One Year on the Fediverse

Today marks my one-year anniversary on the Fediverse, or to be more specific, on chaos.social, my Mastodon server of choice. Over the last year, I have used the social network almost daily. And, to spoil my conclusion right at the start: I am going to stay.

Social media – a lost cause?

I was already quite disillusioned with social media one or two years ago, being well-aware of the creeping death of privacy and self-determination through the predatory practices of the online advertisement industry. I knew: ad-driven platforms do not care about their users, or they inevitably stop caring at some point; what they care about is retention, so they can reel in more money from advertisers, so they can make more profit. To that end, all means are justified: intentionally making people addicted to their sites, selling their users' data, helping manipulate public opinion and elections.

Even knowing all this, I still participated on those platforms, especially on Twitter. Why? Because I saw no alternative. You got me: I do want to talk to people and take part in social circles online. And I would lie if I said that Twitter was never fun. But I have to be careful – it's easy to view the past through rose-coloured glasses if the present is the digital equivalent of a dumpster fire. Twitter wasn't all that great back in the day: it was already a breeding ground for hate, questionably moderated, filled to the brim with ads and staffed with people whose main concern was implementing "features" like NFT support (lol) to make investors happy.

The recent, more rapid decline of internet platforms first led me to believe that the social media experiment was finally collapsing and that we really should have seen this coming a long time ago. And in a way, I do believe that the "golden era" of corporate social media is over and that we're slowly realising it was never a sustainable business model. That in reality, we've been exploited by our platforms this entire time. But after having spent time on the Fediverse, I don't think social media is doomed to fail anymore. I've gained hope – I think we have a chance of building a new kind of social web, one where platforms aren't walled gardens that we have to abandon every 5 years because they turn to shit.

No gods, no webmasters

To me and many others, the Fediverse is more than just "the next social media trend", but it's hard to explain to most people why that is. I think the reason for this is mostly that the way we interact with the Fediverse is, for the most part, not fundamentally different from how we interact with traditional social media. At the surface level, there's nothing new or revolutionary: you post, you like, you follow, etc. No, what sets the Fediverse and other open platforms apart is that they belong to us. This is not meant to be mere populism – it's literally true. If I download the Mastodon software, I can use it, and nobody can take that away from me. Nobody can tell me that I'll have to start paying rent, that I'll have to advertise, that I'll have to adhere to any one specific set of guidelines.

This is not news to open source people, of course – but "regular" people do tend to brush off the significance of this in the context of the web. Think about it: isn't it crazy that we've seemingly all just accepted that government communication, the news, even so-called "public discourse" happens on private platforms that we have absolutely no control over? Worse yet: if you don't sign up, you cannot use these platforms properly (because why would the companies behind them allow that?). So we've essentially forced everyone wanting to participate on the web to lock themselves in something that abuses them and that they can't get out of. This is not freedom. Twitter has never been and will never be a "public townhall" precisely because of this.

On the Fediverse, users have autonomy. To participate, you don't have to sign up to anything you don't trust. In fact, you don't have to sign up to anything at all to at least read and lurk, as content isn't locked behind "please log in" popups or hidden from outsiders (unless explicitly intended this way). You can subscribe to feeds of journalists, government institutions, activists and shitposters using publicly available and highly accessible RSS feeds, without even touching the platforms in any other way. People can come together and decide on their own rules and guidelines while still being able to talk to everyone else. Frankly, I feel like we were being complete idiots thinking that having none of this was somehow okay.

It's time to get used to independence

People like to complain when faced with change that challenges their convenience, even when it ultimately benefits them. With the Fediverse, this was really noticeable during the signup peaks, right around the time free speech champion Elon Musk started banning journalists and the Mastodon account for critical reports on the Twitter situation. People were desperate for alternative platforms, and since Bluesky wasn't really a thing yet, they came to Mastodon, en masse.

What first surprised me about a lot of complaints was that, despite being on it every day, people just do not know how the world wide web works at all. A frightening number of people cannot comprehend that there can be multiples websites running the same software, so Mastodon was and still is incredibly confusing to them. After all, the thought process goes, there is one Twitter, one Youtube, one Instagram, one whatever, right? The misunderstanding is that everything on the internet has to be some sort of service. This is not true, of course, but the people believing it are hardly at fault. This flawed thinking was deliberately conditioned by our current corporate web hegemony.

Unfortunately, it went further than confusion and ignorance. For some people, it turned into outright hostility towards the Fediverse and sometimes even the entire world of free software. Joining the mindless proclamation of "this independent stuff sucks anyway" became a low-hanging fruit. I saw everything from relatively harmless antagonisms ("it's full of nerds! how can i, a cool person, survive?") to olympic levels of mental gymnastics ("the creator of Mastodon is a Russian asset trying to create a propaganda platform" (yes, I have genuinely seen this take)). To be clear, I'm not referring to legitimate criticism here, of which there is plenty – but rather that people were quick to convince themselves and others that the Fediverse was not worth their time by painting it as uncomfortable, unsafe or even somehow evil.

The result of this discourse was that the essence of the Fediverse – its decentralisation – was ignored by most. What mattered instead were aesthetics and surface-level impressions. I think this is one of the reasons the Fediverse has not caught on (and perhaps never will) among the larger Twitter crowd.

In my eyes, there's no way around it: we have to (re-)learn how to make the web work for people instead of Silicon Valley in order to truly move on. Otherwise, we are doomed to succumb to the next social media collapse. Giving up a little convenience and enduring some rough edges in the process is a worthwhile investment to gain online independence.

Community and collaboration

While not an inherent result of the technology behind the Fediverse, what really kept me on the Fediverse was the people there.

I actually created my first Mastodon account half a year earlier than my current one – when Musk's deal to buy Twitter was sealed – but it took me a while until posting started feeling "natural". Like many others, I felt a bit lost at first since I had no connections on the platform (funnily enough, I often felt the same way on Twitter despite my connections there). Once I switched to chaos.social, I started following more people and hashtags, checking the "Explore" tab and becoming more comfortable commenting on other people's posts, even those whom I didn't know (yet). Eventually, things fell into place and now there isn't really anything left for me to complain about in terms of feed content and interactions.

What I found was that, contrary to what some claim, the instance you sign up to does matter. This isn't to say that you necessarily have to find a niche instance like me (granted, chaos.social isn't that niche!) to make the Fediverse work for you, but for me that ended up being a crucial step in making myself at home. Smaller, more focused instances where there's a big overlap of interests and viewpoints create an atmosphere of working together on something, which I think helps the general vibe. Again, this is just my personal feeling as someone who, as already hinted at, can get overwhelmed by scale.

Compared to corporate social media, the aspect of collaboration is also apparent in other areas of the Fediverse: you know the people who run your instance, you know the people who develop the software. They're approachable, they're in it with you. Federation and collaborative software are really the only way to get this level of cohesion; monoliths tend to devolve into intransparent bureaucratic nightmares out of necessity (that is, if you want proper moderation and administration).

Federate all the things!

Over the last year or two, my stance on social media and even the web in general has changed radically. I've become convinced that what most of us consider to be the web is dangerously fragile, and I've committed to invest my time into the construction of an independent, community-oriented social web. Microblogging on the Fediverse is just a tiny part of the big picture:

• I'm supporting Codeberg (who are, by the way, working on federation) as a software forge, so GitHub doesn't become the only option
• I'm dipping my toes into other areas of the Fediverse, even those whose corporate equivalents I'm not familiar with (such as Bookwyrm)
• I'm building a presence on federated instant chat platforms as an alternative to Discord (which is currently my most used social media)
• I'm moving away from most Google services as I recently started hosting my own Nextcloud

One thing that has definitely become clear to me: unless I'm forced to, I will likely never join another corporate social media platform. I'd much rather help out the amazing people who are working on making the web an open and diverse place again, transforming social media into what it was always meant to be.

Turning this aspiration into a global reality requires a digital-societal movement of some sort, and unfortunately we're not quite there yet. Whatever the future may hold though, I'm happy to say that I'm excited about social media again.