Over the last few days I’ve been playing with a number of new options for the internet. I’ve written about micro.blog and an increasing interest in the “indieweb” and I am continuing to explore the opportunities available there.
The one thing that has surprised me is that I’ve become interested in the Fediverse. If you’re not familiar with that term, well, which rock have you been under? Seriously, the “Fediverse” is decentralized network of individual servers that interconnect so that you can experience the whole network even though you’re only signed into the one server. With a few exceptions each server is designed around specific community interests, whether that’s technical interests, social interests, and so on. There is likely a Fediverse community for pretty much any interest you may have. And, unlike X or Facebook and other corporate entities, the Fediverse is distributed: No one owns it, no one entity controls it, and no one entity can shut it down. Oh, and it’s free to join and use.
As I was writing the description above, I was reminded that current day Fediverse instances are quite similar to the old “BBS” or bulletin board systems of the early internet. From all I can gather, and see, the social networks of the Fediverse are simply new incarnations of those old systems with the added feature of interoperability. That is, the old BBSes where siloed: You had to join each BBS you were interested in to access its information or join its discussions. Today, joining the Fediverse through one server gives you access to them all.
And, like the BBSes of old, the individual servers are run by one or two individuals on equipment they either own or rent. They are not run by a corporate entity. This means that each server manager/owner also sets the rules for the server – who can use it, acceptable uses/behaviors, etc – and can ban you if you break their rules. To me, this is the best part of the whole setup. The more we can move away from those corporate controlled entities, the better.
Sounds great, so why did that surprise me? I’ve never been a “social media” person. No X (or twitter), no Facebook (okay, I have an account but it’s pretty barren and lonely because I almost never visit it and do not post at all). But the idea of the Fediverse intrigued me so I set up a Mastodon account. We’ll see how that works out. And, of course, micro.blog also has a similar option for sharing whimsical thoughts that clutter up my brain (and now, I guess, my timeline!)
