The fediverse promises social media without Big Tech – if it can avoid familiar pitfalls
In the fediverse, you can have your own social media platform but also connect to many others. Aram Sinnreich, CC BY-ND
Aram Sinnreich, American University School of Communication and Robert W. Gehl, York University, Canada
You’ve probably noticed lately that a lot of people are trying out alternatives to the big social media networks X, Instagram and Facebook. For example, after Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and started allowing far more disinformation and hateful content on the site, renamed X, advertisers and users started backing away. More recently, Meta’s decision to roll back hate speech rules has prompted many people to consider leaving Instagram and Facebook.
Some of the most popular new destinations include “federated” services like Mastodon and Pixelfed, as well as the quasi-federated Bluesky. Federated means decentralized – rather than one central service, like X, federated systems have tens of thousands of servers. They also tend to be nonprofit and community-run.
Federated services, otherwise known as “the fediverse,” have been hailed as a network for public communication, dialogue and debate, where ordinary people, not corporations, shape their social spaces, and where advertisers, hate speech and intrusive algorithms are much easier to avoid. News organizations, nonprofits, universities and even governments have experimented with the fediverse and Bluesky, partially or even completely shifting their social media presence away from X.
However, as we, researchers who study media and communications, and our coauthors Thomas Struett and Patricia Aufderheide describe in a recently published paper, history provides numerous examples of other promising platforms for the digital public sphere that have died untimely deaths. We identified potential pitfalls from these examples and ways to avoid them.
The fediverse in a nutshell.
We identified three such challenges: too many cooks, commercial capture and guilt by association.
Too many cooks
One nice thing about the big social media platforms is you know who’s in charge.
But instead of centralizing power like Meta or X, the fediverse has a distributed governance structure. While decentralized governance helps the fediverse avoid some of the pitfalls associated with the big social media platforms, like political censorship and surveillance capitalism, it introduces other risks that must be addressed before the fediverse can serve as a worthy replacement.
In short, when too many cooks are in charge, it’s hard to make a good meal. Take content moderation, for example. The fediverse offers great tools for blocking, and built-in codes of conduct, but these tools are specific to individual “instances” – the tens of thousands of fediverse servers. Who decides who gets blocked? With no central authority, governance is in the hands of fediverse members, who use hashtags like #fediblock to loosely coordinate. And that means people who are more likely to be harassed also end up having to do more of the work to prevent harassment.
Commercial capture
The fediverse, like email or the web itself, is open source. It was also developed with no input from the big social media platforms. But its origins won’t necessarily prevent the big platforms from taking over.
Look what happened to email, for instance. Once upon a time, there were thousands of different email providers. But today, nearly everyone is on Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Outlook, mostly because those companies added extra bells and whistles and sold email as a part of larger packages to employers, schools and other organizations.
This could easily happen again. Meta has already used fediverse protocols for its new microblogging service, Threads. While this helps Threads and Mastodon users to communicate, it also means Meta has a vested interest in shaping the technology’s future, in ways that might conflict with the hopes of today’s fediverse users — especially those who just fled Instagram and Facebook.
It’s easy to build your own social media platform in the fediverse. Running one is another matter.
Guilt by association
While some social media companies might seek to capture the fediverse, others might seek to undermine its reputation by highlighting some of its unsavory uses. This has happened with several beneficial alternative technologies in the past, such as peer-to-peer file sharing, the dark web and end-to-end encryption.
The fediverse is already facing such challenges. In 2023, researchers at Stanford University published a report suggesting that child sexual abuse material can easily find a home on the fediverse. Couple this with claims from researchers that “toxic content is prevalent and spreads rapidly” across the fediverse, and a terrifying narrative emerges in which child sexual abuse material is spreading out of control.
Though this content could flourish in pockets of the fediverse, the scary scenario of prevalent child sexual abuse material is not the case. There are many moderation tools, including shared blocklists, that prevent it. However, the idea that the fediverse is full of harmful content was used by Elon Musk to justify his anti-competitive decision to block links from X to Mastodon.
Can these platforms survive?
We’re still bullish on the fediverse, and on Bluesky, if it manages to become a truly federated platform.
But democratized tech doesn’t guarantee democratic outcomes.
If these platforms are going to deliver on their promise, it’s important to learn from the mistakes of the past. That will mean users putting in the work to make sure they remain safe, accessible, noncommercial and well respected.
Aram Sinnreich, Professor of Communication Studies, American University School of Communication and Robert W. Gehl, Ontario Research Chair of Digital Governance for Social Justice, York University, Canada
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
In short, when too many cooks are in charge, it’s hard to make a good meal. Take content moderation, for example.
The take that Fediverse moderation is “not as effective” always makes me smile, because:
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The moderator-to-user ratio is several orders of magnitude better on the fediverse because volunteer-run instances have zero incentive to grow beyond their ability to self-moderate. But also-
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Do you really expect that paid employees (or even trained AIs) are going to be more effective at recognizing who/what is disrupting a community than existing members with a personal stake in it’s quality?
Also, as aside I am very happy they said “Bluesky, if it manages to become truly federated” and not the “promises to be” or “is federated” language we usually see.
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Everyone else took all the good critiques of this article, so here’s mine.
We’re still bullish on the fediverse, and on Bluesky, if it manages to become a truly federated platform.
Bluesky appears to have reached their goal as far as federation. Users can self-host a personal data server (PDS) which federates with Bluesky. If you want an analogy from somebody extremely unqualified to offer it, it’s sort of like bringing a bucket of water to a swimming pool. You can’t go swimming in the bucket, but you can pour it into Bluesky’s pool and swim in there. If the pool closes down or implements segregation and if somebody else opens a swimming pool, you can take your bucket to their pool instead. However, if nobody else wants to open another swimming pool, your bucket is useless. In this analogy, buckets are only useful to very slightly fill somebody else’s swimming pool and for no other purpose. It’s a very good analogy.
Bryan Newbold, the protocol engineer at Bluesky, said the following about PDSes and federation:
Overall, I think federation isn’t the best term for Bluesky to emphasize going forward, though I also don’t think it was misleading or factually incorrect to use it to date. An early version of what became atproto actually was peer-to-peer, with data and signing keys on end devices (mobile phones). When that architecture was abandoned and PDS instances were introduced, “federation” was the clearest term to describe the new architecture.
i.e. In Bluesky’s terminology, federation is not a future goal they’re hoping to achieve, it’s what they’re already doing right now.
The (ActivityPub) fediverse is different, because … damn, I really screwed myself with this swimming pool thing … it’s like a bunch of boats in the ocean. There’s one-person dinghies and giant cruise ships, all with different owners. You can bring your own boat, or you can hitch a ride with a friend or a generous stranger. If you want to hang out in a different boat from the one you arrived in, that’s fine too. Ultimately, we all float on the same ocean which we all have to share. Crucially, nobody is in charge of the water. There’s rules on the boats, but the ocean is just the ocean. If your boat crashes into an iceberg and sinks, the ocean will still be there. You might lose some of your stuff, but there’s plenty of other boats to pick you up.
The failure state in both cases is better than nothing. With Bluesky, you lose the swimming pool, but keep the bucket. With ActivityPub, you lose the boat, but keep the ocean. If Bluesky dies, ideally you can take your federated identity with you to an alternative service that exists in the future, but you no longer have access to Bluesky, because it’s gone. When a Lemmy instance dies, you pretty much have to start over: register a new account, subscribe to all your communities again, etc. But the whole fediverse is still there: all the communities you were subscribed to, the people you followed, all your old comments, they’re still out there floating on the ocean.
Too many cooks: Handwringing. Whataboutism.
The authors misunderstand how to think of the (and even) elements of the fediverse. It’s still taking a competitive view/ worldview/ framing, and when that’s all you understand, sure. But the right way to understand the fediverse is as protocols, like email, and each branch as a flavor of email, or some other misguided metaphor. And it’s it’s only a problem when infinite growth or exp. scaling is your goal. However if neither of those things are your goal, it’s more of an annoyance.
Commercial capture: More handwringing. Misidentification.
Meta took a crack at capture. It didn’t seem to have worked. The fediverse is populated by the leavers, not the takers. The Internet happens at the edge and the normies are always just catching up a few years too late. The point of the fediverse is that it’s a extraordinarly easy to vote with your feet. If the fediverse can fall victim to a 51% attack, fine, well just leave and do it again.
Guilty by association: Again, more handwringing. Also, we should do that.
Federated p2p file sharing e2e file sharing for unsavory bits that governments and corporations don’t want you to have sounds like a great idea.
It’s in the CIA field manual, that when you want to destroy an organization from within, urge caution, and question every unfounded problem.
I read the article diagonally but didn’t struck me as particularly insightful. I can understand the “too many cooks” thing as it can be daunting to start the journey in the fediverse, but the child abuse part is dumb at best: if a given instance does illegal shit it should be dealt with by the authorities and de-federated by other instances. Do the authors know that harmful material exists on all the mainstream social medias? Like beheadings on instagram, porn on youtube, mass disinformation and manipulation on TT and facebook.
But democratized tech doesn’t guarantee democratic outcomes.
Far from it. We really need a major confrontation of the audience, information warfare needs to be educated to every single person of every age. Continuing education about science and mythology needs to continue, as people continue to flock to fiction and abandon non-fiction in every area of life.
People just can’t be serious about democracy and LOL and meme away their nation, the USA (where I live), it’s been absolute crisis since 2014.
“Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture’s being drained by laughter?” ― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 1985
Really good write-up.
RE: Too many cooks:
And that means people who are more likely to be harassed also end up having to do more of the work to prevent harassment.
This is true and a genuine problem, but also a lot better than the alternative, which is the commercial platforms where nobody gives a shit about them and they are harassed on a daily basis with nothing much they can do about it.
On Twitter, community notes were hailed as a success for giving the Community an entirely toothless form of moderation. On the Fediverse, the community has been given real teeth.
RE: Guilt by association
This has happened with several beneficial alternative technologies in the past, such as peer-to-peer file sharing, the dark web and end-to-end encryption.
Nice reminder to spread the word about the wonders of P2P, Tor, and E2EE. Some people will always believe in the propaganda of the capitalists and the authoritarians seeking to undermine these technologies, but they are all very much alive and well, and I think most people are fine with the ideas of having their nude selfies or whatever protected under E2EE.
Likewise, for sure Elon Musk will try to tell people the fediverse is full of pedos. Coming from him, that puts us in the same club as that diver who saved a bunch of children in a cave in Thailand. So in that sense I guess the point about commercial capture is more relevant: I’m more worried when people like Musk pretend to be our friends. But in all honesty, I’m not very worried about that either. I still rock an entirely independent e-mail provider, even after everything Microsoft and Google has done to undermine that technology.
Elmo saying the Fediverse is full of pedos is like a stamp of approval for the Fediverse. It means it’s a working and viable solution to getting rid of American oligarch influence on social media.
If the Fediverse can avoid one big problem with other social media platforms and that is having a power-tripping owner destroy it. If any of the Fediverse platforms can avoid that one thing and manage to keep it’s values in check, then it’s no contest to avoid the other social media platforms.
Is it wrong that I love what this article is doing in the article, is explained in this paragraph?:
While some social media companies might seek to capture the fediverse, others might seek to undermine its reputation by highlighting some of its unsavory uses. This has happened with several beneficial alternative technologies in the past, such as peer-to-peer file sharing, the dark web and end-to-end encryption.
The biggest issue facing the Fediverse IMO, is that one large instance can control what most of the fediverse sees. The user would never know if things were getting pulled, posted much later when no one is on or shadow banned.
Capitalist platofrms will always beat small community driven platforms.
I don’t know about the “tens of thousands of servers” in the Fediverse. For now, it’s pretty easy to keep an overview. I also do not think the number of servers will scale linearly with the user base. Most people may choose a server randomly, but after a while in the Fediverse you will find your instance. Take feddit.org as an example - they have a charitable organization behind then, the “Fediverse foundation”. People like that instance because of the terms it operates under, and they do their thing. Server admins are not necessarily random people, and I don’t think coordination happens via hash tags.
~19000 servers according to this graph: https://fediverse.observer/stats
But I’m not sure they detect all.
True, I was looking from the perspective of lemmy. But I think that’s fair, as the fediverse is not as federated as it pretends to be. For Lemmy it’s about 1,000 servers. I guess many of them are singles person instances, but that comes from my subjective feeling and can be bullshit ;)
