Fediverse for the rest of us

TLDR: Awards

Ease of getting started: Mastodon
Best Instagram alternative: PixelFed
Best blogging platform: MissKey (if you love anime)

**My handles
mastodon.art/@alvarix pixelfed.art/@alvarix bluesky @petportaits

why fediverse

I wanted to get off big social media but found it confusing. I wrote this article to help demystify the options.

We all know that social media is quick dopamine manipulated by greedy capitalists to keep us addicted. It does have merits but the carnage of addiction outweighs the benefits for most.

Facebook was easy to leave — it became a dumpster fire. Being an artist was my excuse to stay on Instagram for the exposure. Mark Zuckerberg made it easier with his infamous speech vowing to do less to protect society. So I decided to finally learn about the Fediverse.

Press enter or click to view image in full size

what is the fediverse

The name “Fediverse” combines “federated” (another way of saying decentralized) and “universe,” reflecting its interconnected but distributed nature. It’s a catch-all for a constellation of social media web apps that are built on the Activity Pub protocol.

No-one owns your data, and no one profits off of it (save Blue Sky which is privately owned). Think of social media like neighborhoods. Facebook and Twitter are like giant gated communities controlled by one company. The Fediverse is more like a collection of small, independent neighborhoods that all agreed to let their residents visit and talk to each other.

It emerged because people got frustrated with big social media companies who:

could change rules suddenly
could shut down services or ban users arbitrarily
could sell user data for profit
had too much control over online discussions

my fediverse journey

I now have a Mastodon account, a PixelFed account and a (forgotten) Lemmy account. I also spent too much time researching blogging platforms. The best were MissKey and Pleroma.

MissKey has been around before the Fediverse. It started it as Japanese bulletin board in 2014. It went on to develop the MFM language which is like markdown on anime crack. I found Misskey too niche and Pleroma forked out of stability.

For now I settled on Medium as a place to write. It’s not part of the Fediverse and I don’t love it for other reasons — the editor sucks and the freemium-ness is annoying. But it’s good enough for now and adds a veneer of credibility.

Friendica and Peertube are the other big players for networking and video sharing that weren’t in my scope.

mastodon

This was my first Instagram replacement. It’s the best known of the public Fediverse and it was pretty easy to setup.

I later discovered that PixelFed is a photo sharing app, thus better suited to replace Instagram. But since I had Mastodon setup I figured I could use that for blogging. I was wrong there also because most Mastodon instances limit posts (toots in Mastodon parlance) to 4000 characters. More than TwiXer but not enough for this blog post (~7.5k chars).

In the end I use Mastodon to jot down thoughts, boost my PixelFed posts and mostly send links there for later perusal. Lemmy is actually made for link aggregration but it doesn’t yet have the plugins to allow quick posting of links that Mastodon has.

Not gonna lie Mastodon’s UI is crap. Phanpy and Elk are somewhat better clients.

pixelfed

PixelFed is a fine Instagram alternative. It’s barebones. You wont find hours of compelling and addictive content. I keep my instagram account for doom scrolling but I’m migrating my posting (and nudging my handful of followers) to PixelFed.

server instances

This is the most confusing part by far. To create a Mastodon account you have to first choose which server you want to live on since the app is spread across a network of servers as represented by their domain names.

The domain name can be anything that the admin chooses (eg. metapix.com). There are lots of servers and analysis paralysis can result. While annoying it’s fundamental to federation.
Does it matter which server you’re on? A little.
I think it’s best just to choose one and get started. Though you may lose some data in porting to a new instance so revisit your choice soon.

You have better visibility with accounts on the same instance. If you want to follow an account on another instance you have an intermediate step of entering your server address in a popup. It does cause friction but it’s acceptable.

Different servers also can have different configurations. Eg. a server can change defaults like character limit. Some instances have open enrollment versus an approval process. Some ban NSFW content. The amount of users on an instance can give a clue to the health and longevity of that instance. Instances are often grouped around loosely around themes and/or languages. Here’s the PixelFed directory of instances.

I applied to mastodon.art and pixelfed.art. It took about a week to get approved for mastodon.art. It took 4 or 5 to get approved to pixelfed.art.

conclusions

The Fediverse got a lot of growtg when Musk took over TwiXer and ran away in horror. It’s been coming off that sugar high ever since. Some say it’s been on a death spiral and not worth investing in. But if you’re sick of being exploited these apps built on the Activity Protocol are our best hope to do it better this time around.

Without the deep pockets you get a lot of ephemeral communities trying to get a toe hold towards critical mass and a lot of questionable UI.

Here are a few more critiques (from this Reddit thread):

Fediverse projects can be fragile, with no guarantees about their longevity.

Mastodon’s privacy first, no-scrapping and no-algorithm policy makes mastodon rather hard to use for casuals. The discoverability is poor, search is bad and the community is rather small. It is a deal-breaker for casual folks.

The culture isn’t great for casuals nor for Black & Brown folk that aren’t willing to assimilate and or capitulate.

But I’ll counter with this quote from Kevin Beaumont (GossiTheDog)

Mastodon isn’t perfect.
But the fact a social network exists that is completely free to use
has no venture capital investors has no shareholders to answer to
has no growth targets
with a web interface
with zero tracking cookies and mobile apps
with zero trackers at all
with ten thousand server administrators who donate their time for user safety is — in my opinion — mindbogglingly cool, given the state of the world we live in. Not everything has to be shit. People make things better.

Find me on the fed. mastodon.art/@alvarix pixelfed.art/@alvarix bluesky