The Twitter exodus is going to a digital realm, new to many, called the Fediverse - a “federated universe” of healthy connections

Landing page of fediverse.party

We posted last week a strong opinion that we shouldn’t abandon Twitter to its capricious mogul (the Musk) and the rising army of trollers he encourages.

But what we’re realising is that the highlighted alternative, Mastodon, is part of a whole information-system which few other than the aficionados have been aware of. They call themselves The Fediverse (Wikipedia definition), standing for “federated universe”. And they have been preparing for a world beyond centralised social media platforms for years.

As the Conversation UK puts it here:

The scholar Robert Gehl describes the Fediverse as “a network of very small online communities that band together through both technology and shared social values.”

The groups that choose to join the Fediverse are often seeking a return to a participatory web that some, like tech writer Ben Tarnoff, believe has largely disappeared with the privatization of the Internet.

In fact, this is a movement that resurrects the concept of netizenship, a term that appeared in the mid–1990s but has since largely vanished from popular discourse:

There are people online who actively contribute towards the development of the Net. These people understand the value of collective work and the communal aspects of public communications. These are the people who discuss and debate topics in a constructive manner … These are the people who as citizens of the Net, I realized were Netizens.

In fact, Fediverse software is designed to encourage netizenship by fostering small, tight-knit communities in which members are given complete control over the rules, policies, and social norms on their platform. Far from being a utopia, getting along often means hard work and compromise by members of each community.

More explanation from the Conversation UK:

In contrast with both corporate social media, such as Facebook and alt-right alternatives such as Truth Social, fediverse sites are often purposely small. For example, the site queer.party currently has 6,000 registered users — and it is currently closed to new members, because the administrators of that site have no desire to make it much larger.

However, even though they are small, there are about 9,000 fediverse sites. And they are not islands: as the name “fediverse” implies, a portmanteau of “federated” and “universe,” these sites band together, not unlike the United Federation of Planets of Star Trek fame.

Queer.party users can communicate with those on climatejustice.social, who might connect to members of the academic-focused scholar.social. Overall, the fediverse has millions of members.

Importantly, these sites can defederate with those who act unethically. For example, while Gab is a nasty, anti-Semitic place full of Nazis, it could have been worse. Much worse.

Early in its history, Andrew Torba, the founder of Gab Social, a far-right networking site, proclaimed his desire to make a large network – a federation – of white Christian nationalist sites. This would be achieved through Gab’s use of Mastodon software, which would enable such a federation.

However, Gab’s plan to make a large network of sites was thwarted by the concerted efforts of fediverse administrators and users, who used a co-ordinated campaign to isolate Gab from the rest of the fediverse. The effort worked: Gab gave up its dream of creating a decentralized network of fascists, and is now a centralized site – not much unlike the mainstream social media sites it was trying to escape.

The fediverse is by and large free of targeted and behavioural advertising, a key technology of surveillance capitalism. In contrast to Facebook, fediverse sites don’t monitor your activities and sell the resulting data to marketers and advertisers.

This is another contrast to the right-wing social media the Pew report focused on: Truth Social, for example, offers advertisers means to target audiences and has partnered with Rumble to expand its advertising efforts. Indeed, in this sense, Truth Social isn’t alternative at all — it’s aping the practices of Facebook.

Fediverse sites eschew surveillance capitalism, largely in favour of more mutualist ways of supporting each other.

Ultimately, if we reduce “alternative social media” to be solely large, right-wing alternative media – as the Pew report on the information environment does – we get a false dichotomy where the extent and diversity of the types of media available is greatly reduced.

On the one hand are the mainstream corporate social media, which, for all their faults, have in fact deplatformed people like Donald Trump. And on the other hand, we have alt-right social media, which fosters bigotry.

The result is we miss out on innovations in platform governance that both go beyond the corporate model and actually do a very good job at marginalizing hate speech and undermining surveillance capitalism.

More nuance is needed here. Research (like Pew’s) often focuses solely on what mass media scholar Kristoffer Holt calls “right-wing alternative media.” And in doing so, it misses a more democratic form of alternative media, what communication scholar Clemencia Rodríguez refers to as “citizens’ social media.”

And for all of us tired of both big tech and online trolling, citizens’ social media is our way forward.

This is the kind of “CAN of CANs”, or social and communal federation, we’re theorising and building in Alternative Global’s community work. We haven’t missed out on this fediverse - we have been tracking initiative in decentralised software and media for years - but it’s funny and delightful how names can suddenly be found for sectors that have been steadily building for a long time.

The Fediverse is now fully on our radar. And finally, we liked the tone of this blog, whose writer has been an occupant of the Fediverse for quite a while:

This Federated Universe of social networks has been in development for years. I've written about it numerous times on Pocketnow. The reason it started so long ago is that intelligent people know that centralized systems like Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, etc. are not designed for sustainability. They're designed to grow a user base and then start manipulating that user base for profit and control as much as possible. Eventually, centralized entities will become destructive and self-serving.

People always eventually realize the disadvantages of dictatorships like this and will revolt for something more democratic and fair. A system where society as a whole gets together, agrees on a certain set of rules, and says, "Hey, lets try not to screw each other over," is a much better idea than putting one person in charge of everything. The ability for anyone to participate equally is what the Fediverse is about.

Stay updated on “fediverse” mentions on Google News (useful for something…)