There has been, for some time, an independent and AI-free chain of related social media services. Collectively, they’re known as the “Fediverse,” because they use a computing concept called “federation” to interact with one another. These services have languished in near obscurity due to the fact that corporate social media is more accessible to the masses; it’s engineered to be easy, because those companies want to harvest user data and run advertising. Or at least that was the case until Elon Musk bought Twitter, and the wheels starting coming off the wagon for one of the most established social media behemoths.
Now people are flocking to Fediverse services like Mastodon as an alternative. But there is a common refrain from those I know who are making the switch: “this all seems so complicated.” Then the next statement is usually “I don’t understand how this works” or “I don’t know how to sign up.” Allow me to use a folksy, nautical metaphor to de-complicate matters.
Imagine an archipelago — a chain of islands in close proximity to one another. Each island has its own culture. One island might be filled with artists, and another with scientists. Some islands might have more generalized populations, but most of the islands in the archipelago have a speciality of some sort.
Einstein Island is a focused on science and technology. The residents of the island love to talk to one another about that topic. Their neighbor, Artisan Island, is all about sculpture, painting, writing, and other artistic pursuits. The residents of that island love to collaborate on and critique each other’s projects. But sometimes the residents of Artisan Island need scientific advice on how to build a kiln, how to mix non-toxic paint, or how to chisel stone without fracturing it. And sometimes the residents of Einstein Island need colorful diagrams for their books, or input on the aesthetics of a machine.
When those circumstances arise, the shipping lanes between the islands carry messages of varying sorts to their intended recipients on the other island. Sometimes that message is just text, but sometimes it includes pictures or scheduling information. The residents of both islands can freely communicate and share knowledge while still maintaining the unique, specialized culture on their own island.
In this metaphor, the islands are instances, which are individual servers in a much larger network. The shipping lanes between them represent federation links. The federation link serves as an information conduit between the local server and other servers in the network. Each server has a theme, if even that’s “general use,” and there’s both a local and a federated feed for each of them. The local feed represents what people are saying on that specific server, and the federated one represents the conversations going on across the whole Fediverse.
Now let’s continue the metaphor. One day, an island emerges with a culture that the majority of the others decide is harmful. Let’s call this “Cannibal Island.” The local culture on Cannibal Island is… well, let’s just say it’s grim and offensive. Hateful messages from Cannibal Island begin clogging the shipping lanes to all the other islands. To correct the problem, the other islands de-federate with Cannibal Island, cutting them off from the greater archipelago community. The people on Cannibal Island can still talk to one another, but they can’t interact with the other islands.
A small number of other islands with compatible cultures might decide to maintain communication with Cannibal Island, but they’ll be in the minority and isolated. This means the people on Artisan Island, Einstein Island, etc. won’t have to deal with the influx of hateful communication that was disrupting their communal dialog.
Federation allows for the possibility of severing links to toxic or undesirable instances. It’s not censorship so much as a decision not to participate in a dialog with that server’s population. And some people might want to de-federate just to keep their content local and restricted. A good example would be a single organization that uses Mastodon for internal collaboration; that server might contain sensitive information that the organization doesn’t want broadcast to the wider world.
When the Fediverse began, the primary servers populating it were modeled on existing corporate social media. Mastodon looks a lot like Twitter. PixelFed looks a lot like Instagram. And Friendica looks a lot like Facebook. Yet unlike their corporate counterparts, all these services use the same underlying protocol to federate: ActivityPub.
Let’s return to the island metaphor. Artisan Island exports portraits and literature. Einstein Island exports scientific illustrations, scholarly books, and important dates in almanacs. A third island, Party Island, just exports pictures of their wild keggers. (They’re very popular.)
When Artisan Island exports stuff to Einstein Island, Einstein Island can use all of it. The island’s various agencies know what a picture and a book is, so they accept it. But when Einstein Island exports stuff to Artisan Island, they only accept the illustrations (because they know what pictures are) and scholarly books (because they know what books are). Artisan Island just leaves the almanacs on the docks, because they find dates and times to be rigid and antithetical to their work. And Party Island only accepts picture imports. They don’t read and they don’t do dates. They just party and party and party. Did I mention they’re pretty popular?
In this metaphor, each island is a different ActivityPub service. Mastodon, like Twitter, doesn’t use date/time information to build calendars or schedules. So if a Mastodon user follows a Friendica user, the Mastodon account will only show pictures and text, not calendar information. And if a PixelFed user follows a Mastodon user, all they’ll see are pictures. PixelFed doesn’t do text-only posts or calendars. This is all about presentation. Each kind of service can federate and interact with others, because all of them use ActivityPub. But what each service displays is dependent on how it’s structured.
Hopefully, some of this has made sense and helped to explain how the Fediverse works. The most confusing aspect of it for new users is the idea of open data exchange, and the lack of an algorithm to “promote” content. The Fediverse was built as an alternative to corporate media, so its very design is meant to deter advertising, promoted posts, harvesting user data, and “walled gardens” of information.
Freedom can be very disorienting after you’ve been deprived of it for decades, but I highly recommend visiting the islands of the Fediverse. Perhaps there’s one out there for you!
As for Twitter, the best metaphor I can use is the sinking of Atlantis. At this point, it’s a matter of when, not if, the whole company will be submerged alongside Livejournal and MySpace. And there’s always room for more unprofitable social media businesses at the bottom of the briny deep….