The Fediverse: What It Is, Why It’s Promising, What’s Next
In the beginning, nerds built the internet, and it was good. It was not yet a small, centralized collection of the feudal empires owned by the tippy-top of the 1%. It had not yet become a perpetual grievance machine, nor a 24/7 stoker of commerce.
But it’s all those things now. And that’s why the promise of the fediverse —decentralized social networking — seems so intriguing.
Since 2008, Evan Prodromou, director of open technology at the OpenEarth Foundation, has been working on decentralized social networks, creating a service called Indenti.ca. Like Twitter, which was launched a couple of years prior, Indenti.ca was an online social network. But that’s where the similarities ended.
“It had some interesting differences,” Prodromou told host Chris Pirillo in this episode of The New Stack Makers. “One was that the software was open source. So you could download the software and install it on your own servers and run your own little Twitter. But the second part of it was that it was federated. So if I had a little Twitter, and you had a little Twitter, we could connect them up, and people on one could follow and talk to people on the other.”
Prodromou is co-author of ActivityPub, the W3C standard for decentralized social networking used for platforms such as Mastodon. In this episode of Makers, he talked about the journey the fediverse has taken and what lies ahead.
When Elon Musk Shook Up ‘an Ossified Structure’
In the aughts, lots of small social networks popped up — Indenti.ca among them.
“About five years, with some pretty brutal competition, that world had really been whittled down to just a few … Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube,” Prodromou said. “And those organizations have had less incentive to connect with each other than they would have if there were hundreds or thousands of them.”
In addition, he said, instant message apps have largely either disappeared or become absorbed into enterprise usage, such as Slack and Discord.
“The acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk in 2022 really shook up what had become an ossified structure,” Prodromou said. “Everybody knew you did these kinds of things on Instagram, these kinds of things on Facebook, this is how Twitter works. This is how YouTube worked. And it turned that all upside down.”
As a result, he said, “People had to think, what do we want to have happen? But I think also people started to think, do we want to keep jumping from platform to platform? Maybe our platform should be our own. And I think that’s really what the fediverse is trying to do.”
The ActivityPub Protocol
“The essence of ActivityPub in the fediverse is that we have multiple services, Prodrodou said. “We call them instances. It’s a weird program or term, but for some reason, we decided to make it what we call our social networks. And each instance typically has a single domain, like mastodon.ca.”
Unlike centralized social networks, however, fediverse communities don’t open their doors to the whole world. “They also have a community … a group of people who manage that instance. They talk to each other, they kind of deal with who can join that instance, who can who’s not allowed to join.”
Pirillo brought up a common complaint from users of centralized social networks like Facebook or X — that a user can’t bring their followers or “friends” with them when they change networks.
“It’s kind of surprising that we’ve put up with it for so long, right?” Prodromou asked, adding, “Those are my relationships. Don’t tell me I can’t take those with me. Those are people I know and care about. But if you’re a publisher or a broadcaster, you’re someone who does this for a living, you’ve also built up that audience/”
This is a problem the fediverse solves, he said: “It’s relatively painless to find a new account. You have to say this account, these accounts are connected, and then everybody kind of moves over and it’s invisible to your actual followers. It just happens. And all of a sudden, you’re just operating from somewhere else.”
Check out the full episode to learn more about how Meta and other tech giants are flirting with the fediverse, the impact those moves are likely to have, and how to join a decentralized social network community.
