Quick blogpost on why you should totally join the Fediverse! The Fediverse itself is a large decentralised social media of "stuff". What can this "stuff" be? Well, pretty much anything. Mastodon (probably the most popular one) essentially became a Twitter clone in the Fediverse. Pixelfed then became an Instagram clone also sitting on the Fediverse. Now, there are attempts to make a TikTok clone on the Fediverse. So, while the whole network is known as the Fediverse, comprised of many people's servers all linked to each other, the apps built on top of it can serve different purposes.
Why You Should Join
- Mastodon, and the Fediverse/ActivityPub protocol, is entirely open source. If you want to be convinced why Open Source is cool, read this and come back.
- The Fediverse is not centralised - many different parties host their own servers. This means you're not at risk from a man-child buying your platform and handing it to bots and nazis. If that does happen, you can just move server!
- Your data is yours. No longer is your content stolen by the company running your social media to train AI or to sell to the highest bidder. Data is a $200,000,000 business.
- Less bots. With Twitter infested with bots, and Meta introducing bots [intentionally?] to Instagram and Facebook, the Dead Internet Theory is more true than ever. Come talk to proper human beings instead.
- Your emotions aren't commercialised. It is well known that normal social media make money off your interactions (more interactions = more platform use = more ad payouts). This means negative emotions like anger are prioritised - leading to a hostile space rather than one you can be happy in. Because, when you're angry, you will be more likely to enter arguments and conflict with other users (maybe even bots), inflating interactions.
Remember, you're the product. - No Ads! Since everything in the Fediverse is non-profit in nature, you won't encounter any weird ads (or ads at all)!
- No algorithm! Again, due to the non-profit nature, there is no incentive to introduce predatory and exploitative algorithms which, on other platforms, seek to divide, and cause anger and stress in the users. Have a look at my objective analysis of Twitter here (with horrifying examples from my own feed).
- You might already be on [corporate] Fediverse! Bluesky and Threads, both closed source, corporate products, use the ActivityPub protocol but, yknow, because the companies suck, they choose not to federate with the rest of the Fediverse (they don't play well with anyone else). Try out the freer side of the Internet!
- The Fediverse is built for people looking for a community - not an audience.
How To Join
First off, you gotta choose an instance. You can choose a small on if you're looking for a special micro community (eg queer people, IT nerds etc...). Different instances are targeted towards different people and communities. For example, you have infosec.exchange for tech stuff, tech.lgbt for queer people in tech, mastodon.social as general "main" social instance, and our own local one: moris.social! To clarify, all servers can intercommunicate with other instances they have federated with. However, smaller servers might not have linked up with as many other servers, so you might feel a bit isolated. moris.social is one of these smaller instances. Finally, when you are choosing an instance, you are choosing the community and the admins (and their rules) though you can always move to another server later down the line.
Once you have chosen an instance, you can create an account on their website, and get right into following people!
Welcome to the free web.