Life in the Fediverse (aka Mastodon)

The fediverse is a collection of social media platforms that can all communicate with one another. It’s similar to the way email works: gmail.com and hotmail.com are owned and operated by different sites, but users of either can send and receive email from one another. Mastodon is the best-known server software in the fediverse, but there are a number of other software options. They all use the same protocols so they can all talk to each other. Hence “the fediverse” as the overall name.

As with email, you don’t need to know anything about the server software in order to use the service.

I’ve been part of the fediverse for five years now. It’s my favorite social media service. I use a cross-poster to post to Twitter. But at present, I mainly read my fediverse feed, and only check Twitter for notifications.

The main advantages of the fediverse:

No Advertising

Fediverse is user-supported. Users run their own servers, or get accounts on servers run by volunteers and/or supported by donations. There are some corporate-owned instances, but I don’t know anyone who uses them and couldn’t even tell you how to find one. Most of the fediverse actively discourages brand accounts, ~brand engagement~, and anything that looks like traditional marketing.

Creators and small businesses do show off and link to their products, but they do so like a person talking to other people, rather than a brand wooing customers.

No Algorithm

Because the fediverse is user-supported, users are not the product on the fediverse. They don’t need to lure advertisers with promises of ~engagement~. Fediverse feeds are shown in the order posted, most recent post first. That's it.

I have RTs turned off for everyone on Twitter because otherwise my feed would be 80% viral posts. But I have RTs on for almost everyone on Fediverse, because the ratio of posts-to-RTs is much better on Fediverse.

Fediverse doesn’t have a quote-tweet function, either, which cuts down on the “I am linking to this horrible thing so I can tell everyone how horrible it is” effect that Twitter has.

Everybody talks about how The Algorithm makes Twitter a worse place, but I think the impact of Twitter’s “promote ~engagement~” policy is nonetheless underestimated. Even if you personally use Latest Tweets, and turn off RTs for every person in your timeline, and ignore Twitter’s Promoted Tweets and What’s Happening and Who to Follow and all the other cruft: you cannot escape the pervasive influence of The Algorithm on the people that you follow. The Algorithm’s love for ~engagement~ shoves controversial, despised posts in front of users. Because an angry user is an engaged user, one who is yelling at other users and getting them to yell back. The Algorithm doesn’t care if you enjoy using the service -- as long as you use it.

No Virality

This is one of the “I think it’s a feature but you may think it’s a bug” items on this list. Even when The Algorithm promotes heart-warming or entertaining content, virality is still bad IMO.

What I want from social media is:

An online place to interact with friends and make new ones.

Virality is the antithesis of social.

Viral posts encourage people to interact with strangers who are overwhelmed by attention. Virality is one-sided. It changes the media from “social” to “broadcast.” It shifts attention from “people you know and like” to “strangers with whom you cannot connect because 10,000 other people are also reacting to this post.”

As a creator, I understand the appeal: I’d like my creative work to go viral, for thousands of people to see and enjoy it. But still: my primary use for social media is to be social. Not to broadcast. Not to be parasocial.

Furthermore, I find it easier to promote my work on fediverse than on Twitter. On Twitter, my friends are bombarded with viral content and miss my posts. On fediverse, my friends are not bombarded by viral content, so they see my posts and will boost them and respond to them.

Limited Search

The other “feature that you might think is a bug.” Most Fediverse instances support searching on hashtags, but do not allow you to enter a word or a name and find toots from anyone who’s said it. This is an anti-harassment and anti-spam measure. It means brands can’t do a name search and respond to anyone who’s mentioned their brand, or mentioned a competitor. It means troll-bots can’t search for Controversial Phrase Du Jour and spam out angry messages at anyone talking about it. It couples with “no virality” to keep the fediverse a place for people to interact with friends and potential friends, not to yell at strangers or engage in parasocial behavior.

Distributed

I’ve been on social networks before that turned sour due to changes in network management. OpenDiary self-destructed when it tried to launch paid accounts as an entirely separate website. Despite being open-source, LiveJournal was a single site that was sold and re-sold and re-sold, growing progressively worse with each new owner. Twitter hasn’t changed management (yet), but its incremental changes to The Algorithm have made the site less and less pleasant to use.

Fediverse doesn’t carry this “what if $Jerk buys the company” risk because it’s not one company. No one can buy the fediverse, and no one can change the fediverse management, because it’s thousands of instances run by thousands of admins. It’d be like worrying that someone terrible was going to buy the idea of email and stop you from being able to use email without seeing ads. Yes, your current provider could change owners and do that to your current email address. But you could get a new email account with another provider, or even set up your own email server.

And fediverse is much better than that analogy, because fediverse was designed to make switching instances easy and painless. I have had accounts on four different instances since I started using the fediverse. All of them let me download all of my content when I choose to. I can download the list of people I follow and re-import it to a new account. If I want to close my account on an instance, I can transfer all of my followers from the old account to the new one.

More Freedom to Choose

A service like Twitter or Facebook has to decide on a moderation policy, and users either have to accept that moderation policy or leave.

As a distributed network, fediverse doesn’t have a single moderation policy uniformly enforced across all of the fediverse. Each instance can make its own moderation policy and choose how to enforce it. It can be as draconian or open as the admin chooses. It can be lopsided or even-handed. And because there are thousands of instances and it’s easy to move, “leave if you don’t like it” isn’t flippant and impractical. You can find an instance that suits your needs.

It’s not a flawless solution. Let’s say you hate moderators and want to hang out on NoModeration.Instance, home to you, 200 like-minded individuals, and 80,000 spambots. NoModeration.Instance is likely to get banned by most other instances, because they don’t want to hear from its 80,000 spambots. If your instance is banned by the instances your friends use, you won’t be able to follow them without switching instances.

But it generally works and allows people to balance their preferences. PETAIsThe.Way can ban Mmm.Meat and vice versa, while instances that don't feel strongly about the subject can let their users follow people from both instances.

More Community

This one is fuzzier than the others, but I find that community and interaction is much better on fediverse. Others have commented on this, and I think there are structural reasons for it. The Algorithm that promotes ~engagement~ encourages most users to be passive consumers of the content created by the most popular users.

Absent such an algorithm, the fediverse is a place where users interact with one another as peers. Users feel less pressure to perform and less reluctance to chat. My Twitter feed became much more active after I started crossposting from fediverse, because Twitter’s message to users is “no one cares about you.” And it sends this message even to Twitter’s biggest accounts -- even if hundreds of thousands of people read your tweets, they don’t care about you. You are a Content Creator. Those people following you don’t know you and you don’t know them and there is no basis for trust or friendship. The Twitter experience is arguably worse the more popular your account becomes.

The fediverse reminds me of the early days of OpenDiary and LiveJournal. The people I follow are more likely to interact with each other as well as me. They are more likely to discuss everyday matters like what they’re doing, or how they feel, or what their plans are. When people are talking about the same topic on my Twitter feed, it’s likely to be provocative hot takes. When people are talking about the same thing on my Fedi feed, it’s more likely to be thoughtful and considered.

In addition, Fediverse has two features for discoverability and community that other social media sites lack. These are the “Local” and “Federated” timelines. “Local” shows the timeline of posts from every user on your instance. “Federated” shows the timeline of posts for every user on your instance PLUS every user followed by any user on your instance. I seldom look at these timelines, but I benefit from it anyway because new people can look at them and find me that way. And especially on smaller instances, they promote a sense of community: look, all my friends are here, and they're chatting with their friends.

Granular Privacy Settings

On Fediverse, toots can be:

• Public: Anyone can see them
• Unlisted: Anyone can see them but they’re only shown to your followers, not to the Local/Federated timelines
• Follower-Only: Only people who follow you can see them. I wish this was “followed only”, because unless you want to require permission to be followed (which you can do!), anyone can follow you to see your followers-only toots. Still, it’s nice to have an option of this nature.
• Direct Message: only visible to the people mentioned.

This isn’t as good as Dreamwidth/LJ’s privacy settings, but it’s better than Twitter’s “either everything is public or nothing is.”

I’m pretty sure I’ve left some stuff out from this post, but it’s pretty long already so I’ll call it here.

Tl;dr: if you want an online venue where you can interact with friends and make new ones, Fediverse is a great option.

Warden, by Delyth Angharad

Warden is an M/M fantasy romance novella, around 36,000 words. It has two plots that run in parallel: a fantasy action-adventure as the two protagonists investigate some nefarious/mysterious activity on behalf of their king, and a romance as they figure out what sort of relationship they want.

I enjoyed the novella on the strength of the protagonists being adorable together. The main characters, Alwyn and Dain, are well-drawn and distinctive. Alwyn is sober, serious and angsty, while Dain hides all his angst behind a façade of charm and gregariousness. There is some friction in the romance plot, but for the most part the characters try to be mature, sensible and honest. I always love that in a story.

To me, the adventure plotline was a way to keep the characters occupied while they fell in love. It involved a lot of “protagonist gets captured and/or beat up and then other protagonist rescues them”. So it provided some good hurt/comfort moments. The protagonists took turns rescuing each other: one of my most beloved tropes.

The ending is perplexing, because it doesn’t resolve either the romantic or action plotlines. It’s not a cliffhanger, in the sense that the protagonists are in a good position to continue both relationship and investigation. But it doesn’t feel finished, either.

The Amazon blurb describes Warden as “light on violence” and with no killing of humans, and the last is only true if you decide the flashback about war crimes doesn’t count. If your baseline for violence is something like Game of Thrones, fair, it’s light on violence in comparison. If your baseline is Pride and Prejudice, it’s got quite a lot of violence. XD

There are some typos/formatting oddities (I noticed several instances where dialogue should’ve ended with a comma but used a period, and vice versa), but it wasn’t enough to hamper my enjoyment of the story.

So overall, this was a fun story with some lovely sweet scenes between the protagonists. I expect there will be a sequel and I plan to read it. It's a solid 8. n_n