How Fediverse Works (and Why It Could Be the Future of Social Media)
Idealist nerds have a long history of giving horribly confusing names to potentially revolutionary technologies. The same goes for Fediverse, a combination of “Federation” and “Universe” and a potential future social internet. But what does this mean?
Simply put, Fediverse is a collective name for many different social networks and platforms that are connected to each other. Users of any of these services can follow users of any other, reply to posts, like and share them.
There are many articles and websites that explain this concept in detail, but most of them get bogged down in technical language pretty quickly. I’d like to avoid this, so here’s my good faith attempt to explain what Fediverse is in plain English.
First, though, let’s talk about email.
Email Is Decentralized (And Why It Matters to Fediverse)
Anyone with an email address can send an email to anyone else. Gmail users, for example, aren’t limited to communicating with other Gmail users—they can send messages to Outlook users, Yahoo Mail users, and even people who have their own email servers in the basement. Essentially, anyone with an email address can write to anyone else who has an email address. In other words, email is decentralized.
There is no one company or institution responsible for email – there are many different email providers, and they are all compatible with each other. This is because email is an open protocol for which anyone can create a service.
The largest social networks don’t work like that now. For example, you can’t follow user X from Facebook or follow the Reddit community from Tumblr. That’s why all these sites are filled with screenshots from other sites: people want to share posts from other sites, but there is no good way to do it. Fediverse is trying to solve this problem.
Follow anyone anywhere
Fediverse is an attempt to make social networks more like email, that is, to allow users of different services to follow and interact with each other anywhere without registering a million different accounts.
One of the largest Fediverse services at the moment is Mastodon , which launched in 2016 as an alternative to Twitter. Other open source networks on the platform include Pixelfed , a photo sharing service similar to 2010’s Instagram, and Peertube . As I mentioned, there is also Threads, a network owned by Meta that allows users to share their posts with Fediverse.
How it works in practice: I’m fairly active on Mastodon , but I have a few friends who only post on Threads. Since Threads is connected to Fediverse, I can follow Threads users, see their posts, and even write comments using Mastadon. It’s as simple as finding a Threads user from inside Mastodon, following them, and interacting with them just like you would with any other user.
This is the promise of Fediverse: you use any social network you want to use, and connect with people on any social network they want to use. And there are a few more benefits. When I stopped using Twitter a couple of years ago (before it became X), I left all my followers behind. This works differently with Fediverse: you can switch from one service to another and take your followers with you. This is the freedom that cannot be obtained from a centralized system.
The Potential Future of Social Media
A number of companies and enthusiasts are working on other ways to connect to Fediverse. WordPress offers a plugin that allows bloggers, for example, to share their posts – replies are displayed as comments. Flipboard, a news reader app, recently added the ability to follow Fediverse users from within the app , and email newsletter platform Ghost is also working on a similar feature . And there are ways to connect other networks that aren’t Fediverse – for example, you can connect Bluesky to Fediverse with a little effort.
There’s a certain idealism behind all these efforts: many of the largest Fediverse services are run by nonprofits and volunteers. But the participation of smaller publishing companies like Ghost and Flipboard suggests that Fediverse could also become a place where writers and publications can connect directly with readers in the future. A decentralized social media system could also allow smaller social media startups to compete with large platforms. This is a potentially exciting time for social media and the Internet in general.
All this is possible because Fediverse is based on an open protocol that anyone can use. The hope is that over time there will be more services offering integration, and social media will become as open as email. Will this definitely happen? I don’t know. And Fediverse, like everything on the Internet, has its problems. Moderation, for example, is a huge challenge, and the emergence of larger platforms may make it more difficult.
With this explanation I only scratched the surface of the service – I could dig a lot more. For the most part, though, when you hear “Fediverse,” you will now understand what it means: a series of social networks and platforms connected to each other. We hope you’ll hear a lot more about this in the coming years.