I’ve been online for a long time. My parents like to remind me of the time I came home from college and tried to get them excited about this “World Wide Web” thing and the Mosaic browser (which I got working over a 56k modem with a SLIP connection). I remember being really excited the first few times I saw billboards and print ads with URLs in them – it was an indicator that the Internet, up to then a tool for college computer science geeks and a few tech companies, had started to go “mainstream.”

I’ve also lived through much of the history of “social media” – I was a college kid hanging out on USENET during the Eternal September, I was on Friendster, Orkut, and MySpace in my 20’s and early 30’s, (although I never did “get” MySpace), and of course I had Facebook and Twitter (and Google+ 🤣) accounts early on. It’s been really interesting to watch over the past few years as those web sites on ads have been replaced by Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram handles. It’s also been a bit disconcerting to see the companies behind those services behave in ways that I think are ultimately bad for individual users, for democracy, and for society as a whole, right as we’ve become more and more dependent on the services they provide to stay in touch with the people and information that matters most to us.

Of course, nothing has made that clearer than Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter a few weeks ago, and his subsequent decimation of its workforce as well as many of the standards and policies that at least tried to combat the spread of hate and misinformation on the service.

This is bad. Twitter, through a fairly simple set of primitives (tweet, retweet, like, follow, tag, search), has become the default way to follow the news in real time, to organize for social change, and often to communicate with those who share our interests and values. As a typical VC-funded startup focused on growth and engagement, Twitter’s behavior was often questionable, but it was also often balanced by an also-typical Silicon Valley mix of idealism, empathy, and pragmatism in its employees. With Musk in charge, that balance has shifted, and Twitter no longer feels like a place that many of us want to support in any way. Hence, the #TwitterMigration.

But where to go? Some have just stopped using Twitter and shifted their activities to Facebook or Instagram or other existing social networks; however, those networks often have different sets of primitives that don’t adequately support the same sets of use cases as Twitter. Others have shifted to newer networks that try to take the Twitter model and tweak it slightly, like Hive, Tribel, and Post.news.

The problem, as I see it, is that all those services share the same fundamental flaw as Twitter – their singularity. Each service is fundamentally controlled by a single corporate entity – Facebook and Instagram are owned by Meta, Hive, Tribel, and Post are startups. Even if the entities that control those services are “good” today (for example, Post has heavy involvement from Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway, both of whom I have deep respect for), there’s nothing to prevent them from someday falling into the hands of an Elon Musk or someone even worse.

Enter: the Fediverse (often slightly inaccurately referred to as “Mastodon”.) The Fediverse, in a nutshell, takes the same primitives as Twitter – post, follow, tag, re-share, like – and distributes them over a network of servers run by – well, anyone who wants to run one. These servers talk to each other over a network protocol called “ActivityPub”, and can run on a few different software packages (the most popular of which appears to be Mastodon). Just as you can get your email on gmail.com but also send and receive mail from people on yahoo.com or comcast.net or wherever, once you have an account on a Fediverse site, you can follow and interact with users on any other connected site. For example, I use the site masto.ai – follow me there at @aelman – but I follow people from other sites like mstdn.party, mastodon.social, sciences.social, journa.host, and hackyderm.io. Each of those sites has its own requirements for getting and maintaining an account – some are open to all, others require you to be a working journalist (journa.host) or are targeted to specific groups. The beauty is there’s no way for any single entity to take control of the entire network – at worst, they could only take over a subset of servers. Mastodon and other Fediverse software give server owners robust tools to manage poorly-behaved people and sites from banning individual users on their own site, to blocking individuals from other sites, to blocking (or “defederating”) entire servers. Users on a defederated site can see each other’s posts, but can’t follow or be followed by those on other sites – in fact, “alt-tech” sites Gab and Truth Social run on versions of Mastodon in a “defederated” state.

So imagine a world where most social media sites are federated, rather than standalone “walled gardens.” I could use a site like Post, but I could follow people who choose to use Hive, or Tribel, or a Mastodon server, or even (presumably a post-Elon Musk) Twitter. I could reply, re-share, and like their posts, and they could do the same to mine, from wherever they happen to be.

This could be a huge boon for government and non-government organizations, too – rather than having to manage an account on a corporate site, they could simply set up their own server where official government accounts could be managed and fully separated from personal or campaign-org accounts. (This would also help with solving the “blue checkmark” problem – a post from “@potus@whitehouse.gov” could be trusted over a post from, say, “@potus@twitter.com”.)

Of course, this future isn’t going to come easy. Right now, there are a lot of people who are trying out the Fediverse and realizing that, like the early Web, it’s kind of a pain to get started. Those who do take the plunge are finding that server operators are often overwhelmed with new registrants and struggling with unprecedented load on their services (and potentially massive bandwidth/cloud computing bills). Many newcomers are bringing behaviors over from Twitter that many of the Fediverse old-timers (it’s been around in various forms for at least a decade) actually came to escape. Many who remember the Eternal September from USENET days are seeing the parallels and are worried that existing communities will be drowned by the flood of cultural change.

As for me, though – I’m optimistic about the Fediverse. Unlike some in the Fediverse community, I think there’s plenty of room for both commercial and hobbyist sites in a federated social media world – I think it’s entirely possible that a commercial, ad-supported site like Post or Hive could provide the easy onboarding that Mastodon and similar project currently lack, while still enabling those who prefer it to stay on hobbyist-run sites, or even spin up their own servers, all while being able to follow and interact with anyone they want to. Commercial sites could offer algorithmic timelines or other “enhancements” that some people want, without forcing it on everyone who wants to stay connected. Most importantly, different sites would compete on the features and reliability they offer rather than on the content produced by their captive audiences.

I have a lot more thoughts on what this might look like, and I’m hoping to find the time to blog them over the next few months. Let me know what you think!