Fediverse
Mastodon et al
August 12, 2019 — May 30, 2024
Fediverse: Volunteer-run Twitter.
An alternate take on social media, which interpolates between private chat and the raw context collapse hellscape of modern social media.
The Fediverse is not owned by any single megacorp, which is a net plus IMO. It does not help paranoiacs, as it is not cryptographically strong, and thus subject to censorship and surveillance etc. But also it’s cute and friendly and evokes early-internet nostalgia, which is sweet. For secrecy, you probably want a decentralised p2p system, such as Nostr or scuttlebutt.
This is all hopelessly out of date now. I wrote it before the adoption of the underlying ActivityPub protocol by various major actors such as Ghost and facebook’s Threads.
1 Mastodon
cosy twitter. Maybe it should be hyggr or something. This is close to what I imagined social media would be like in the year 2000, for better and for worse. Lots of local communities, peer-recommendation friendly, hard for a corporate overlord to influence, cute and customisable…
You can DIY your own hosting, which is a plus and a minus, 🏗
You want to have it without hosting it? There are businesses which do it. One obvious contender is Librem Social which hosts Mastodon and some other handy things. USD2-USB8/month depending on your options. Not sure how the pricing scales per user.
Simon Willison’s intro is helpful: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon.
- How much I’ve spent so far running my own Mastodon server on AWS: Quite a lot of cash before even accounting for labour.
- Mathstodon
- christianp’s mathstodon
2 Pleroma
3 Misskey
Japanese message board that is also a fediverse server.
4 Peertube
PeerTube is a federated video sharing system, with a structure much like Mastodon and using the same federation protocols. Written in Typescript, if you are curious. I am curious how well this scales. Video is hard.
5 Plugging in to other things
Making other systems talk fediverse.
5.1 Bridgy
AFAICT the fanciest and most full-featured system
Bridgy Fed is a decentralized social network bridge. It connects the fediverse, the web, and soon Bluesky/AT Protocol and Nostr. If you’re on one of these networks, you can use Bridgy Fed to follow people on other networks, see their posts, and reply and like and repost them. Likewise, they’ll be able to see you and your posts too.
Related project, Bridgy classic does cross posting (rather than directly federating).
5.2 Via Zapier
Seems to work? Create posts in Mastodon / Fediverse by Unshape from new items in RSS by Zapier feed
5.3 Mastofeeder
e.g. mastofeeder plugs into the RSS ecosystem.
This is a simple Mastodon/ActivityPub server that has a virtual
@website@mastofeeder.comuser for every RSS feed on the Internet. Just search for your favourite RSS-enabled website from Mastodon’s search and follow the user! All RSS items will be posted as toots.
5.4 For static sites natively
Many attempts