The Fediverse
I was never an active user of Twitter. Occasionally, I was browsing my feed. I follow the #genart posts and read about technology. My occasional post about some lesser important topic, the link to a blog post I wrote, or a retweet about something I believed to be interesting. I never ended up in a heated discussion about any crap with random people. I have a pretty dull social media existence.
Years ago, I signed up for a mastodon account. I was curious. I wanted to escape the Twitter universe for various reasons. Twitter tightened their once open API and restricted/removed some features that made it difficult or outright impossible for 3rd party developers to provide great Twitter clients. And my Twitter client back in the day was affected by it. I understand that Twitter doesn’t have any interest in 3rd party clients that would block ads and provide an experience that would jeopardize their ad revenue in any way, and I don’t have to like it.
Fast forward, I have my mastodon account on mastodon.social, but that doesn’t matter. You can interact with any user from any mastodon instance. Not only that: you can interact with people from other like Pleroma, Misskey, Peertube and Pixelfed. A complete list of projects is available from https://fediverse.party/en/miscellaneous/
All the instances of these services speak the same protocol (ActivityPub) that enables users to interact and share content. People, not cooperations, are operating these instances. People who use their own money to pay for the hardware, infrastructure, and time provide a solution for all of us looking for alternatives to the bloated, monopolistic, and ad-driven social media landscape. Let’s honor and support them for their efforts. Or start running your instance of whatever service interests you. It’s not as complicated as it might seem. And the more instances are available and allow sharing and collaboration, the better for all of us.
I’m @ingorichter@mastodon.social and @wayneschlegel@pixelfed.social. Let’s be social and civil, have fun interacting, and share our ideas, views, perspectives, pictures, music, art, etc. Everything that respects each other and makes us happy.