The “enshittification” of social media started around 2016, but it reached new highs in 2023. All chronological feeds and hashtag importance have given way to narrow-AI algorithms and recommendation engines. The result was that reach has become impossible for the common user, and many art creatives lost their livelihoods. Enter the Fediverse.
From Wikipedia: “The fediverse is an ensemble of federated (i.e. interconnected) servers that are used for web publishing (i.e. social networking, microblogging, blogging, or websites) and file hosting, which, while independently hosted, can communicate with each other.“
This system has some advantages:
- It is almost impossible for governments to shut down in its entirety.
- User load can be shared among different servers (“instances”).
- Different instances have different rules, so you join the one you agree best with.
- Generally no spam and fewer bots.
- A non-aggressive environment as users get along better.
- No telemetry or ads.
- Everything is chronological so there are equal chances to be seen, no weird recommendation engines here.
As for the disadvantages:
- Some instance admins are too twitchy, and can block other servers on a dime (my main gripe with the system).
- Some users are too sensitive for some topics, and require you to self-censor.
- The system probably can’t sustain more than 10-20 million active users, because not many people have the expertise to run their own instance and pay for the financial costs before donations start rolling in.
- If your instance goes down, you’ll have to migrate and re-acquire all your followers from scratch.
- Your family and friends aren’t on it, and probably never will be.
Here are the Fediverse alternatives to the classic options:
Alternative to Twitter: Mastodon
The biggest federated environment with over 2 million active users. Great for “toots”, and small-sized blogging. Very actively developed. While there’s an official app for it and a third party one called… Shitter, and FediLab, the best way to view it remains the web browser. Alternatives to Mastodon: Pleroma, Diaspora, Misskey/Calckey (they mostly interoperate anyway).
Alternative to Reddit: Lemmy
Since the latest Reddit shenanigans Lemmy has jumped to become the second most used fediverse service. Still under active development, but it works great and it has all major Reddit features. People there are much nicer too! Alternative to Lemmy: Kbin (they interoperate, so Kbin content is available on Lemmy, and vice versa). Apps: Jerboa, Lemming, LiftOff, Summit, Connect.
Alternative to Instagram: Pixelfed
A bit slow compared to the other fedi services, but it’s unique in getting the original Instagram experience. As an artist, I love it. PixelDroid is the mobile app for it.
Alternative to Youtube: PeerTube
Well, there’s TilVids, and then there’s everyone else. TilVids doesn’t want to federate with everyone else, but it does have the most interesting videos (particularly of Linux interest). Spectra.Video and Diode.Zone are also great options to move your videos at. Just note that bandwidth is limited in these free services, so it’s best to upload in 1080p instead of 4k. There are 3-4 mobile apps for it.
Alternative to Medium/Wordpress/SubStack: WriteFreely
Not much to say here, a very modern editor that acts as blogging and article publishing service.
Secure Messaging and IRC/Discord alternatives: Matrix
Matrix is secure messaging end-to-end with Element.io being the main provider. It can also act as a community messaging server. Nostr and Jami are the newest such services on the block, but they’re a little bit weird to get into, I still prefer Matrix.
Alternative to TikTok: none
Thank the Olympian gods!
Finally, the best way to deal with some smaller instances going down and losing your account is to get 1-3 different accounts on different instances. I personally have 3 Mastodon accounts, 3 PeerTube ones, and 2 Lemmy/1 Kbin ones.
I used an older $70 phone (Moto G5 Plus) where I have installed the free, and very private Murena /e/ OS. It’s a totally de-googled Android OS (more so than LineageOS) that uses the iOS UI paradigm. In it, I use three app stores that only carry open source apps: F-Droid, IzzyOnDroid, and Obtainium. I avoid as much as possible from installing from the Aurora or the included App Lounge app stores that use the Google Play Store. The OS uses the open source microG service to replace the Google Play Services.
So, I have almost completely left behind the normal social media and moved on to the Fediverse (apart from FB messenger with my mom, and a couple of special-interest subreddits via my laptop). You see, after leaving OSNews 15+ years ago, I became an artist. And social media was the way to get sales back then. I started with Tumblr, and later Instagram and FB. Overall, I had amassed about 340,000 followers across all social media. Sales were good for a while. Then, the enshittification started. The biggest blow was Instagram removing the chronological feed and hashtag importance, and little by little only superstar accounts were pushed by the recommendation engines. By 2020, it was near-impossible to survive online selling your art.
Now, I don’t have any illusions that the Fediverse can replace the golden era of social media (2010-2020). I have calculated that you need a minimum of 100 million active users for various niche business to survive under a fair social media system. And currently, the whole Fediverse only has about 14.5 million accounts, with only about 2.2 million being active. In fact, I don’t expect the fediverse to ever achieve more than 10 million active users…
And yet, I prefer to stay on it. It’s simply a more fair system. It’s not a corporation that changes its policies at a whim, or sells your data. I rather use a “lesser” system in terms of reach and maintain my mental health, than battling Instagram’s algorithms all day long (“no, I don’t want to shoot useless vertical short videos”).
So, come on and join us on the fediverse. The more the merrier!
Note: OSNews is very active on the Fediverse. We have the main OSNews account which posts our stories, and we have a (new and unfinished, have patience!) PeerTube account for video. Thom has a personal account, of course, as does Eugenia, obviously. Adam, our web developer, is there too. If you want some inside information on what we’re up to with the site, the Fediverse is the place to go.
Wow, hello Eugenia and thanks for the article.
I feel young again!
Thank you! Nice to see you again! 🙂
15 years? Noo way.
Now that I think about it, it’s near to 18 years. 🙂
Wow. I still remember you posting most articles. 18 years, convert that to internet time…
Left as editor anyway, she posts off and one since then last post was 9 years ago though.
Yeah… the thing is even as a fairly tech savvy person myself I see these services as complete non starters for 99% of people…. even myself dont’ bother to go past buying a phone that is “stock” android…. after getting quite grumpy about manufacturers ignoring OS updates on their phones and only providing a bare minimum of security updates if that.
I was pretty gung ho on Diaspora when it launched… but that flopped and since then I’ve not really bothered.
Mastodon is active though, and it has the most users on the fediverse. You just need to find an instance that has a good admin that you agree with. The main instance is good, and toot.community’s admin is super nice and smart.
As for a phone, you can try installing LineageOS or eOS on an older phone, that’s what I did. I had that phone since 2019 and was going to throw it away. Instead, eOS gave it a second life. I’m sure you have a stack by now, given how fast they stop getting supported.
Indeed…
Sony Xperia x10 mini (hardware+,support cycle- slider keyboard!)
ZTE Open C – Firefox OS (I really liked this, support cycle-, low end hardware-,web apps+)
ZTE Zmax (hardware and support were mid)
Samsung Galaxy S8 Active (hardware+ support-)
Moto G Stylus 2022… (hardware and support seem mid, but it is at least stock android with few modifications so should have a longer cycle, retains 3.5mm jack and SD).
Whenever someone says the SD, removable battery or 3.5mm jack must be sacrificed i just point at the X10 mini… 4.3 screen and it still had all those it was a bit thick but trivial to pocket in even the smallest pockets.
Future dreams… RISC-V based Haiku OS derived Phone running web apps and native. I still think they need to ditch the HPKG format though…. its too bloated for phones.
Good to see you, Eugenia. Interesting article.
I already use Matrix and regularly watch videos on peertube. Mastodon is interesting, but i haven’t looked much into it.
Didn’t know about Lemmy, will have to check it out, especially with what’s going on with reddit right now …
Interesting write up but it missed a few key things.
Big question is centralized social media even viable long term. Facebook ad revenue is going up but profit is going down. Ad revenue growth even of a big player like facebook is being out stripped by hosting and moderation costs. Yes the requirement for moderation is coming from governments starting to regulate the internet. Yes this is going to see more Ai moderation that is going goof up because parties like facebook even if they wanted to cannot pay enough staff to moderate what they are receiving. Worst part is what is facebook and other central todo if they ever find them selfs stuck in a legal rock and hard place where two countries they are operating in have inverted ideas on what is legally acceptable.
Also I don’t see long term as federated being that hard on users we already have get a app for that culture.
There is advantage to federated services.
1) No central company problem. This means person posting is only legally liable to their own countries laws and the person receiving is legally liable to their own countries laws. This is not like a central company where you can end up stacked with multi countries laws.
2) peer to peer federated gets end users to pay for the data storage of the content.
3) moderation costs fall on the end user or possible to a party like anti-virus that users can be made to pay for.
There is either cost neutral business models and viable profitable business models here.
Do note my serous point is the current central social media models even able to be kept running. Remember we have not had a world depression in a while that would cause companies to cut their advertising budget the thing current centralized social media and lots of web services depend on for profit. Yes the recent attempted google extension to browsers to validate uses watching advertising is another sign that advertising as a profit stream is coming questionable.
I think social media started to get worse in around 2003. not 2016. Sweden had it’s own social network that most people used before facebook was introduced in the country. It was a much more pleaseant experience overall to anything the gigant produced either before or after it.
That Sweden own social network before Facebook was a government run and funded network that only had one set of laws to worry about since it was restricted to Sweden citizens and if you did anything wrong on it normal Sweden law enforcement could be on your door. So yes government run with moderation backed up by physical force does make a pleasant experience as long as your government is not a nasty bit of works.
Yes the government did not want to keep on footing the bill with the Sweden one. This comes back to the same problem how to run a viable social media system that is quality. This is the big problem that is not solved.
I had no idea it was either controlledbor financed by the state. Wyatt media that started it was an independent media private company as far as i knew. could you please provide more info.
Unfortunately I understand human nature enough to know services like Mastodon will never really take off. Last I heard of it was a complaint about it “being fiefdoms run by tyrants.” And before that it was a post about how one of the most popular server admins had dropped off the map and stopped responding to any requests, moderation or otherwise. That admin eventually came back, but these problems stem from the fact they aren’t centralized. Being bankrolled, having central administration/moderation, and reliable uptime is what people want in an online community. Having to sign up on different servers, those servers going down, inconsistent moderation, etc. quickly makes people realize they don’t need this service at all.
With enough instances out there, and as long as you aren’t a Kardashian requiring millions of followers, the fediverse is attainable for normal users. As I wrote in the article, I don’t expect more than 10 million active users in the future. And that was my point in the article: that we don’t need all 8 billion people to be on it before we do the right thing and we join ourselves. If they don’t want to join, that’s their loss. As for the tyrants, I also wrote about it in the article. From the 3 instances I’m in, the 2 admins are great, the 3rd one not so much. That’s why you pick and choose your instance.
The alternative, the centralized social media, is to have no control of advertisers and data collection, privacy, government snooping, and on top of that, no one is seeing your posts because of cryptic algorithms. Personally, I rather be on a fair system, even if it will never reach highs.
The problem with mastodon is that it has no value to me… I don’t actually care about tech savvy people seeing my beach photos, or my latest project, I care about networking with my family and small close friends which aren’t there, and won’t be because mastodon and other decentralized platforms aren’t a platform for the billions. And I also care about buying stuff online which mastodon doesn’t do AFAIK, Facebook has pretty much usurped the offline purchase scene from Craigslist which is all but dead probably because it failed to innovate and remove scams.
I’d like for all of that to change but that is the status quo.
Also social networks pretty much peaked with MySpace IMO… after that they became advertisement platforms rather than social scrap books.
This^ Pretty much. Real people in real life simply aren’t going to jump through the extra hoops and problems of communicating through these things. “Decentralized” is pretty much a corporate buzzword that’s become popular with incompetent managers, along with blockchain… That and I have a strong suspicion the only thing I’d find on Mastodon is the church of Linux zealots.
dark2,
I agree that people will stick to the giants. I don’t think people are averse to federated networks per say, they would use them if their friends were on them, but it’s a classic chicken and egg problem.
I really don’t see many in the corporate world pushing decentralized/federated technology. If anything, from where I’m sitting, the tide seems to be going strongly in the opposite direction with corporations pushing us more into the hands of centralized service providers that consolidate power.
You’ve been the biggest zealot here by far with completely unprovoked bigotry against other operating system users across topics. Linux is just an operating system and mastodon is just a social media platform. If you don’t like them then don’t use them and move on with your life. Neither Eugenia nor anyone else here were being preachy. *You* are the only one here guilty of perpetuating this pointless religious drivel. So on behalf of everyone else here: give it a rest! Stop training your brain to reinforce a cult mentality, instead try looking for common ground.
Corporate normally hates fully decentralized.
Linux people are going to be more willing to look into items like mastodon and on adverage be more highly skilled with servers so able to setup there own instances for what they need even with higher barrier to entry and for what Linux users do this higher barrier to entry may not be a problem but instead advantage(this leads to a development motivation to fix problem).
Most people don’t have to do total cost of ownership calculations on servers installs. This is something a higher number of Linux people are trained todo compared to normal users. Yes server world dominated. Its the total cost of ownership maths that start telling you that the current central social media model are not long term maintainable.
There is also a problem with centralized social media caused by cost control as well. Lets say you upload a 2 meg photo to facebook then download it from facebook you don’t get your 2 meg photoback instead you get a 100kb lossy compressed version of it. This also happens on youtube and so on. Remember all this stuff requires storage and social media cannot 100 percent predict when users will want to access stuff.
Being centralized did not stop reddit having major moderation problems due to moderators stopping responding. Yes centralized has not stopped moderators being tyrants.
So dark2 no most of the problems with social media be it centralized or federated at the moment exist in both. Reliable uptime forgot how many centralized social media like google hangouts is no more.
Please note I am not saying there is not problems because there are a lot of problems.
Centralized is running into the problem where they are not getting money any more and with users increasing faster than income to the point where they cannot employ enough people themselves todo moderation and increasing users equals more server costs. There is a breaking point for the Centralized social media where they will need more money invested in hardware to support their users than income.
The current centralized social media is like titanic just after it hit the iceberg. The iceberg is government regulation mandating they moderate. The question now is what the post centralized social media going to look like.
Lot of federated social media has the problem is no formal system to fork in case admin person goes missing. Forking is possible inside federated model.
Yes the number of logins required in federated social media that does need to be sorted out.
Very stable fedorated system is the git repository system. Think about it admin goes missing in git system someone else can pick up where a git stopped.
Social media like it or not is going to be fiefdoms run by tyrants be it federated or centralized.
P2P solves that problem but creates dozen more, ha!
I haven’t realized but I’ve been following Thom for ages already on mastodon… Welcome to the list Eugenia 🙂
A few more compatible services that should be mentioned:
– PhotoPrism, which replaces Flickr
– FunkWhale, which replaces Soundcloud
– FireFish, which is the new name for Calckey (twitter-like)
– Plume, wordpress-like blogging
– NextCloud to replace online Google/MS Office
– CastoPod, self-hosting podcasting
– OwnCast, self-hosting livestreaming
“So, come on and join us on the fediverse.”
I think I will graciously decline. Social media doesn’t make up a large part of my life, but that which is there is at least shared with the people I care about. So I’ll stick with the big ones, despite their myriad problems.
Since I am the local nerd in my circle, 99% of the people I care about are on mainstream platforms. They won’t follow me to alternatives and rightfully so. FOSS alternatives always have more hoops to jump through than the commercial platforms. It’s never close to turnkey. The value to them is next to nothing.
We already live in a panopticon. Giving up convenience and connection for the doubtful benefit of less egregious management is a losing proposition. If you aren’t going to sacrifice a large part of your life to run your own “fiefdom”, you will always be at someone else’s whims.
I did sniff at Lemmy. It looked promising. Until the defederation wave started… It showed me that instead of one less than stellar management group on a central site, you now have one per instance. I happen to have an account on the largest instance by sheer luck, but it feels off to be on a platform that can’t stand different viewpoints. Where the “solution” to pluriformity is to take your ball and go home.
You’re not wrong. However, it also depends what you’re after. If you’re after friends and family, then the big ones are fine. Everything you said, I wrote in the disadvantages part of the article.
But for me, who I don’t interact with people on social media for “social” reasons (e.g. travel diary, or news from me for my family to read, etc) but specifically I use it for my art business, then I need something that the big ones don’t offer anymore: chronological feed and hashtags *by default*. As I wrote in the article, proportionally, I get as many eyes on my art on foss sites as I used to in the early days of tumblr and instagram, before they became big and then all went downhill. That’s what I value in these services. There, I have the same chances of growing my art accounts the same way as I could back in 2011 with Tumblr or IG.
But I hear you. The problem of opposing opinions and the whims of admins, is, and will remain, a problem. That’s why you need to choose your instance carefully, or run your own.
For example, I’m big on ufo discussions lately, and mastodon doesn’t like the subject much. They see the subject as a conspiratorial right wing one (despite Congress acknowledging its reality and having hearings soon!). They don’t want to admit that some of the lefties have had experiences too, as it’s easier for them to put their heads in the sand. So, no, I’m not 100% happy with mastodon users either. But I still prefer it over fb or youtube or google search where the subject is actually censored (they only return search results from big tv stations, and not vlogs or user podcasts). Reddit censors it somewhat too (many experience reports are not searchable reddit-wide). ONLY Twitter doesn’t censor it at all. Mastodon doesn’t censor it, but the kind of users it attracts do not want to engage in the subject, so it’s like it’s self-censored. This is totally frustrating for me, but what can I do? I simply use federated media for what it can actually work well for, and I avoid the rest of its uses. That’s why I remain on reddit for these two subreddits I mentioned in the article. There’s a reason I mentioned these… 😉
We already live in a panopticon. Giving up convenience and connection for the doubtful benefit of less egregious management is a losing proposition
I really think this is a bit of a red herring. A strawman. And I’ve been hearing it more and more lately.
You’re right. Privacy is gone. Effectively you cannot claw it back. I quit Facebook about four years ago now and recently someone was giving me a hard time about it, mocking me for trying to hide my precious personal information because I’m so important.
Talk about missing the point!
The reason I quit Facebook wasn’t because of privacy. They already had my information. They still maintain those shadow accounts for people, all your friends and family who take pictures of you in the background? You’re tagged in those whether you or I want to be or not. That’s already lost. I’m not fighting that war.
At the risk of sounding like a right wing wacko, the war I’m fighting is the one for my mind. When I started using Facebook and other sites of that nature it was simple. You subscribed to friends or topics or movies and music or television or books that you liked. You then got information on those people and things in a feed in a chronological order. You heard about Aunt Susie’s cats, Uncle Fat’s latest grilling adventure or fishing trips. These days? Now all you ever see is an endless stream of slogans “liked” by friends and family. If you want to see something they actually posted? You might see actual posts by them if you go directly to their page. You’re probably not going to see them in your feed.
Almost all the centralized social media platforms have taken to curating your feeds. You could also translate that as controlling what you see and hear and still be right. This is the reason why people should leave the major platforms. They’re not doing what they used to do. They’re not functional for people anymore, they’re just a new form of consensus creation and perception management.
I don’t expect you to change anything, but I hope you see that there are more reasons beyond privacy to make these choices and to encourage others to migrate too.
Blast from the past!!
Lovely to see you again
In terms of the services you suggest I’ve only tried Mastodon. And honestly I didn’t like it at all!
As you say, you can find an admin you agree with and great, but my experience is that what it was actually creating was niche echo chambers. For me this is exactly the failure of the algorithm mechanism, you are only exposed to those who agree with you and anything else is shown because those same people disagree with it (often very strongly!). For me, the worst aspect of social media platforms is the inability to discuss or share nuance of ideas without vitriol. Rather than breaking down barriers between people, it cements them and forces people to “choose a side”. Mastodons model exemplified this when I used it.
Agreed 100% with everything, except the idea that 2016 was the shitification date for social media. Its always been shit, it just gets shitter with scale. In some ways fediverse seems better because its smaller, but also because well, I’m from a very privileged group that doesn’t get much harassment online. Everything always seems easier, and safer to me and always will.
Indeed the shittification of facebook itself started around 2010… as it no longer had to compete with MySpace it lost nearly all its customizable features and went full in on the monetization of the people.
Myspace I feel was acutally half good, sure it had technical problems like how do you keep people from abusing the HTML code they could inject on pages… but it was at least designed to give you some control and the advertisement wasn’t crazy like it is now.
What I also don’t get is… how MySpace currently operates… like, people would go back to it if it actually offered what it used to rather than the garbage that it is now.
Wow, Eugenia, it is nice to see you writing again.
And as someone who has been around the block, I have definitely come to the conclusion that the internet was much better when there were no centralized services like Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and people engaged in more specialized communities like OSNews for instance, or ARS, or many random forums running phpBB etc.
I believe that YES, Lemmy is a fine replacement for Reddit, and Mastadon is a good replacement for Twitter.
The reality people are not taking into account, is that MANY of the most popular and well known web services have never made a profit in their entire existence (ala Reddit), and I believe in the very near future with this economic downturn we could be looking at a complete cycling of the web when the VC money they have been living off of dries up and many of what we think are big web names will be gone in an instant. I believe the future is smaller and federated.
Thanks, bookmarking this for future reference. I hadn’t heard of some of these. I was on Mastodon a few years back but didn’t last long since I found it a bit too much of an echo-chamber. Perhaps I was on the wrong instance.
It seems clear the mainstream platforms are getting killed by a thousand cuts, with new legal restrictions coming in and widespread censorship, but it looks like the technology to replace them already exists in a mature form. Of course the new laws coming in will effect instances running federated services, but might fly under the radar for longer before they get noticed.
Hi Eugenia, I’ve missed you! 😀
I left Reddit last month and now use Lemmy pretty much exclusively now. I’m really enjoying it. One thing that surprised me (in a good way) is that on Lemmy I’m so less focused on upvotes or what’s popular or witty, snarky little replies… Because it all just doesn’t matter on Lemmy. Instead, the conversation is the goal. I’m posting things to encourage conversation with people who have similar interests to me. It’s online media made for the intent of being social, or, social media in its purest sense. It’s so refreshing.
I too use /e/ OS on my phone! I really like it. My favorite built-in feature is being able to disable internet access for any app. Google will never implement that in default Android, which means keyboards, alarm clocks, photo gallery apps, calculators, and everything else that has no business communicating with the internet will always be allowed to send whatever data they want to any server they want.
My least favorite thing about it is the name. It’s so hard to search for /e/. XD
It seems preposterous that a person would need to make multiple accounts on different hosts just to make sure that they still have access if some of the instances go down. That’s pretty wild. Why is there no way to replicate accounts across multiple hosts?
If a Lemmy instance is federated to 16 other instances how many of them would the same usernames and passwords be copied to? What if there were 256 instances, or 1024?
Instead, posting something on an instance of Lemmy will authenticate the user against the instance the specific user account is hosted from.
Nobody NEEDS to create multiple accounts on multiple instances. There’s no benefit to collecting “karma” or whatever on Lemmy. The whole point is to post, comment, and vote in a community, for the purpose of having fun with with other people who have similar interests. If a Lemmy instance goes down, just create a new account on another instance and continue enjoying the community. Creating accounts with the same username on different instances is only beneficial to keep the same username.
Hello Eugenia! Great to hear from you!
I love Mastodon. I like the low traffic nerdy ad free atmosphere. People have an educated decency to them, I really like. So much hate on Twitter, makes me hate it in return.
Lemmy is the next thing I will try .. Reddit is becoming shittier every day.