Fediverse

Mastodon et al

August 12, 2019 — February 4, 2025

computers are awful together
confidentiality
distributed
diy
economics
P2P

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Fediverse: Volunteer-run Twitter.

Figure 1

An alternate take on social media, which interpolates between private chat and the raw context-collapse hellscape of modern social media.

The Fediverse is not owned by any single megacorp, which is a net plus IMO. It has obvious downsides though.

The fediverse helps people who want a messy barnraised social media experience. It’s cute and friendly and evokes early-internet nostalgia, which is sweet.

It does not help paranoiacs, as it is not cryptographically strong and thus subject to censorship and surveillance, etc. For secrecy, you probably want a decentralised p2p system, such as Nostr or scuttlebutt.

I wrote most of the text here before the adoption of the underlying ActivityPub protocol by various major actors such as Ghost and Facebook’s Threads. That has probably changed the landscape.

1 Mastodon

The famous one.

cosy Twitter. Maybe it should be hyggr or something. This is close to what I imagined social media would be like in the year 2000, for better and for worse. Lots of local communities, cute and customisable…

You can DIY your own hosting, which is great for autonomy but a PITA in practice. Probably only suits enthusiastic fan clubs and anarchist cells.

You want to have it without hosting it? There are businesses that do it. One obvious contender is Librem Social which hosts Mastodon and some other handy things. USD2-USD8/month depending on your options. Not sure how the pricing scales per user.

Specialist mathematically inclined instances:

2 Lemmy

Figure 2: Lemmy for Reddit refugees by @ulu_mulu.

Lemmy: A link aggregator (i.e., Reddit clone). Looks modern and clean. I’ve actually decided that I’m not a short-form social media person, so while Mastodon is interesting, I don’t think I’ll be using it. OTOH Lemmy is a link aggregator, which foregrounds commenting on things, which is more my style. I might actually get around to using this.

The flagship instance is amusingly Marxist. The Divisions by Zero New to Lemmy community was helpful. I think that one is anarchist? You already taste the classic the cypherpunk flavours of Lemmy.

There was an interesting project to make a Lemmy comment loader for static sites: See I Made a Lemmy Comment Loader for Static Sites /leviwheatcroft.github.io/lemmy-blog-spam/. This makes me wonder if we even need comments on websites? Maybe link aggregators are the way to go?

3 Pleroma

Pleroma is the best ActivityPub software there is for general Twitter-style social media. Low on resource requirements and with several web frontends and mobile apps, it’ll work well for any kind of community you want to create without breaking the bank. It’s also perfect for self-hosters who want to run a one-person setup.

For users, it has a few additional features that many other ActivityPub servers lack, like chats between users and emoji reactions.

[…] it’s a lot like Twitter, but much more flexible

It’s built on Elixir, which is a fun non-mainstream language for a fun non-mainstream project. And let’s face it, if you are this deep on the page, you are the kind of hobbyist who cares about such things.

4 Misskey

Japanese message board that is also a fediverse server. From reading the coverage of it, I get the vague sense that it joined the fediverse by accident?

5 PeerTube

PeerTube is a federated video sharing system, with a structure much like Mastodon and using the same federation protocols. Written in Typescript, if you are curious. I am curious how well this scales. Video is hard. OTOH, YouTube proceeds to get worse and worse, so maybe the effort is worth it.

6 Plugging in to other things

Making other systems talk fediverse.

6.1 Bridgy

AFAICT the fanciest and most full-featured system:

Bridgy Fed is a decentralised social network bridge. It connects the fediverse, the web, and Bluesky/AT Protocol and Nostr. If you’re on one of these networks, you can use Bridgy Fed to follow people on other networks, see their posts, and reply and like and repost them. Likewise, they’ll be able to see you and your posts too.

Related project, Bridgy classic does cross posting (rather than directly federating).

6.2 Via Zapier

Seems to work? Create posts in Mastodon / Fediverse by Unshape from new items in RSS by Zapier feed

6.3 Mastofeeder

e.g. mastofeeder plugs into the RSS ecosystem.

This is a simple Mastodon/ActivityPub server that has a virtual @website@mastofeeder.com user for every RSS feed on the Internet. Just search for your favourite RSS-enabled website from Mastodon’s search and follow the user! All RSS items will be posted as toots.

6.4 For static sites natively

Many attempts

7 Incoming