This is the Fediverse
Social media focused on privacy and power of the people
The fediverse is more than a collection of software, servers, protocols, and people. The fediverse is a movement dedicated to the idea that there is a better way to experience social media. It is a movement focused on people. I urge you to watch this two minute video for a quick introduction.
As noted in the video, many of the ills of today’s mainstream social media are due to platforms such as Facebook, X, Instagram, and TikTok competing for your attention. Not only are the platforms tracking your every movement on their sites they track your activity on other sites as well. Add to this the monetization of social media for creators and you have creators incentivized to create the most attention grabbing content and you have platforms creating algorithms tuned to stoke your fears and feed your desires to the point that you spend more time on the platform so they can generate more ad revenue from all the ads that they are able to very effectively target to each individual user.
image is a screenshot from https://fediverse.partyThe fediverse is the antidote to this. With the fediverse there is not one platform or one service provider. There are apps that can be hosted by individuals. Your data is your own - especially if you host your own server. If you’re not interested in running your own server you still have a very high degree of ownership of your data as well as mobility. If the server you’ve been using announces that it is shutting down you can download your data, delete it from the server you’ve been using and move it to a new server of your choice.
The apps that participate in the fediverse all share standard methods for communicating so it is possible to follow people who use different apps on different servers. You choose the content labels (AKA hashtags) that you want to follow. You choose when you want to look at the full feed of your local server to find new folks to follow. You choose when you want to look at the global feed. Some apps give you the ability to segregate those you follow into groups just like in your real life. You choose what you share and with whom.
Some applications, such as friendica, also allow you to follow mainstream social media - without the impacts of their algorithms - and automate cross posting and commenting on the content that you choose to follow. In short friendica gives you the power and flexibility to experience social media on your terms.
The fediverse is not magic. Hosting software for a large user community in a manner that ensures availability and responsiveness incurs non-trivial cost. One challenge of the fediverse is that when you don’t host your own software you’re at the mercy of someone else’s checking account. There are some instances such as mastodon.social which are well funded by donations. If it is important to you to have a reliable and responsive service it is important that you consider contributing to offset the cost of hosting - particularly if you are interested in helping build a large and diverse online community on your local server.