There’s been much talk around how badly presently available social media platforms are performing. Each passing week, we find our privacy tossed around, our data sold, our feed regulated and opinions manipulated.
While we are at it, the need for more open, authentic and free platforms has come into recognition again and again. I’m happy to share one such network of platforms for the people who are looking desperately for change.
It’s called Fediverse.
“The Fediverse is the ensemble of federated servers that are used for web publishing (i.e. social networking, microblogging, macroblogging, or websites) and file hosting. On different servers (instances), users can create so called identities. These identities are able to communicate over the boundaries of the instances because the softwares running on the servers support one or more communication protocols which follow the open standard. As an identity on the fediverse, you are able to post text and other media, or to follow posts by other identities. In some cases, you can even show or share data (video, audio, text and other files) publicly or to a selected group of identities and allow other identities to edit your data (i.e. a calendar or an address book).”
So in layman’s language it is distributed version of social media i.e. there is no one central server rather it’s a pool of instances. You can join any existing one or create your own. Also, there’s some amazing feature in here: whatever you share on one platform or whatever conversation you have on one of the fediverse apps gets reflected in other apps belonging to the universe too because they all can communicate with each other using a protocol called “Activity Pub”.
Here’s a brief video to explain you better ~
So, you can find really cool alternative apps for existent ones:
Twitter -> Mastodon, Friendica, Misskey, Pleroma[microblogging]
YouTube -> PeerTube, FunkWhale[video hosting]
Facebook -> Hubzilla, GnuSocial[social media]
Medium -> Plume , Write.as[regular blogging]
Instagram -> PixelFed [Image Hosting]
Checkout more apps on the Fediverse here:
The best part is all of these apps are open source and have rich functionalities.
So, why is this not adopted yet?
We need an alternate sustainable revenue generation model for our internet. Fediverse has “no-ads”. So, the person who hosts the instance usually depends on donation from the user to keep the server running. Although the amount per person is not much, most of us are not yet tuned with the paid version of internet. Besides I believe, social medias will run when you have all your network shifted to that too. Given that Facebook etc have become these giant directories of your contacts, it has become really difficult to do that transition for the whole network in small time.
But good news is we have an alternative and we have already begun!
Hit me up @aditiBhatnagar@fsmi.social
See you on that side of the network,
Cheers