Imagine logging into your social media account, and instead of ads flooding your feed, you'd see the actual posts of the actual people you follow in chronological order. Imagine easily cross-posting and interacting with your friends' content on several social apps at once with only one user account. No need to sign up for every service individually. Can such a virtual universe become a reality? It’s already here, and it's called “the Fediverse.”
What does the Term Fediverse mean?
Fedi… what? The name doesn’t sound as catchy as other Silicon Valley buzzwords and often gets confused with Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse, (but that’s a topic for another day). So, what exactly is the Fediverse?
The term is a combination of the words “federated” and “universe”. It describes a decentralized social web in which users can share, comment, follow, and like each other's posts across various different platforms. So, let’s say you post something on X or TikTok then it will also be visible to users on Instagram or Facebook. The technology that makes this possible is called ActivityPub, an open protocol enabling communication between these social platforms.
The fediverse is similar to email. You can send messages to anyone, no matter which email service they use–Gmail, Yahoo, Apple, or AOL. Each email provider offers different features, but they all agree on what an email is. The fediverse uses this same principle of connecting different social apps together.
How does the Fediverse work?
To understand how the fediverse works, let’s start with how it doesn't work. The current social media model we know consists of one company, for example, Meta making all the rules, operating and owning the entire platform, like Instagram, including its user's data. It’s often described as a walled garden that restricts people, for example, from migrating their followers to another platform.
In the fediverse instead, you can switch between different social media platforms and take your audience with you if you disagree for example with one service's privacy policy. You won't need to rebuild your audience from scratch. While this feature already exists today, it's still a somewhat technical process. However, it should become simpler as the technology gets better.
Mastodon and Meta's Threads are the fediverse's most popular platforms, offering features like the ones on X (formerly Twitter). The fediverse gained much attention when Meta announced it would connect its new app, Threads, with the ActivityPub protocol. As of March 2024, Threads users in certain countries can now share posts to Mastodon and receive likes from Mastodon users. The fediverse also includes other apps like PeerTube (similar to YouTube) and Pixelfed (similar to Instagram).
The History of the Decentralized Social Web: The Fediverse.
The origins of the fediverse reach back to 2008. That’s when Evan Prodomou, a social open web advocate and co-author of the Activity Pub protocol, created ident.ica, a micro-blogging site similar to Twitter. ident.ica had a mechanism built into it that let others download, install and host the software on their own servers and then connect with other networks. The community quickly adapted it, and people created their own ident.ica versions with the openly available code and underlying protocols such as OpenMicroBlogging (OMB). All these independently hosted ident.ica servers, which are also called instances, could then converse with each other through sharing, liking, posting, and resharing.
So we can say ident.ica was the prototype of the federated social web. It even caught the attention of Google. In 2010, the corporation set out to develop a similar tool called Buzz, which was integrated into Gmail. However, the project failed due to privacy issues, resulting in a series of lawsuits.
Then the popularity around the decentralized social network died down again, until 2015, when the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) contacted Prodomou to develop a standard protocol for his idea. Just three years later, ActivityPub was born. Since then, the Fediverse has been growing steadily.
Getting Started: How to Join The Fediverse
Ready to give the fediverse a try? Here’s how it works: Start by exploring the social media apps available in the fediverse and pick the one that suits your preferences. Here are some suggestions:
- Mastodon: Microblogging, similar to X (formerly Twitter)
- Pixelfed: Photo sharing, comparable to Instagram
- Flipboard: Curates content from the web based on your interests
- Threads: Microblogging, a Meta competitor to X (formerly Twitter)
- Peertube: Video sharing platform
- Lemmy: Community site and link aggregator with features similar to Reddit
- Friendica: Similar to Facebook
Once you’ve chosen a social app, the next step is to select an “instance”—that’s your home in the fediverse.
For example, let's say you want to sign up for Mastodon. Unlike X, Instagram, or Facebook, where you create your account on a single platform, Mastodon lets you choose from various independently hosted platforms. Each Mastodon instance has its own rules and moderation policies. Some of the most popular instances include Mastodon.social, mastodon.world, and indieweb.social.
You can also look at the Fedi Directory to discover a wide range of instances and select the one that aligns with your values. Choosing the correct instance is crucial. Familiarize yourself with their privacy policy and data storing methods.
Before we continue, it’s also important to know that once you post something in the fediverse it will be out there – most likely forever. Let me explain: When you delete a piece of content, your instance will remove it and then send a request to all the other instances where your post appeared. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that these platforms follow the deletion request. Oftentimes, that doesn’t even happen out of bad will but is related to technical issues.
You might wonder: So, what happens when I delete a post on a centralized platform like Instagram or X? Will that be gone forever? Also, here, the answer is no.
While your post was out there, someone might have taken screenshots, third parties stored it, or the data was still available on former server backups.
The difference: After deleting a post on a centralized platform, the further distribution of the content stops, whereas a federated network can’t prevent it from spreading further. To learn more about data deletion in the fediverse, I recommend this blog post published by a software developer explaining the mechanisms and features in more detail.
So, if you still want to contribute to the public discourse online, whether in the fediverse or on a centralized platform, it’s something important to remember.
So, now you know how crucial it is to choose your instance wisely because everyone can host them in their garage. Once you have found your place in the fediverse, it’s time to create an account, a process similar to that of conventional social media apps. Just start interacting with the community. It works similarly to X, Instagram, and Facebook, so it will be easy to get the hang of it. You can start browsing through the Fedi.Directory to follow accounts that share similar interests.
The Fediverse Competitor: Meet the AT Protocol
Now that you better understand the concept behind the fediverse, let’s talk about a similar project—the AT Protocol. It runs on the decentralized social app Bluesky, another X competitor developed by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and now operating as an independent public benefit corporation. It gained momentum after the recent turmoil at Twitter, now X, following Elon Musk’s announcement to change its block feature. Previously, blocking prevented unwanted users from viewing or interacting with someone’s content. But under Musk’s update, those users can still see posts from the accounts that blocked them—a change that caused a lot of outrage. Shortly after the announcement, Bluesky reported a spike of 500.000 users in just one day. It’s yet another example of more people getting fed up with Musk’s platform management.
ActivityPub and AT protocol offer an alternative. But what exactly are the differences between the two protocols? According to AT's developers, they focus on data portability, allowing users to migrate to another platform more smoothly to "protect users from sudden bans, server shutdowns, and policy disagreements.” Bluesky explains further on their website that migration tools for ActivityPub are “comparatively limited as they require the original server to provide a redirect and cannot migrate the user's previous data.”
There are still some other differences between the two open protocols, such as managing usernames. Instead of ActivityPub’s double-@ email usernames, the AT protocol opts for unique domain usernames. You will always have this domain as a unique online identifier. That also makes it easier to move between platforms, as you will have the same ID across all AT protocol apps.
In the end, which protocol to choose depends on your personal preferences. ActivityPub is already an established standard with many use cases, whereas Bluesky is still the only social app running on the AT protocol.
