Okay so this isn’t going to be a standard format article, it’s going to be more akin to my Finding Your Digital Home piece that I wrote a few weeks back. This post is going to be about the Fediverse and why I believe in it so much that I’ve basically dedicated all of my time to building for it and building on it.
First and foremost, the Fediverse is not a technology. It’s not ActivityPub, it’s not WordPress, or Mastodon, or Threads. The Fediverse is an idea. It’s the idea that things can be better—that people’s ideas are valuable, and that those people should be able to express those ideas however they see fit. The fediverse is hope that people can sustain themselves on a platform that’s not designed to take from them, but to give to them.
Centralized platforms owned you. They owned your content, they owned your platform, they owned your following. If you wanted to keep that, you had to operate on their terms. The Fediverse is built on the idea that things shouldn’t work like that. It stands for people—it gives them a place to build something that’s wholly their own. In the Fediverse your art is yours, your ideas are yours, your platform is yours, and nobody can take that away from you.
It serves as a collective—anyone can build their blog and have it tap into the Fediverse. People can consume the content from wherever they see fit and they can all join in on the same conversation. You don’t have to make sure that people can find your site on Google, you’re not beholden to their idea of an optimized search engine. You don’t have to make sure that your videos are made the way YouTube sees fit, you don’t have to make sure your photos and videos are made the way Meta or TikTok want them to be. It is, and will always be, yours. Sure it’s messy and confusing and not everything works all the time, but it’s ours, not some corporation’s. We made this ourselves because we care about this better future and we spend every day trying to make it just a little bit better.
But all of this doesn’t come without a cost. People like me and those who write for this blog, those who manage our infrastructure, those who build clients and applications that tie into the Fediverse do this because they believe in a better future. They do this because they want to build a place for people who want to express themselves. They do it out of love for their fellow human beings, not because they’re looking to make a quick buck. Remember that every time you pay for the premium subscription to your client, or you turn off your ad blocker, or you donate to your instance admins, you’re showing that you also believe in this idea. You’re showing those of us who have dedicated so much of our lives to building this idea that our efforts, our ideas, our hope matters.
Do you guys share this same love for this idea? Let me know in the comments or over on Mastodon.
