at that by using Reddit!).

Finally, while talking about limitations, the Fediverse is a mixed bag when it comes to privacy, in some ways it's a big improvement, in other ways it's a bit worse. A nice plus is that many Fediverse instances are hosted in the EU, so they're not under U.S. jurisdiction, and the E.U. has much better privacy laws than the U.S. does (see: FISA courts). It's also funded through donations instead of ads, which is a big plus in terms of privacy since there's no financial incentive to suck up all your data. It's also in some ways a drawback since if nobody donates to the admin(s) of your instance, the admin(s) may decide it's not worth the costs of running that instance, and might shut it down. Fortunately, migrating accounts between instances is easy, and most admins will give you at least 3 months notice before shutting an instance down, but if you're really worried about that, you can either sign up for a larger instance (which would be less likely to shut down) or if you don't mind spending the money, donate to your instance's admin(s) so they're less likely to shut it down, or just make your own instance so you have full control over it. Probably the biggest drawback is that the admin(s) of your instance can read your DM's. Of course, that's also true with most centralized social media anyway, but it is a little worse with the fediverse due to the smaller scale, so just assume that anything you do on social media isn't truly private, which is an assumption you should already have when using social media anyway. If you want to send people messages with sensitive information, you really should be using a messenger that uses end-to-end encryption (e2ee) such as Signal (or better, Matrix, which is a federated e2ee service, if you're unsure of which Matrix app to use, Element is probably the best one out there).

Why you should join the Fediverse and convince others to do the same

For one reason, why not? It's pretty quick and easy to make an account, and you have nothing to lose (other than maybe 5 minutes of your time) by doing so. For another reason, as discussed at length in this post, it's a place online where you can escape the tyrannical and near absolute power of the social media giants. Additionally, there's already millions of other users on the Fediverse, and so by making just one account, you'll be able to interact with them, so you don't even need to convince any of your friends to join in order to find it useful.

With that said, you may still wish to convince your friends to join as well. If you try convincing your friends to join, you may get some objections like "but everyone is on facebook, nobody else I know is on fediverse, why should I join?". For that reason, I'd recommend only trying to convince about two or three people you know to join at first, and for that, I'd recommend picking people who 1) you interact with often (such as a significant other, close friends, family members, etc.), and 2) who you think is easiest to convince. Once you've done that, convincing other people you know to join should be a lot easier. If you get the "nobody else I know is on fediverse" line, just point out all the other mutual friends you've already convinced to join! Also, if your friends are as indecisive as I am, they may have trouble deciding which instance to sign up for, so maybe just pick one for them and send them a link to it so they can sign up. It really doesn't matter too much which instance you sign up for at first since migrating accounts between instances is super easy.

Another reason to join is that it can help create a virtuous cycle / snowball effect which can lead to further growth. More people joining the fediverse means more people producing content there, and the more content there is on the fediverse, the more value it has by enabling people to interact with it, and the more likely it is to get linked from elsewhere on the Internet, and thus the more likely other people are to also join. For this reason, it also may be worth trying to convince some influential people who you follow on social media to also create accounts there and to start posting their content there in addition to wherever else they already post their content.

As far as influential people who it might be worth trying to convince, there's already plenty who don't need to be convinced at all, they already are outraged by online censorship, so we would just need to get their attention. Think people like Glenn Greenwald, Krystal Ball, Saagar Enjeti, Katie Halper, Matt Taibbi, Jimmy Dore, Abby Martin, Aaron Mate, Kyle Kulinski, Fiorella Isabel, their tweets get posted here all the time, and I could on and on and on, listing other influential people who already have expressed (on Twitter no less!) how much they loathe online censorship, and so they would almost certainly be on board with joining something like Mastodon if only they were made aware of it!