When I was younger, I thought the concept of social media was cool! The idea of people sharing their thoughts and their lives with their friends online was a neat concept to me. So when I joined my first social network, Google+ (I almost feel old saying that,) I thought it was so cool getting to talk with communities of people with similar interests to me. And when I joined Instagram, I felt the same way, but with my friends from school.

Of course, things are different now. Google+ is gone (yeah, I still kinda miss it, minus Google’s tracking) Instagram has turned from a place where I keep up with friends to a place where content is thrown in my face, I don’t even know what’s going on with Facebook (though I never really used it in the first place,) and I don’t even want to think about Twitter. Social media turned from a way to connect with friends to a place to be served content that is algorithmically chosen to try and suck you into watching forever and maybe buying something somewhere. And I hate it. I’ve either deleted or stopped checking most of my mainstream social media accounts because it just feels unhealthy at this point. This is where the Fediverse comes in to save the day.

The Good Ending

In a lot of video games, there seems to be a concept of a good ending, and a bad ending defined by one or more decisions. I feel like a lot of the mainstream social media sites took the bad ending. They started out with good intentions, wanting to let people communicate and keep up with eachother wherever they are. You can use to talk with your friends, keep up with old friends from high school, maybe even make some new friends and become a part of some new communities of people.

But then, it slowly started to fall apart. The companies running them needed to make money off of this free service they made, so they started showing ads. Then, they wanted to make them more efficient, so they started showing more ads, and to make sure people maybe click on them more, they started collecting data to tailor those ads. Then they realized some people only pop onto the site every once in a while, so they wanted to find a way to keep them coming back, so they used that data to make the content more interesting so people would keep scrolling and finding new content. Of course, that means they had to show you content from accounts you don’t follow, so they start suggesting content from around the web. Which isn’t the worst thing, but then that content starts taking precidence over the posts from your friends, and even content from accounts you actually follow. And as the older sites started to lose popularity to the newer ones, they went “hey, we can do that too,” and started coppying them. This all resulted in a weird cluster of different features, media formats and ads being force fed to you by an all-knowing algorithm with the task of getting you hooked on your feed.

The Fediverse, however, doesn’t have all of that. The only posts I see are from people or companies I follow, people from my server, or everyone on the Fediverse if I am feeling brave (which I usually am not.) I don’t feel like I’m being sucked in, and I can just check in whenever I feel like it, scroll to see what’s new, then go about my day when I see what there is to see. I feel like I am actually communicating with people, seeing stuff made by people for people instead of being fed content made for an algorithm from people or companies or groups that I don’t even know. It feels like the natural evolution of the old versions of the sites I used to use, where it was just people posting things, and interacting with people, and people were actually being social (at least to the extent you could be sitting behind a screen.) I think the Fediverse is the good ending for social media. Something that is run by people, for people, to communicate with people. Just as things should be.

How do I join this Fediverse thing?

If you are reading this from the Fediverse, hi! Y’all rock, but this section isn’t for you. If you are reading it from outside of the Fediverse, you rock too, and I would like to recommend joining the Fediverse! The best way to join in would be looking into something like Mastodon (Twitter alternative,) Pixelfed (Instagram alternative,) or Lemmy (Redit alternative.) Each of these sites have instructions on how to get started. The most daunting part of this is choosing a server to join, but don’t worry, it’s easier than it sounds. You can find a server based on one of the categories shown on each respective site, or just choose one. The fun thing is if you don’t like your server, you can move to another one! From there, you set up an account like you would on any other site. You can then start using it like any other site as well. The other fun thing about it is you aren’t limited to the server you are on. You can follow people on other servers! This is kind of like how you can have an email account on gmail.com, and still email your friends on outlook.com. You can join on a server like https://mastodon.social, and follow people on another server like . You can even follow someone from Pixelfed or Lemmy from Mastodon, and they can follow you! Even Threads is joining the Fediverse.

Of course, that is another way you can start to dip your toes into the Fediverse. While this doesn’t solve a lot of the problems I mentioned, and is controvercial within the Fediverse since it is run by Meta, Threads can interact with the Fediverse! Right now, this is in beta, and needs to be turned on (guide here) but doing this will let you follow accounts on the Fediverse. If you like Threads and just want to leave it at that, that’s fine! But I would totally recommend at least looking at something like Mastodon as well, and if you like it, you can transfer your account over from Threads to Mastodon! (will add guide if one becomes available, and you could also look it up pretty easily once this feature is added.) Again, there is a lot of controversy around Threads joining the Fediverse, and it won’t fix a lot of the issues I mentioned in this, but it is at least a good way to dip your toes in if signing up feels a bit daunting.

And no matter what you do, find me at @[email protected]! :)