How The Fediverse Will Save Your Socials
An exploration of trust on the internet.
Happy Wednesday, Friends. Well, it's not entirely happy; what a brutal first week in Tr*mp’s America. So far, he's announced that America will only recognize two genders, male and female, at conception. What he's failed to realize is that all humans are female at conception, so...I guess we have our first female president now? He also just issued another Trans military ban, and countless organizations have rolled back their DEI and Pro-Queer initiatives. It's gonna be a far less corporate pride this year. Our powers are being stripped away, and it's up to us to own and claim them again.
But no corporate move has been so blatantly egregious as the two I want to talk about today, Meta and TikTok, and what their capitulation means for the state of social media and the internet as a whole. So, let's dive in.
If you're new here, I'd love for you to subscribe to this community we're building. It's one of hope, resistance, and optimism in the face of the coming darkness.
Meta's Missteps
For those of you who don't know, two major things have happened in the last few weeks that have destabilized many people's trust in the social tools we use to communicate daily.
On January 7th, Meta (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Threads) announced some sweeping changes to how it approaches free speech and misinformation. The changes are as follows:
Meta is removing fact-checkers and replacing them with Community Notes.
Meta is bringing more political content back to users' feeds.
Meta is reducing the amount of content that will be moderated.
Meta is ending its protections for certain groups based on political and religious discourse as quoted below.
"We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like "weird."
Things you can now say on Meta include:
"Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit."
"Gays are freaks."
"Trans people are mentally ill."
Zuckerberg was quick to state that these changes were due to an overuse of censorship and bias. To fix said bias, he's moving his fact-checkers from biased California to totally unbiased Texas. He said that he wants to get back to the roots of Meta being used to bring people together, but it's been seen by many (if not all) as a simple plow to curry favor with President Trump and his right-wing supporters. After all, these changes were announced on Joe Rogan and FOX.
P.S. After inauguration day, Meta was also making hundreds of people follow Trump and Vance multiple times against their will.
The Trouble with TikTok
Then, on January 19th, TikTok went offline for about twelve hours while displaying this message, "A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately, that means you can't use TikTok for now. We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned!" When the app came back online, it said, "We thank President Trump for providing the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties, providing TikTok to over 170 million Americans, and allowing over 7 million small businesses to thrive. It's a strong stand for the First Amendment and against arbitrary censorship. We will work with President Trump on a long-term solution that keeps TikTok in the United States."
Many people on socials were quick to point out that companies like this rarely, if ever, call out politicians by name, but TikTok is clearly exalting Trump in a way that curries favor with their users. Folks were also quick to remind us that Trump was the very person to mention a TikTok ban in the first place. He created a problem and then swooped in to solve it in order to appeal to TikTok users.
These two actions have created a massive shift in trust as evidenced below.
What Now?
So, now we have the two most popular social media companies who have visibly aligned themselves with President Trump. Many people have pointed out that this is how authoritarian regimes consolidate power by directing the narratives and controlling how people can communicate with one another. This censorship is nothing new for Queer people. Our art and content on Meta platforms are usually inappropriately flagged as sexual, and our pages frequently see huge drops in engagement due to elusive shadowbans. But now that the platforms are so visibly against us, what do we do? Where can we go now that many folks feel trapped on these platforms we have no control over?
Enter The Fediverse
You probably haven't heard of the Fediverse, but if you have, it's probably been in the niche, nerdy corners of the internet. The term is fairly recent, but the idea has been around since the inception of the internet back in 1993. And while you might not have heard of it, it's poised to change the internet as we know it. When I first learned about it, that scared me, but now, it makes me hopeful that we may have a place on the internet that we actually have control over.
Let's start simple. What is the fediverse? The fediverse is an interconnected, decentralized social platform that lets you control all your own content across multiple platforms. The name comes from "federated social networking." Federated, in this case, means "an organization or group within which smaller divisions have some degree of internal autonomy. If that feels a bit heady, I've found the easiest way to think about it is like a playground.
Imagine a playground with tons of different things: slides, jungle gyms, monkey bars, sandboxes, you name it. Each thing is owned by a different company (a sandbox is Meta, a slide is TikTok, etc). You are free to run between things and do what you want while keeping your backpack full of stuff (your content, followers, etc.) with you. You're not locked into just playing with sand toys in the sandbox; you can push them down the slide instead. That playground is a fediverse. Of course, you can leave the playground and go to different fediverses, too.
What’s It Good For?
This is the beginning of the dream that many had when the internet was created of a truly decentralized internet that puts power back into the hands of the users and not the corporations. Imagine how liberating it would be if you could keep all your TikTok followers even if you left TikTok for another platform. Now imagine how bad that could be for business and why corporations haven't allowed it to happen until now.
Even if this sounds pretty chaotic and far out to you, there are already some platforms that use this type of system. Reddit, which has been around for years, uses subreddits that consist of individual groups of users, each with its own set of moderators and rules, like a small version of the fediverse. Mastodon, which gained a little traction when Musk bought Twitter is trucking along slowly. The most recent addition has been BlueSky however, the buzzy Twitter replacement built by Twitter's founder, Jack Dorsey. With Bluesky's surge in popularity after the election, the fediverse has been launched into the mainstream. It even forced Meta's Threads to announce that they will be exploring how Threads can be a part of the fediverse as well, which is a huge win.
People are looking for platforms where they aren't trapped by the whims of CEOs or shareholders. On the fediverse, everything that you post or create is yours. The other apps just borrow it.
"Think of all the places you follow people or the fact that you have a long history of posts on Instagram that isn't remotely correlated to your history of posts on TikTok or Facebook or YouTube or anywhere else. Wouldn't it be better if all that stuff were in one place, controlled by you, and you could move it from app to app and platform to platform as you wanted? And you didn't have to be on a hundred different apps with a hundred different algorithms just to get the content you care about? And the places where you connect with your friends, or make a living as a creator, couldn't be irrevocably destroyed by a billionaire with a sink and a bunch of weird ideas about financial products?" - David Pierce.
What Can I Do Now?
If you're worried about the state of the internet and the various ways that social media companies are controlling our behaviors and thoughts without our consent, I have some ideas.
Archive
First, archive your content somewhere that isn't online. This allows you to have all of that information even if the site or servers go down or if you just want to leave a platform, but don't want to lose everything that brought you to it in the first place. Pretty much every platform allows you to download all of the stuff that you have made. Here are the instructions for Instagram & Facebook & TikTok.
Get Familiar with the Fediverse
The good news is you've already started this step just by reading this article! It's a good idea to get familiarized with the concept of the Fediverse just so you're more aware of it as more stuff comes along. This is a great article from which I got a lot of information if you want a more in-depth take.
Explore!
This is the fun part. When you have a little bit of time, just take a peek at some popular fediverse platforms that already exist. The easiest one is probably BlueSky, which I dabbled with a bit immediately after the election. Here are a few others:
Mastodon - Like Twitter or Threads
Pixelfed - Like Instagram
PeerTube - Like YouTube
WriteFreely - Like Substack
Lemmy - Like Reddit
Even if you don't use the platforms now, it's a good idea to get your handles early.
Talk To Your Friends
The biggest drawback to the fediverse right now is that your friends aren't on it. These are social tools, so we need our social people wherever we end up. So take a moment to get your friends involved and see where they want to go. It's like moving to a neighborhood with your friends, just online!
Hopefully, one day, we have an internet that allows us to do what the internet was created for: connect with people around the world freely. The fediverse is a huge component of that. I see this as an opportunity for Queer folk to get out from under the thumbs of the CEOs who clearly do not care about us and create a community for ourselves where we can thrive and feel safe. Of course, this will never replace our physical gathering places, but imagine how cool it could be for those in rural America to be able to come hang out freely somewhere like @stonewall.fediverse.com.
Well that’s all from me this week. I’m going to leave you with some music to continue your day with. It’s the full-length, wildly experimental, incredibly unique Eusexua, by FKA Twigs.
