The Social Media Seesaw is Why We Need the Fediverse

Last week, I praised Meta’s move from censoring information to using Community Notes to provide transparent, crowdsourced accountability. This swift reversal is encouraging, but its speed and decisiveness warn of the dangers of centralized social media like Facebook, X and even Bluesky.

If you are optimistic about last week’s changes like I am, take a moment to imagine you appreciated the status quo. A significant group of users were comfortable with Meta serving as the arbiter of what is accurate, true and moral.

They appreciated Big Tech’s general inclination to view progressive positions as “settled” fact. The larger world may still consider matters like the role of transgender athletes in sports an open conversation, but they do not.

Mark Zuckerberg discussed the changes with Joe Rogan last week, saying he felt Meta should not restrict speech to a degree that would hinder users from discussing the mainstream viewpoints presented on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Left-leaning publications like the Verge presented this decision as cataclysmic, while some of my more progressive friends began an exodus from anything owned by Meta.

A problem for the future of communication exists, whichever side of this debate you fall on. Sometime back, Meta decided to censor in a way preferential to left-leaning viewpoints. Unsurprisingly, those with more traditional views of culture and morals were angry. Meta’s teeter-totter now corrects at the cost of fanning the flames of progressive ire.

Zuckerberg has gone from being one of the Right’s boogeymen to one of the Left’s. For all I know, Meta will vacillate again four years from now, if not sooner.

This is not good for tools essential to our daily communication. As long as a single company controls our tools, this is exactly what we should expect. The only real solution is to quit centralizing.

Meta isn’t the villain here; depending on any company to be our key to communication is. X-nee-Twitter has been another case in point. As Elon Musk reshaped it to his liking, many received a rude awakening that “their” platform, a place they’d invested years in building a following, was not theirs at all.

Many jumped to Threads, hoping Meta’s upstart competitor would be less Musk-like and more akin to Twitter’s progressive past. Now that Meta’s policy has shifted towards Musk’s own, the dance has started afresh with Bluesky.

A jettisoned side project of the pre-Musk Twitter, Bluesky promises decentralization, but much of that promise remains unrealized. Too much of the core system remains under the direct or primary thumb of the service’s venture capital-backed parent company, Bluesky PBLLC.

Like other centralized social media, it also deploys an algorithm to determine which posts we see. Inevitably, these algorithms serve as a form of “soft censorship,” serving the company’s ideological preferences or its quest for stoking “engagement” at any cost.

This is good for running a successful social media company and repaying venture capitalists, but lays the foundation for another X or Meta, not something better. Users running from one platform to another, whose main difference is its proximity to one’s ideological comfort zone, may feel like they made a step forward, but the move only obscures the problem.

Meta or X could easily waiver under a future Democratic administration’s push for more moderation. Conversely, Bluesky could cave, and go the way of Meta and X, if Republicans make good on threats to revoke Section 230 protections.

I’ve written about the better alternative several times now: the Fediverse. Unlike Bluesky, the Fediverse is already fully decentralized, with no one holding the keys.

Most of us interact with the Fediverse via a platform called Mastodon, a Twitter-like system launched 2016. Unlike Bluesky, there are a wide array of servers (“instances”) running Mastodon’s software, many of which are free to join and each of which is free to set their own policies.

If Mastodon isn’t to your liking, other platforms are also parts of the Fediverse. One can use WordPress (the blogware) to interact via a plug-in. Flipboard, the one-time social media rising star, went all in on the Fediverse not long ago. Pixelfed, the Instagram competitor enjoying fifteen minutes of fame after Meta started blocking links to it, is also a part. Numerous other big and small systems likewise can participate. Interestingly, Meta’s Threads is in the process of becoming a part of the Fediverse, too.

The Fediverse uses a publicly developed, standardized communication protocol called ActivityPub, allowing all these options to work together. Pick any of them and you can follow me (@trbutler@faithtree.social) or any other Fediverse user. Change your mind on your pick of instance or platform and you can relocate, keeping the list of folks you follow as you do.

E-mail has been such an important, useful tool for decades because of this exact kind of decentralization.

Your best friend might love Gmail’s algorithmic sorting, your brother might self-host e-mail off his own domain and your mom might still inexplicably cling to Yahoo Mail. Love or hate their preferences, you can write them all and they can all write you, wherever your e-mail home may be.

Like the e-mail analogy, on the Fediverse, you can choose to be in a big hub instance with a bunch of users (like Gmail is for e-mail) or a small instance that might, for example, all be users who enjoy a specific hobby or share a common cause. If someone finds a given instance’s policies too strict or not strict enough (just as I object to how Gmail runs its system), that ability to switch is invaluable.

Your friends’ and family members’ addresses stay the same, whichever instance you land on, unlike, say, when you switch from X to Bluesky. Move between centralized platforms, and you start over, trying to find those you want to follow, discovering along the way some aren’t there at all.

That experience is far inferior to switching e-mail providers, whereas, on the Fediverse, one of the few differences with e-mail is that moving is even easier. While letting everyone know your new e-mail address is a pain, the Fediverse transparently redirects those who follow you to your new address after a move.

I followed my longtime approach to e-mail and decided to host my own Mastodon instance so my church and other organizations I work with, including OFB, were not beholden to someone else’s whims. That users can do this, with a little tech elbow grease, ought to keep instances honest. What’s keeping Bluesky honest? X? Their rapid switching — no matter how much I like the present moment’s prevailing winds — suggests the answer is “very little.”

Meta, for virtuous reasons or perceived competitive advantage, has made itself partially accountable. The slow but steady progress of making Threads fully participate in the Fediverse should keep Threads a bit more “honest.” For my criticisms of the company—both new and old—Threads is an oddly bright spot.

I don’t personally enjoy using it, with its own use of an obnoxious algorithm. Yet, Fediverse integration means Threads’ presence benefits those of us on Mastodon, too. I follow a good number of Threads users, getting to see what they say, without dealing with Threads myself. Likewise, as of last month, Threads users can follow my Fediverse account via Threads if they’d like to.

This interoperability isn’t an argument for joining Threads, but all the more reason to embrace Mastodon. After all, the part keeping Meta honest is whatever value they see in the broader Fediverse — either in letting Threads users gain more of an audience or providing Threads users with more interesting things to see. If everyone joins Threads, that point is moot.

By joining Mastodon with an awareness of Threads, though, you get the best of both worlds. Many Threads users have enabled Fediverse Sharing already, which means you can follow them elsewhere on places like Mastodon by simply adding “@threads.net” to the end of their user handles (e.g. “@timothyrbutler@threads.net”). Friends and acquaintances who haven’t turned on Fediverse Sharing almost always agree to do so if I ask, since it is quite simple to do.

A handy, free tool called Bridgy Fed even brings Bluesky users into the Fediverse party to a limited degree. Via a simple set of steps on the tool’s site, my Mastodon profile, along with OFB’s, are now mirrored on Bluesky without the hassle of posting things twice.

Much akin to asking Threads users to turn on Fediverse sharing, I can also ask Bluesky friends to follow “@ap.brid.gy” on there, a special account that “bridges” their posts to Mastodon. Thereafter, typing their Bluesky handle with “@ap.brid.gy” on end (e.g. “@trbutler.bsky.social@ap.brid.gy”) lets me find and follow them from the comfort of my Mastodon account.

The result? I’m slowly building a social presence on a place uncontrolled by capricious powers and able to ride the waves of fragmentation happening across social media. The other day, scrolling down my Mastodon feed, a post from a friend on Threads and another from a friend on Bluesky appeared right next to a third post that was “native” to the Mastodon. That’s so much nicer than having three separate places to check.

Native, full Fediverse support is ideal, but these steps with Threads and Bluesky have made my Mastodon feed the most useful social media feed I have access to already. These are genuine steps toward restoring the decentralized quality of the early Internet, albeit in a most modern way.

If social media is going to remain our means of so much communication in the days ahead, isn’t that what we want?