Since I ditched Fakebook, I have experimented with Free and Open-Source (hereafter: “FOSS”) alternatives that respect users’ rights to their own intellectual property, images, etc., and which don’t use social media to farm data to sell to advertisers, spy on users to collect that data, and make the user a commodity to be bought and sold. While there are a few proprietary alternatives like MeWe, I avoid them on principle and look for FOSS stuff first, settling for non-free stuff only when there’s no good functional alternative. Enter “the Fediverse” and it’s several different platforms for both “Microblogging” (like X or Twitter, short-form posts with very limited character counts) and “Macroblogging” (like Fakebook and MeWe, long-form posts). The most successful platform in the “fediverse” is the microblogging platform called Mastodon, which got a huge influx of new users when Elon Musk purchased Twitter (now renamed “X”).
- This collection of FOSS “social media” platforms has the nickname “the Fediverse” because of the way it is organized.
- No single mega-server, no corporate or private ownership of the platform.
- Anyone can create their own instance and run it as they see fit.
Compare “federation” to e-mail. From my own domain I can reach anyone on any other domain. A Gmail user isn’t restricted to communicating only with other Gmail users, but can exchange information with Yahoo, AOL, Outlook, or any other provider. That is “federation.” In proprietary platforms like Fakebook, one can only share with other Fakebook users. On the Federated platforms, a Friendica or Mastodon user can communicate with any user on any of the several federated platforms!
The exception to that rule is Diaspora (Hereafter: diaspora* or d*), which prefers the moniker, “the Federation” to the term “Fediverse,” because at present, the dozens of diaspora* instances communicate only with each other and not with the others except Friendica. The common protocol among the platforms in “the Fediverse” is ActivityPub, which diaspora* has not and probably never will adopt. The reasons for this are many, but I can describe one good reason from personal experience:
While communication between all instances of all platforms sounds cool, it most certainly is not, because:
- There are a over a dozen platforms with dozens or hundreds of instances each. So it takes huge bandwidth on super servers to keep up!
- While I can “reach” them all from my Friendica account, no one actually reads them because it all goes zooming past, even if the feed is restricted to a single hastag or group. But from my diaspora* account I can reach far and wide without my posts or those of the people I share with getting lost in all the noise.
Recently I spent a week reacquainting myself with Friendica, one of the oldest and most popular macroblogging platforms in “the Fediverse.” When I tried it out before, it was full of features I wouldn’t even think to use, with buttons and knobs and dials and sliders and switches that just overwhelmed me as a newbie. That was probably four or five years ago, and I wanted to see if Friendica had gotten – well, friendlier. The short answer is NO. But I wanted to try “Groups” to see how that would go. There are not “groups” you can just “join” per se like on Fakebook, and I didn’t find any groups in two days of searching that matched my interests, other than memes for Star Trek and Star Wars fans. As it turns out, I was having more success using “Aspects” on diaspora* than trying to use “groups” on Friendica. But they work exactly the same way. You organize your contacts into Groups (on Friendica) or Aspects (on d*) and then share posts with that particular set of contacts.
Last but not least, there’s the User Interface (UI or UX): A new user could spend several weeks “learning Friendica,” or simply start using diaspora* right away. There just aren’t hundreds of buttons, knobs, dials, sliders, and switches to learn. Oh there is a learning curve of course, like with anything new, but for one’s first forays into federated / distributed social networking, it’s like using Linux Mint instead of Gentoo or Linux-From-Scratch for your first forays into Linux computing. Diaspora remains the easiest and best of the federated platforms, and I for one am very glad they don’t federate with the other busy, complicated, noisy “Fediverse.”
Robin's Rants and Raves 