Relevant Overviews
- Bluesky and the ATmosphere
- Fediverse
- Content Strategy
- Online Strategy
- Online Community Management
- Social Media Strategy
- Content Creation & Marketing
- Online Architecture
- Digital Transformation
- Thinking tools
- Zettelkasten
- Blockchain, Crypto, NFTs etc
- Personal Productivity
- Innovation Strategy
- Surveillance Capitalism, Social media and Polarisation (Overview)
- Communications Tactics
- Social Web
- Media
- Politics
- Communications Strategy
- Science&Technology
- Business
Overview: Fediverse
What?
Strictly speaking, the Fediverse is a collection of interoperable social networks built on the open Web standard ActivityPub, including Twitter-lookalike Mastodon and YouTube-lookalike PeerTube, as well as Meta's Threads, which "federated" in 2024.
Unlike Twitter and YouTube, however:
- Mastodon/PeerTube are not owned and controlled by corporations. Anyone can launch and operate a Mastodon or PeerTube server, just like anyone can set up an email server and exchange emails with others using the email standard.
- The person who creates a server sets its rules (privacy, hate speech, etc).
- Users on any Mastodon/PeerTube server can not only interact with users on other Mastodon/PeerTube servers, they can interact across Fediverse platforms. For example:
- if Mastodon user A follows PeerTube user B, B’s PeerTube videos will appear in A’s Mastodon feed,
- user A can even comment on the video from within Mastodon, without visiting PeerTube or having a PeerTube account.
This would be like if my Twitter account followed someone's Facebook page, yet we could still interact seamlessly from our platform of preference. That’s impossible as Twitter & Facebook are walled gardens. Fediverse platforms like Mastodon and PeerTube are not – this is the Open Web on social.
So what?
While each Fediverse server is a community with its own rules, they're not walled gardens. This helps solve the vicious circle problem facing new platforms (why join a network where there are so few people on it? Hence noone joins it, so numbers stay low. So noone joins it): people don’t need to join the same social network, they just have to join any Fediverse network.
And that, in theory, changes everything. Instead of everyone being trapped in a few platforms owned by billionaires who impose the algorithm which maximises their profits (ie optimising for enragement), "The Fediverse thus promises a landscape of interconnected gardens of all shapes and sizes, each managed according to its inhabitant’s needs. People can roam everywhere, talk to anyone and change “home garden” at will" - Welcome to the Fediverse, starry-eyed noob.
Challenges
The ActivityPub approach, however, has some flaws - see:
- the singleton problem: it's "difficult to convince ... a major server to [federate] ... with a minor one... three Mastodon servers contain almost 60% of the known Mastodon population" - Peer-to-Peer Network Models and their Implications.
- "Federated networks become oligopolies at scale" due to forces seen everywhere ("airline routes, power grids, trains, banks, Bitcoin mining, protein interactions, ecological food webs, neural networks"), so the fediverse evolves to become something only a little better to the centralised apps it was trying to replace - see Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr
Other approaches to building alternative decentralised ecosystems therefore exist.
What about...?
Bluesky
By late 2024 I had opted for Bluesky as more promising for building decentralised collective intelligence, because:
- like Fedizens, Bluesky users own their data, but they can also move it wherever they like without changing their identity (unlike in the Fediverse).
- anyone can build on Bluesky, without asking permission, so any Bluesky user can subscribe to custom feeds and moderation tools developed by 3rd parties.
Derived from this Bluesky thread by @danabra.mov
Nostr & Farcaster
These both venture into blockchain territory. I'll be investigating these soon.
See also
- Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid, providing social media users with control over their data through personal knowledge graphs.
- adversarial interoperability - another part of the solution to this problem.
Personal state of play
ActivityPub
I was an early convert to ActivityPub as a theoretical idea, and in 2022 found myself writing a Fediverse strategy report for another EC department as the EU's Data Protection Supervisor and the EC's IT department launched social.network.europa.eu, the EU's own Mastodon server. The same year saw the EU Bubble's own server - https://eupolicy.social/ - launched. As I pointed out at the time, this had real potential: "it should be very easy for eupolicy.social to avoid creating a Brussels Bubble within the Fediverse... rather than building bridges outwards, we can pull national conversations into the Bubble, simply by following the right people." (Am I on the right Mastodon instance?).
At about the same time I took the plunge as part of the #TwitterMigration triggered by Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter. I was optimistic (my first post was literally Welcome to the Fediverse, starry-eyed noob), but within a few months I'd discovered an unhappy truth: the current infrastructure simply doesn't deliver content properly reliably.
I'd point you to the mid-2023 toot where I pointed this out, but (as if to illustrate my point) it's gone: in November my server simply disappeared, taking all my content and connections with it, without warning. I managed to dig out a screenshot of that toot from my phone and include it in All my toots gone.
Well before then the EU's experiments had become clearly underwhelming, with accounts limited to the institutions, rather than the people working in them. Someone clearly never read Euan Semple's "Organisations don't tweet, people do", missing a huge opportunity that news organisations started embracing in 2022: setting up a Fediverse server for their journalists to prove that they are their journalists, not an imposter. In April 2024 it was closed.
Meanwhile https://eupolicy.social/ was shrinking, from 720 active accounts soon after launch to 225 by late 2024.
From Threads to Bluesky...
Literally one month after my Mastodon server disappeared, Instagram's "Twitter-killer" Threads arrived in Europe, announcing their intention to join the Fediverse. I dug out my never-used Instagram account, and also launched a Bluesky account to kick both networks' tyres in parallel.
Currently I'm feeling confident about Bluesky, as set out in my November 2024 newsletter.
---
Version control
I develop this Fediverse Overview using the permanent versions pattern described in Two wiki authors and a blogger walk into a bar….
- changes in this version:
- updated to reflect what I learnt about Bluesky, and generally shortened
- version control
- this is version: 4
- previous versions available on my experimental wiki
---
More reading: resources tagged OR(#fediverse, #open web, #bluesky, #mastodon, #threads, #nostr) follow below:
Relevant resources
mathewlowry.medium.com
The second in my 1/1/2023 bundle of 5 posts exploring collective intelligence looks at the role of decentralised social networks: "A personalised, decentralised Social Knowledge Graph for each user multiplies the knowledge available to them via a trusted network of Followers and Friends, and creating collaborative possibilities more akin to w…
mathewlowry.medium.com
The "executive summary" of my 5-part bundle of 1/1/2023, which "provide a snapshot of my current thinking into how a decentralised collective intelligence ecosystem could be bootstrapped into existence."
www.manton.org
"Micro.blog can now cross-post to a Mastodon user account... Your custom domain on Micro.blog can now be ActivityPub-compatible, so that you can follow and reply to Mastodon users directly on Micro.blog ... someone can follow your blog posts".As a result "you can consolidate your identity and posts back to your own blog at your ow…
fasiha.github.io
Yoyogi "breaks from the timeline... elevates the author and centers the thread".Pick a Fediverse account (Mastodon for now, Pleroma and Misskey next) that you’re following and see just their threads, in a columnar interface.You need to login and give it permission: the accounts you follow are presented at left, allowing you to select one…
mathewlowry.medium.com
My second post following my personal #twittermigration: "the other users on your instance create its collective intelligence — the nearest thing you have to a content discovery algorithm".Not that I like algorithms, but "Apart from hashtags, ,,, your server’s Local and Federated timelines [are your] primary discovery channels when y…
uxdesign.cc
Mastodon is "subtly designed to reduce the huge, viral surges of attention we see on Twitter" and others, which have "deformed people’s behavior... coaxed people to constantly try to hack the attentional marketplace... incessantly making posts ... operatically theatrical... enrage ... [other] high-voltage reaction".Hence “antiv…
neil.mckillop.org
"I wanted a way to add any bookmarks I make there into a 'Read later' category in my RSS reader ... I create a PHP file that gets the latest 20 bookmarks... and takes an access token from your mastodon 'development' admin page. Then I can give this URL to my RSS reader: https://neil.mckillop.org/stuff/mastodon_bookmarks.rs…
docs.google.com
"Welcome To Mastodon Welcome to Mastodon, and The Fediverse! This is a living document with some tips and Frequently Asked Questions about Mastodon and the Fediverse..."Pretty complete-looking
www.theverge.com
Awesome hot take open letter to Elon Musk: "You fucked up real good, kiddo... no possible way to grow ... without ... compromises that will ultimately destroy your reputation and possibly cause grievous damage to your other companies... the problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems... absolute monarchs u…
doctorow.medium.com
Those who've read Doctorow's books and blogs on the collective action problem stopping people leave the established social media walled gardens may not find anything new, except for the quite brilliant link he makes with "the 1971 film adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof ... the Anatevkans can’t just pack up and leave: they are being …
Like
social media,
regulation,
facebook,
eu,
twitter,
surveillance,
interoperability,
fediverse,
cory doctorow
blog.joinmastodon.org
The story on Gab and Mastodon:"After crowdfunding millions of dollars... Gab abandoned its own code and switched to ... Mastodon software in early 2019 as a way of circumventing Google’s and Apple’s ban..."Mastodon's AGPLv3 opensource license allows this, of course, but there are conditions, which Gab then broke until JoinMastodon &…
uxdesign.cc
a "how-to guide ... through an online survey of Blind / low vision / visually impaired people."Discovered via Mastodon, where the culture is not to boost any toot containing non-accessible images, but applicable to all online publishing. "alt text and image descriptions are ... not actually the same thing. Alt text refers to the tex…
slate.com
A very funny round up from week 2 of the twitter migration: "It hasn’t even been two weeks since Elon Musk officially took over Twitter, and things look like they’re going about as well as a Cybertruck demonstration... one response to Musk’s tenure has seemed to really get under his skin: the verified impersonators."Funny, but the number…
github.com
"a guide & a general backgrounder/crash course on data protection law... primarily targeted at Mastodon instance owners ... and users, but much of the elements will likely also apply to other #fediverse services" by "an External Data Protection Consultant, researcher, and general buzzkill who focuses on helping organisations and…
carlchenet.com
Why is it important to choose your Mastodon home wisely? Because "You can move your user account from one instance to another, but you have to follow a special procedure which can be quite long... create another account on a new instance and import three lists... your followers, ... the accounts you have blocked [and] have muted".[note: …
axbom.com
how "Mastodon fits into the much larger concept of the Fediverse... visualisation ... many different use-cases and benefits of different services".Good intro to the Fediverse as a whole, plus the visualisation in png & pdf, and some Q&As covering multiple accounts ("a user preference"), Nextcloud (adding ActivityPub end…
scott.mn
4 ways Mastodon doesn't optimise for enragement.On Mastodon’s "home timeline... posts don’t have metrics ... you have to click through ... makes you judge a post first by its content, rather than the score attached to it... the whole dynamic [being "ratioed"] doesn’t exist... leads to more thoughtful engagement rather than ... …
medium.com
JJ "explore some of the opportunities afforded by the likes of Bluesky, Scuttlebutt, the Fediverse, and Indieweb — not to mention good, old, reliable RSS".Most of the mastodon tips I knew, except: "enable the advanced web interface (it’s like Tweetdeck)" - I didn't know that existed so moved to Tusky and spent my first wee…
Like
algorithm,
twitter,
moderation,
mastodon,
indieweb,
fediverse,
planetary,
scuttlebutt,
bluesky,
twitter migration,
jeff jarvis
pruvisto.org
search the people you follow, are followed by, blocked & muted on Twitter, as well as the lists you maintain and follow, for possible Mastodon/Fediverse accounts. Provides graphs of which instances they're on, too, so useful for identifying which server to join.
mathewlowry.medium.com
I discovered the Fediverse as I kicked MyHub.ai’s shiny new tyres in early 2020, and I’m kicking myself now for not diving in then.
mathewlowry.medium.com
Writing a chapter for a book on Personal Knowledge Graphs made me rethink MyHub.ai, and led to a new collective intelligence pilot project with the founders of massive.wiki.
Think
social media,
pilot,
collective intelligence,
decentralised,
myhub,
fediverse,
knowledge graph,
pkgbook,
fotl,
massive.wiki
medium.com
I've been invited to write a chapter for an upcoming book on Personal Knowledge Graphs (PKG). My chapter will encompass each user’s PKG, the Social Knowledge Graph created by networking them together via the Fediverse, Solid hosting, AI writing tools and Decentralised Autonomous Organisations.This post provides a first draft of its Introducti…
blog.datproject.org
An overview of three protocols - ActivityPub, Scuttlebutt and Dat - and their complementary roles in helping redistribute power from "large centralized corporate interests and back into the hands of individual people and small groups... No one protocol [is enough] ... each protocol has its strengths and weaknesses". We need "develo…
tinysubversions.com
Pretty good explanation of ActivityPub from Darius Kazemi: "ActivityPub describes ways for social network sites to talk to each other... [from] sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat... [to] New York Times ... Spotify. Basically any site where individual "users" create content and other people can subscribe to it could be A…
thenextweb.com
"it's a start... Musk argued that disclosing what amplifies or downranks tweets would reduce the risk of “behind the scenes manipulation.” [but] algorithms alone offer limited insights" because it's not just an algorithm that defines what you see: it's a huge dataset - "content that enters the platform, each user’s p…
Like
algorithm,
social media,
transparency,
twitter,
bias,
machine learning,
open source,
fediverse,
elon musk
hapgood.us
I suspect this will be a canonical text for me moving forward with myhub.ai.Mike Caulfield in 2015, when my first hub was only about 2 years old, had also "been experimenting with another form of social media called federated wiki... instead of blogging and tweeting your experience you wiki’d it. And over time the wiki became a representation…
Like
social media,
knowledge management,
garden,
curation,
stream,
wiki,
myhub,
2ndbrain,
zettelkasten,
fediverse,
memex,
fedwiki
crossposter.masto.donte.com.br
allows you to connect a Mastodon account and a Twitter account and enable cross-posting between them. You can choose some options, such as if you want to post boosts, unlisted toots or replies.
davidwolfpaw.com
re-reading some articles about Mastodon from early 2017 identifies some common misconceptions:It Isn’t “True” Federation": Mastodon instances ... can block other sites or control who has access, they aren’t truly federating" - a "free speech absolutism" argument "complaining that you want to say things and you want to forc…
Relevant Overviews
- Bluesky and the ATmosphere
- Fediverse
- Content Strategy
- Online Strategy
- Online Community Management
- Social Media Strategy
- Content Creation & Marketing
- Online Architecture
- Digital Transformation
- Thinking tools
- Zettelkasten
- Blockchain, Crypto, NFTs etc
- Personal Productivity
- Innovation Strategy
- Surveillance Capitalism, Social media and Polarisation (Overview)
- Communications Tactics
- Social Web
- Media
- Politics
- Communications Strategy
- Science&Technology
- Business