The Fediverse: A Wildly Incomplete Primer

Good morning friends. It was not my original intent to make this post but after having several people ask me to do one I am bending to public sentiment, or at least as public as this blog audience and my social sphere is. I’ve been on Mastodon… or as it is more correctly known The Fediverse, since the great Wheaton Exodus of 2018. Most people left… I stayed around at least partially active and have some words to say about the matter. These are by no means authoritative words, because like many things the Fediverse is what you make of it. However I am still going to fill a post with words nonetheless.

So You Want to Leave Twitter?

Every so often an event happens to make people extremely nervous about the future of their social media platforms. We’ve gone through this many times over the course of the years with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, and even further back when you start counting instant messaging platforms and IRC networks. So what happened to cause this current disturbance int he force? Basically an asshole bought Twitter, and has spouted off some random bullshit as he is wont to do about his grand plans for it. What is going to happen as a result is anyone’s guess. Elon could be playing 5D chess right now and trying to rattle the cage to get the stock price to go down… so he can pay less to buy the company. He could also be completely serious because he has had more than one run in with a Twitter user… like this situation where a bot was tracking his plane.

I wanted to start this post with a bit of editorializing, to get it out of the way. Twitter can be an awful experience for anyone who is being harassed or is in any way marginalized and abused because of it. Twitter can also be a magical place where you can connect to people of similar interests from around the world. Coming up this Friday, it will mark my thirteenth year on the platform and I have seen so many things over those years and it has both positively and negatively impacted my mental health. There is no replacement for Twitter… I know I have looked many times. There are OTHER networks that exist out there, but if you go into them attempting to remove twitter and replace it with something else… you are going to end up sorely disappointed. Again I know… I have looked… and while I enjoy the various places I have found in the process there is no direct Twitter Killer just like there is no WoW Killer (other than sometimes itself).

What is Mastodon / The Fediverse?

So let’s start things off right by stealing a definition directly from Wikipedia!

The fediverse (a portmanteau of “federation” and “universe”) 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, but which, while independently hosted, can communicate with each other. On different servers (instances), users can create so-called identities. These identities are able to communicate over the boundaries of the instances because the software running on the servers supports one or more communication protocols which follow an open standard.^[1] As an identity on the fediverse, users are able to post text and other media, or to follow posts by other identities.^[2] In some cases, users can even show or share data (video, audio, text, and other files) publicly or to a selected group of identities and allow other identities to edit other users’ data (such as a calendar or an address book).

Wikipedia

Twitter is a single open platform and everyone on it can see everyone else on it and all of the content contained within… with a few caveats for things like blocks and mutes. The Fediverse instead is a group of individual platforms running on the same protocol and agreeing to “federate” data between them in order to facilitate communication across multiple platforms at the same time. There are many different software platforms running on this shared protocol but the most popular of these is called Mastodon. This is in part why everyone mistakes the name of the broader platform for Mastodon, when in actuality it is just a subset of the greater Fediverse running on ActivityPub. There is some nuance here but really for sake of understanding that is about all you really need to know.

Usernames and Instance Names

In The Fediverse you are your username combined with your Instance name. So for example I currently reside on the Mstdn.social instance of the Fediverse which is largely gaming focused. I am Belghast on that instance and in order to reach me you would use my username and the instance name like this:

@belghast@mstdn.social

Essentially you are telling one the instance who has authority over your account. When you follow someone from another server, there is some verification that takes place to make sure that both accounts are valid before setting up the syndication of content between them. Once followed, that user will effectively act like they are on your instance with you and you will see content from them similar to following someone on twitter.

The Feeds

The default web interface for Mastodon/Fediverse looks an awful lot like Tweetdeck, so for me it is extremely familiar and comfortable. However at a high level the Fediverse itself functions a little different than twitter. Everyone has Four feeds that they can access without any additional configuration. Lets talk about these and give a quick overview of how each functions.

• Home – This is essentially a feed of everyone you are following on your account. Unlike twitter you will often times see partial conversations as the @ behavior is a little odd at times.
• Notifications – This is a feed of mentions, favorites, and boots… which is the equivalent of a retweet. There are no quote retweets in the Fediverse, so those simply don’t exist.
• Local – This is a feed of everything that is being talked about currently on your local instance and is ultimately what gives a given server a “community” feel.
• Fediverse – This is everything being talked about on the Fediverse as a whole or at least the servers that your instance is currently Federating content for.

Apart from that you can create columns for Hashtags and create user lists similar to twitter and configure your interface to include these. There are also mobile apps but I will get into those later.

Post Audience

Let’s talk about a little quirk that is a bit different from Twitter. Each post you make has the ability to change the audience that it is currently targeting. In twitter when you send someone a direct message, it shows up in a completely different interface. When you send someone a Direct message in the Fediverse, there is a visual indication that it is private but it shows up in your feed. The only difference between the two is that the “audience” is set to one or more users. You get to this interface by clicking the Globe icon and you have a handful of options by default. I am going to run through these but please note that various servers have various other options because these can be configured by the server admin.

• Public – This shows as available to anyone who is federating content with your server and is watching the local feed of the server.
• Unlisted – If someone is following you directly they will see the content or if someone clicks on your profile, but otherwise it will not show up in public timelines.
• Followers-only – This will only show up if someone follows you, and will not show in public feeds or on your timeline if someone clicks through and is not following you.
• Direct – This is flagged to only show up as the users included in the message.

This message was going around yesterday and causing some great concern. The truth is that nothing you say online or on your phone should ever been considered private full stop. There is some nuance here, but everything that you say on ANY platform… is readable by someone. When I used to run forums all the time, it would have been trivial for me to get in and read private messages sent between users. I didn’t do that because it would be a violation of privacy. Having administered a Fediverse server, the truth is there is no EASY back end interface to allow admins to read your messages. They would have to get into the table structure and mung around with the data to find them… but just like your corporate email administrators can read your messages… it is a possibility. Someone at twitter can also read your messages as well… you never had any privacy there either.

That might not be the assurance that you want, but it is the truth. So let’s move on to another “quirk” of the network when some things start to break down.

Remember the Joy of Netsplits?

The largest “Instance” is called Mastodon.social and there is a similarly sized overflow instance called Mastodon.online. The first is run by a man named Gargon, who lists himself as the CEO and Lead Developer for the Mastodon project. He is both revered and reviled depending upon which segment of the broader Fediverse you are talking to, and mostly based on my long distance view of his actions… does whatever the hell he wants without taking into account the suggestions of other server admins. Mastodon.social is both the most twitter-like of instances, but also largely lawless and un-moderated. It could just be the sheer scale of the server, but little has been done to take action on known bad actors on both .social and .online.

So instead various segments of the community and server admins have taken action for them. This means that sometime between I went absent in December 2021 and now… the instance I am on has actively stopped federation with those two servers. That is one of the unique “features” of the Fediverse is that each community can determine who they will and will not accept posts from. The end result however is that you can have users on two different server instances that cannot communicate with each other… effectively breaking the “miracle” of open federation. I culled through my friends list yesterday removing everyone that I could no longer reach and it was not an enjoyable thing. Apparently votes were taken among the community I am on, but I was not paying attention at the time and as such did not get to vote.

Moving Instances

One of the interesting features of the Fediverse is that essentially took into account that it is unlikely that you are going to stay on the same instance forever. If decisions like blocking an instance end up harshing your enjoyment of the platform, you can effectively pick up “your house” and move it. There are semi-automated and manual ways that you can export all of the people you are following, blocking, and muting and import them into a brand new account on a different instance. This does not move the people who are following you, but when you move you will ultimately ping everyone when you “follow” them from the import, and given that this is a fairly common practice most people just take it as a normal practice on the network.

During the course of my stay on the Fediverse I started on Mastodon.Online, then decided that the community was not my jam and moved to Elek.xyz, and now more recently moved to Mstdn.social. When my good friend Liore decided to roll her own instance I moved again to Nineties.Cafe while it was active, and then again when my friend Gazimoff started MMORPG.social moved over there. In both of those cases I helped with the moderation and administration a bit, or at least enough to understand what a pain in the ass it is. Finally when both of those instances ended… I came back to Elekk.xyz, and just moved to a newer more general purpose instance Mstdn.social. One of the default features of The Fediverse is the ability to go into user preferences and indicate you have moved and the account that you are moving to.

Remember the Term Netiquette?

Since every server that you interface with is effectively its own small island on the larger collective federated platform, they are each going to have their own “community norms”. For example Elekk.xyz the gaming instance that I spent most of my time on tends to be very queer and very liberal. There are going to be instances that are very much the opposite of that… like Parler that darling of the rightwingers. Currently I am on a more twitter like general instance, but finding a community that fits you is fairly important. However one of the things you are going to see a lot more on the Fediverse than on Twitter is “Content Warnings” because they actually do something. The above screenshot is an example of the interface when I have clicked the CW icon, giving me a line to write what my warning entails and then the normal dialog for composing a message.

What is shown to other users is something that looks like the above image. You get a line indicating what the warning is and then a Show More button allowing you to unroll the image. You can go into the back end interface and determine if you want this default behavior to happen or not, but honestly I find it terribly useful. If you want to “toot” about game spoilers then you absolutely can, just indicate that your content warning is a game spoiler and what game it is for and talk away. Anyone who responds to the original message is going to will also be wrapped within the content warning keeping the thread hidden from anyone who does not want to look upon it.

Similarly you can mark images as sensitive and they will not by shown by default unless the user clicks on them. The negative side of this is that users will self police their instances and give you a piece of their mind if you are posting something potentially triggering that does not happen within a content warning or sensitive flag. Another thing that the fediverse is extremely big on is accessibility, and as such there are users who will give you a good deal of grief if you make it your practice to regularly post images without descriptions. To get to this interface click the Edit button after uploading an image, and it will bring up the dialog shown above allowing you to give a description of the image for the visually impaired. It also has a functionality where it attempts to auto-describe it with AI… but that does not seem to work on any of the video game screenshots I have tried it on.

Read the Room

If I had one piece of advice to give potential folks migrating over to the Fediverse, is to lurk for a bit and read the room. Scroll through the local feed to see what sorts of interactions are happening on the server. Each Instance Server in the Fediverse honestly has more akin with an old school forum than it does Twitter. When I used to join forums all the time for different groups of friends, or even more modernly new discords… I would attempt to pattern my own behavior after the behavior of what I was seeing in the community. That is not to say that I would behave significantly differently than I normally do, I would just attempt to adopt the customs of a given server/forum/discord.

The Fediverse/Mastodon is not the new Twitter and honestly anyone saying that is being disingenuous. I’ve been here roughly four years and what I found instead was an interesting and wildly different community to the one I had on twitter. It can scratch a bit of the same itch, but if you go into this experience looking for a one to one replacement, then I feel like you are going to be sorely disappointed. I posted a long “explainer” thread yesterday not in an attempt to get people to convert, but to explain the network at a high level. I have no plans currently to leave Twitter and am mostly keeping a wait and see attitude, but it did give me reason to become more active in the Fediverse.