The fediverse - awful name, great concept

journal  · 

Alertness levels today: |-------O--|

A bit of extra sleep helped, and this morning’s “challenge week” session kicked things off nicely too.

Only a short post today, as bed is calling. I’ve been continuing to enjoy my experience with the fediverse, and thought I’d jot down a few notes on the subject.

First, some background. We all know about the mainstream social networks like Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. They started off great - Facebook used to be a brilliant place to see what your friends were up to. But then the companies providing them realised that there was a ‘uge amount of money to be made by hoovering up information about users, and profiting from it in the form of taking payment to control what they were shown. So instead of seeing your friends’ coffee art, you’d be shown clickbait articles about things you may or may not be interested in. For someone like me who is incredibly easily distracted, this became a nightmare - it was too easy to “fall down the rabbithole” and emerge hours later in a rather hyper state of mind.

Beyond the attention-harvesting issue, there is another down side of these traditional platforms: they are all “walled gardens”, a bit like the early days of AOL where you were mainly constrained to interacting with their little part of the internet. This stands in stark contrast to previously established communications channels like the telephone / postal service, mobile phone networks, email etc. In all these examples, different - and often competing - companies pass information on behalf of customers.

So - the fediverse. Awful name, great concept. What if there were different places online that you could go to, which allowed you to communicate with people in other places? That’s the fediverse. The world wide web has “http”; the fediverse has something called “ActivityPub”. The principle is the same - a common language that allows different things to work together. And this fertile soil has given rise to a rich mix of different kinds of platform - Mastodon (perhaps the best known, a bit like Twitter), PixelFed (a bit like Instagram), CalcKey (general social), BookWyrm (social reading), FunkWhale (audio sharing) and a very long list of others … all separate, with different emphasis, but all able to work together.

One of the best things about the fediverse is that it is not really a commercial type thing, which means there aren’t algorithms controlling what you see. On the plus side, it saves you from being locked in a battle with a highly-paid team of people trying to make you spend more time on the platform - this is really appealing to me. Conversely, you have to work a bit harder to find people and subjects of interest - you won’t have “engaging content” pushed your way quite the same.

Many people think the fediverse and Mastodon are the same thing, but that’s not true at all. And this is what I’ve been experimenting with. My first account on the fediverse was with Mastodon (@mindshoot@mastodon.xyz) and then more recently I set up an account on CalcKey (@mindshoot@calckey.social) to see how the waters felt over there.

The answer - pretty good! The platform differs from Mastodon in a few ways, such as supporting longer posts, sharing toots, reactions, richer text in messages and various other differences. There’s a different community feel too.

Finally I just wanted to mention a few random people in no particular order I find myself following these days who have been interesting in different ways:

A final observation about the fediverse. As it turns out, there’s been a diverse LGBTQIA community of people behind and driving the history of computing and technology. This mix has continued into the fediverse and its origins. Experience of being on the receiving side of bigotry and hatred appears to have fed into the designs of these platforms, with an emphasis on eg content moderation, accessibility and safety. While there are certainly hateful parts of the fediverse what with us being humans, there are more servers intent on protecting users. They have tools available to disconnect (“defederate”) from the bad instances and thus create a safe space free from bigotry. My experience has therefore been that there is a wonderful and welcoming diversity of people to connect with.

Doooh, it’s now later than I was expecting! Maybe more another day.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash