Believe it or not, it’s been over three years since Twitter announced it was being sold to Elon Musk. When that news broke, some Twitter users (myself included) began to move to the fediverse — a collection of decentralized web products powered by the W3C standard, ActivityPub. Many people thought this might be the beginning of a full-scale exodus from Twitter to more open products, like Mastodon.
But three years later and the X-odus still hasn’t happened. Despite a couple of competitors now boasting user numbers in the hundreds of millions (Meta’s Threads) or tens of millions (Bluesky), X/Twitter remains the primary microblogging platform in our culture. As for Mastodon, it is much smaller in terms of users than even Bluesky, but it has a passionate user base — many of whom are committed to open source technologies.
So is the fediverse destined to remain a niche platform? Not if the attendees of last week’s FediForum virtual event have anything to do with it. Most of them want the fediverse to be a viable open web alternative to corporate social media.
That feeling was best conveyed in a four-minute fediverse promotional video debuted at FediForum by Elena Rossini, an Italian creator based in Paris. It’s well worth your time watching if you’re still unsure what the fediverse is and what benefits it offers.
Introducing the Fediverse: a New Era of Social Media
Rossini’s video followed a keynote presentation on day 2 of FediForum by Christine Lemmer-Webber, one of the people who helped create ActivityPub and who is now building “decentralized networking technology” at the open source Spritely Project. She made the point that the apps that came to dominate in the Web 2.0 era (such as Twitter and Meta’s Facebook) were centralized, and that the fediverse aims to return to the peer-to-peer internet that preceded Web 2.0.
“The interesting thing about the Web 2.0 era was that it was a pivot from where I think many people thought the networks were going to go at the time, which was that things were going to go in a much more peer-to-peer direction,” she said. “[…] and what happened with web 2.0 was that it became kind of like, instead, actually the strong centralization of […] client-server stuff, and that this was an opportunity to kind of capture things. And in many ways, the fediverse was a response to that.”
Lemmer-Webber also noted that “we can’t succeed without joy.” In other words, the web should be fun, as it was when it started in the 1990s. The social web doesn’t have to be about hate and division, as it so often is these days on centralized platforms. With the fediverse, you get to control your feeds — there’s no corporation behind the scenes manipulating the algorithms.
Promising Fediverse Apps
At FediForum there were a number of demos of new or recently launched fediverse apps.
One of the key issues of centralized social media is the inability to move your followers from one platform to another — for example, you can’t migrate your Twitter followers to Bluesky. Bounce is a new tool that aims to solve that, at least for ActivityPub and AT Protocol (Bluesky’s protocol). Bounce allows you to “migrate your social graph between Mastodon and Bluesky.” It’s made by A New Social, the organization behind Bridgy Fed — a “bridging” tool that enables you to make your Mastodon, Threads or Bluesky account viewable on other platforms.
Bridgy Fed diagram; via A New Social
As with Bridgy Fed, Bounce can be confusing and it isn’t going to solve all your migration problems. For example, while you can migrate all your followers, you will likely lose connection with people you follow. But it’s definitely a step forward for the decentralized web to enable some form of social graph elasticity.
There have also been improvements in helping people manage their feeds across multiple social media accounts. Surf, a beta app from Flipboard, enables you to follow sources from across the open social web. As demoed by Flipboard CEO Mike McCue at FediForum, you can create your own feeds or choose to follow feeds made by other people. McCue mentioned a feed run by Tim Chambers (the admin of the indieweb.social Mastodon server), called “Guardians of the Fediverse.” It has 213 sources, curated by Chambers, and is a great way to track developments across the fediverse, Bluesky, and other open web networks.
Surf app
A somewhat similar idea is being pursued by Newsmast, with its new app called Channel.org. Channels are described as “customised feeds for the open social web, curated by real people on Channel.org and distributed through automated boost accounts which anyone can follow.”
With that name and its focus on channels, it reminded me a bit of the “push” era of the web — circa 1997 — when products like Microsoft Active Desktop and Netscape Netcaster encouraged users to subscribe to channels of content.
Migrating social graphs and curating feeds are all well and good, but hardly mainstream activities. So it was encouraging to see further efforts to bring open web technology to broader activities. My personal favorite at FediForum was Bandwagon, an app for musicians to share their work and get paid using Stripe or other payment providers. It’s kind of like a decentralized version of Bandcamp.
Bandwagon
At FediForum, Bandwagon creator Ben Pate demoed the latest features and also noted that creators need to be able to make a living on the Fediverse, which will encourage them to stick around. He added later on Mastodon: “My goal is to help bring more people here (and away from the corporate silos). I think one good way is to help bring content creators into the fediverse.”
Be the Web You Want
Sometime it can be discouraging as an open web advocate to see so many of my peers still focused on centralized tools like X, Facebook and Instagram. But as two of the stickers on Elena Rossini’s laptop say, you can “be the change” and “we can have a different web if we want it.”
So, if you want a better social media experience — a joyful one, even — then consider joining the fediverse.
Originally published at The New Stack: https://thenewstack.io/bringing-joy-back-to-the-web-fediverse-vs-centralized-apps/