As I write this Joe Biden is the 46th President of the United States. There is a Presidential account called POTUS over on Twitter (X) at twitter.com/POTUS which honestly should probably be deleted since Twitter (X) is run by a fascist-friendly entity in 2024. (Note: I stopped posting on Twitter in 2022.)
There is also a @potus account on Threads, which is a platform owned by another terrible entity, Facebook.
Both of those accounts exist so the President can talk to the people, which is good. Sure, the President has many ways to talk to the people, but those platforms provide a place where the people can talk back, and share, and discuss. Those are (sometimes) good things.
But this is the Internet my friends, and just like the President, any company, any organization, and any person, can have a web site, the President can have their own damn server for social media microblogging.
Do you know about the Fediverse? Imagine if you could choose an alternative to Twitter, but still talk to Twitter users… or talk to Facebook users, and Instagram users, and Threads users, and now imagine we don’t need Twitter or Facebook (which also owns Instagram and Threads). It’s possible.
Also imagine you can block users and also entire servers. If there’s a Nazi server you can block it so you’ll never see their posts. And yes, there are such servers. Most of them are already blocked by most civilized Fediverse servers.
Threads is starting to federate, and what that means is I can see all of the posts that @potus@threads.net posts even if I never have a Threads account, because I have a Mastodon account at @rasterweb@mastodon.social on the Fediverse. I can subscribe and see the posts at https://mastodon.social/@potus@threads.net. Now, at this point I cannot reply to those posts, but supposedly by the end of 2024 this will be possible. (Threads needs to turn on two-way Federation, basically.)
Now, there are two opposing views of the Fediverse allowing federation to and from Threads, and those boil down to “Hey, Threads is run by a terrible organization that will not behave and does terrible things so we’ll block them!” and “Hey, this is the way we get more users to leave Facebook/Threads, by showing them there is an open alternative!”
I’ve probably simplified the two views, but I’m a simple man. I will admit I still use Instagram (mainly because I have a lot of friends there) but I also use Pixelfed and believe me, if I could just use Pixelfed and still interact with Instagram users, and they could see my posts and interact with me, I’d probably stop using Instagram…
Of course if Facebook hears enough of this, they’ll probably never want to Federate. It would mean losing users. Large companies depend on lock-in to keep you there, and it sucks.
So while I mentioned my account at mastodon.social, that’s not all there is… In fact, there are hundreds, sorry, thousands of Mastodon servers. Here’s a list of some. Check out FediDB and right now there are over 27,000 servers on the Fediverse. Some have thousands of users, some have just one user.
But I just wanted to let you know there is an alternative. Best case, we destroy these large powerful corporations that control social media, and worse case we live alongside them, as an alternative for some people.
Wait, who pays for this!? Well, people do. I donate a small amount of money to the servers I have accounts on. Not everyone does, and that’s okay. I don’t see advertisements, and none of the people who run the servers I use are selling my data. The Fediverse is much more about the people, not the money. But will it scale? Sure, maybe, or not? We don’t know, but we sure as hell should try it and find out.
Anyway, welcome Mr. President!