Ecologia Digital

2025-12-05 22:36:07

Museums in the Fediverse: Experiments with Tainacan, ActivityPub, and WebSocial

Below, we present the slides and the text of José Murilo’s presentation, representing Ibram-Museus at the 1st WebSocialBR in Brasília, on December 3, 2025.

Slide 1 – Museums in the Fediverse: Experiments by Ibram-Museus with Tainacan, ActivityPub, and WebSocial

It is a pleasure to participate in this event, and I want to thank everyone involved in making it happen. This will be an opportunity to present the reflections and experiments that Ibram-Museus is conducting on the topic of decentralized social networks. We also want to listen to all the initiatives presented here and make ourselves available for effective dialogue around ideas, strategies, and applications to develop this environment of decentralized social networks within public policy.

Slide 2 – Why the Fediverse?

Following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in 2023, experts and politicians in Brazil and abroad have recognized that the free services provided by Big Tech social networks—tainted with aggressive surveillance schemes for customized advertising—are harming the health and well-being of users, especially young people. The problem of misinformation, on the other hand, poses threats to democratic regimes.

This undesirable scenario in the social media environment, combined with Brazilians’ special preference for this mode of online communication, led us to imagine that a public policy for this field, in a country as large as Brazil, could have a significant demonstrative effect. Therefore, Ibram believes it is timely to conduct an experiment with federated social networks and museums—memory institutions.

Slide 3 – Why Museums in the Fediverse? Tainacan…

Since 2016, Ibram has been in an important partnership with public universities to develop the Tainacan Project. It is a digital repository application in open-source software, specialized in the online publication of digital collections, which Ibram presents as an integral part of the Networked Collection Program—a public policy based on open-source software.

In the management that began in 2023, especially with the administrative restructuring of Ibram, we managed to expand the scale of digital services offered by Ibram to the museum field. To achieve this, it was necessary to accelerate the institute’s capacity to operate Digital Culture public policies autonomously, and for this, cooperation with Information Science departments at public universities was crucial.

The institutional design proposed for this Ibram-University cooperation favored the involvement of young museologists, archivists, and librarians in the formulation and implementation of applications and in activating networks for the museum field.

In these 10 years of development, a measure of Tainacan’s performance and its community in the field of digital memory is the fact that the software already has versions in 12 languages, with more than 2,000 active instances and over 40,000 downloads.

Slide 4 – The First Step: Brasiliana Museus

To inaugurate the initiative of Brazilian Museums in the Fediverse, in January 2024, we activated the ActivityPub plugin on the Brasiliana Museus WordPress site and published the first post from a gov.br domain on the web social, i.e., in the Fediverse. Comments on this post, originating in the Fediverse, were also recorded in the comments section of the post on the Brasiliana blog, demonstrating the possibility of integrating institutional websites with the Fediverse.

It is important to mention that Brasiliana Museus is a service for aggregating museological collections developed from Tainacan, which became the basis for developing new applications, as we will see later.

It was a beginning, a simple experiment, but we consider that the initiative had great significance. Our hope was that it would be the start of a transformative process in how we, as people and institutions, connect online, and that it could provide an improvement in our fundamental relationship with the digital and the web.

Slide 5 – Tainacan + WordPress + ActivityPub

Technical aspects: The Tainacan Project is developed as a plugin for WordPress, just like the ActivityPub plugin, which connects WordPress to the Fediverse. WordPress, in turn, is used on 43.4% of all websites on the internet, being the most popular content management platform in the world. The ecosystem expands as the community increases the library of available plugins.

Not by chance, recently, specialist Dave Winer, creator of the RSS format (an XML format for open web content distribution), declared that he sees WordPress as the ideal “OS” for the open social web.

As soon as we experimented with the WordPress ActivityPub plugin, we realized how we could immediately choose, in the plugin interface, the type of Tainacan post we could select for posting in the Fediverse.

In other words, Tainacan, as if by magic, began to have a direct channel for segmented dissemination of cultural heritage content to subscribing users. At that moment, the Tainacan team at Ibram was impacted by what we could imagine in terms of new applications of Tainacan for decentralized social networks.

From there, we defined the initiative’s objective as providing museums and other memory institutions with a tool that facilitates exploring decentralized social networks as an environment for disseminating their collections.

From other experiments with museums in the Fediverse, such as the San Francisco Airport Museum (SFO Museum – ActivityPub Services), we realized that in the case of museum collections published in Tainacan, each item could become a post or even a new profile in the Fediverse—in the case, for example, of museum items of broad interest.

Slide 6 – Online Audience Management

From the support and development teams’ work on Tainacan at Ibram, we have been adapting the core application for developing other functionalities beyond aggregation, such as event registration on the “Visit Museums” site, and for registering memory institutions in the “MuseusBR” service. Another planned initiative is developing the module of public notices that would complete, along with Tainacan, what we consider a package of useful applications for public institutions. The most interesting aspect is that these new applications, developed within the WordPress ecosystem, like Tainacan, immediately integrate into the Fediverse.

For this reason, we understand that the moment is opportune in the Tainacan community to embrace the connection with the Fediverse and effectively explore how memory institutions can make the most of the open social web. The goal is to provide institutions that promote access to knowledge with updated tools for managing their online audiences.

Slide 7 – On the Role of Universities

When I think about the challenge of launching a strategy to popularize the Fediverse in Brazil, I cannot help but think of universities as institutions best positioned for leadership. It is impossible not to remember the mobilization period for Eco-92, where universities entered into a healthy competition in terms of diligence in installing their first institutional email servers. At that time, the internet was born under the auspices of institutionalization.

The problems of the Internet certainly have multiple causes and ingredients, but from the perspective of the Brazilian Institute of Museums, they present the contours of an institutional crisis. This is because technologies that mediate social relations, like the Internet, intrinsically create institutions.

A coordination mechanism that enables collective action, with the capacity to process information to solve increasingly complex problems, regardless of whether it is supported by information technology, is an institution.

Slide 8 – Public Policy vs. Monopoly Logic

In the early days of the Internet, there was a group of ‘hackers’ who advocated for the total absence of government action in the digital environment. This happened with the publication of the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. The last 20 years seem to indicate that the absence of public policy only favored the takeover of the web by speculative capital interests and transnational monopolies.

“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of the Mind. In the name of the future, I ask you from the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” (Davos, Feb / 1996)

The crucial decision is between the policy that defends the common interest and deliberately favors the emergence of new digital institutionalities on the network, and the blind policy that, through inaction, allows the evolution of the digital environment to occur randomly, at the whim of the interests of large foreign technology companies.

We could perhaps imagine a “Declaration for a Public Interest Cyberspace” to counter John Barlow’s declaration in the 90s.

Slide 9 – The App as an Adoption Strategy

Here I want to mention one last development of Ibram’s experiments with the Fediverse, which emerged as a very interesting opportunity.

The great challenge is how to guide the transition from the centralized, proprietary environment to the decentralized environment, which establishes distributed responsibilities and an expanded role for institutions that promote access to knowledge.

In the last 2 years, we have conducted some experiments, and recently we have been in contact with Michael Foster from the NewsMast Foundation. It is an organization dedicated to developing the WebSocial, offering the possibility of creating community apps for organizations interested in exploring the Fediverse.

The app works integrated with WordPress and promotes community engagement based on a Mastodon instance. In other words, through the partnership with the NewsMast Foundation, Ibram plans to boost the strategy of occupying the Fediverse by Brazilian museums.

Michael Foster, who is part of the project, often says that the Fediverse is an environment determined by technology, where everything starts with a server or even a protocol. However, this is not the case for people in general or communities in general. For communities and people, especially in Brazil, social spaces start with an app.

The Ibram app is born from the set of users of the Forum (WordPress) that developed the National Sectorial Museums Plan – PNSM in a participatory manner and is coupled to the Fediverse instance (social.museus.gov.br) where we intend to offer Brazilian museums the opportunity to create institutional accounts. If everything goes as planned, at the beginning of 2026, we will launch the “Museums in the Fediverse” app in the Android and Apple stores.

Slide 10 – Summary

The network technology that mediates much of our lives is social engineering—which means that deciding how it works is (or should be) a political issue. If we want to have any hope that these collective digital spaces will result in a world worth living in, we need to build our Internet policies based on solid institutional principles.

It matters to museums, for example, that if there is a social network service willing to host memory institutions of public interest, the data of the museums’ interaction with their interested public is also preserved as a digital collection and for research.

Ibram understands that Brazilian museums have a contribution to make in reflecting on the future of the digital environment, especially concerning the issue of digital memory.

The Entry Guide to the Fediverse

O “Guia de Entrada para o Fediverso”
lançado pelo Ibram por ocasião de evento, em 03/12
As a result of this internal reflection by Ibram-Museus, and in support of the 1st WebSocialBR, the Brazilian Fediverse Forum was an opportunity for the launch of the ‘Entry Guide to the Fediverse.’ It is a digital booklet with basic information for anyone interested in exploring the universe of decentralized social networks. We invite you to discover this alternative to the capture promoted by centralized platforms and their algorithms — download the Guide and take your first steps into the Fediverse.

Building apps for social spaces

The Newsmast team was in Rome last week, working through our messaging and branding with a non-profit agency. It was hot, hard work, ending up with a lot of mosquito bites, some fabulous memories and a clear plan to take forward.

^{Michael Foster (Paths & Patches)}

Ecologia Digital

2025-12-05 22:36:07

Museums in the Fediverse: Experiments with Tainacan, ActivityPub, and WebSocial

Below, we present the slides and the text of José Murilo’s presentation, representing Ibram-Museus at the 1st WebSocialBR in Brasília, on December 3, 2025.

Slide 1 – Museums in the Fediverse: Experiments by Ibram-Museus with Tainacan, ActivityPub, and WebSocial

It is a pleasure to participate in this event, and I want to thank everyone involved in making it happen. This will be an opportunity to present the reflections and experiments that Ibram-Museus is conducting on the topic of decentralized social networks. We also want to listen to all the initiatives presented here and make ourselves available for effective dialogue around ideas, strategies, and applications to develop this environment of decentralized social networks within public policy.

Slide 2 – Why the Fediverse?

Following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in 2023, experts and politicians in Brazil and abroad have recognized that the free services provided by Big Tech social networks—tainted with aggressive surveillance schemes for customized advertising—are harming the health and well-being of users, especially young people. The problem of misinformation, on the other hand, poses threats to democratic regimes.

This undesirable scenario in the social media environment, combined with Brazilians’ special preference for this mode of online communication, led us to imagine that a public policy for this field, in a country as large as Brazil, could have a significant demonstrative effect. Therefore, Ibram believes it is timely to conduct an experiment with federated social networks and museums—memory institutions.

Slide 3 – Why Museums in the Fediverse? Tainacan…

Since 2016, Ibram has been in an important partnership with public universities to develop the Tainacan Project. It is a digital repository application in open-source software, specialized in the online publication of digital collections, which Ibram presents as an integral part of the Networked Collection Program—a public policy based on open-source software.

In the management that began in 2023, especially with the administrative restructuring of Ibram, we managed to expand the scale of digital services offered by Ibram to the museum field. To achieve this, it was necessary to accelerate the institute’s capacity to operate Digital Culture public policies autonomously, and for this, cooperation with Information Science departments at public universities was crucial.

The institutional design proposed for this Ibram-University cooperation favored the involvement of young museologists, archivists, and librarians in the formulation and implementation of applications and in activating networks for the museum field.

In these 10 years of development, a measure of Tainacan’s performance and its community in the field of digital memory is the fact that the software already has versions in 12 languages, with more than 2,000 active instances and over 40,000 downloads.

Slide 4 – The First Step: Brasiliana Museus

To inaugurate the initiative of Brazilian Museums in the Fediverse, in January 2024, we activated the ActivityPub plugin on the Brasiliana Museus WordPress site and published the first post from a gov.br domain on the web social, i.e., in the Fediverse. Comments on this post, originating in the Fediverse, were also recorded in the comments section of the post on the Brasiliana blog, demonstrating the possibility of integrating institutional websites with the Fediverse.

It is important to mention that Brasiliana Museus is a service for aggregating museological collections developed from Tainacan, which became the basis for developing new applications, as we will see later.

It was a beginning, a simple experiment, but we consider that the initiative had great significance. Our hope was that it would be the start of a transformative process in how we, as people and institutions, connect online, and that it could provide an improvement in our fundamental relationship with the digital and the web.

Slide 5 – Tainacan + WordPress + ActivityPub

Technical aspects: The Tainacan Project is developed as a plugin for WordPress, just like the ActivityPub plugin, which connects WordPress to the Fediverse. WordPress, in turn, is used on 43.4% of all websites on the internet, being the most popular content management platform in the world. The ecosystem expands as the community increases the library of available plugins.

Not by chance, recently, specialist Dave Winer, creator of the RSS format (an XML format for open web content distribution), declared that he sees WordPress as the ideal “OS” for the open social web.

As soon as we experimented with the WordPress ActivityPub plugin, we realized how we could immediately choose, in the plugin interface, the type of Tainacan post we could select for posting in the Fediverse.

In other words, Tainacan, as if by magic, began to have a direct channel for segmented dissemination of cultural heritage content to subscribing users. At that moment, the Tainacan team at Ibram was impacted by what we could imagine in terms of new applications of Tainacan for decentralized social networks.

From there, we defined the initiative’s objective as providing museums and other memory institutions with a tool that facilitates exploring decentralized social networks as an environment for disseminating their collections.

From other experiments with museums in the Fediverse, such as the San Francisco Airport Museum (SFO Museum – ActivityPub Services), we realized that in the case of museum collections published in Tainacan, each item could become a post or even a new profile in the Fediverse—in the case, for example, of museum items of broad interest.

Slide 6 – Online Audience Management

From the support and development teams’ work on Tainacan at Ibram, we have been adapting the core application for developing other functionalities beyond aggregation, such as event registration on the “Visit Museums” site, and for registering memory institutions in the “MuseusBR” service. Another planned initiative is developing the module of public notices that would complete, along with Tainacan, what we consider a package of useful applications for public institutions. The most interesting aspect is that these new applications, developed within the WordPress ecosystem, like Tainacan, immediately integrate into the Fediverse.

For this reason, we understand that the moment is opportune in the Tainacan community to embrace the connection with the Fediverse and effectively explore how memory institutions can make the most of the open social web. The goal is to provide institutions that promote access to knowledge with updated tools for managing their online audiences.

Slide 7 – On the Role of Universities

When I think about the challenge of launching a strategy to popularize the Fediverse in Brazil, I cannot help but think of universities as institutions best positioned for leadership. It is impossible not to remember the mobilization period for Eco-92, where universities entered into a healthy competition in terms of diligence in installing their first institutional email servers. At that time, the internet was born under the auspices of institutionalization.

The problems of the Internet certainly have multiple causes and ingredients, but from the perspective of the Brazilian Institute of Museums, they present the contours of an institutional crisis. This is because technologies that mediate social relations, like the Internet, intrinsically create institutions.

A coordination mechanism that enables collective action, with the capacity to process information to solve increasingly complex problems, regardless of whether it is supported by information technology, is an institution.

Slide 8 – Public Policy vs. Monopoly Logic

In the early days of the Internet, there was a group of ‘hackers’ who advocated for the total absence of government action in the digital environment. This happened with the publication of the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. The last 20 years seem to indicate that the absence of public policy only favored the takeover of the web by speculative capital interests and transnational monopolies.

“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of the Mind. In the name of the future, I ask you from the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” (Davos, Feb / 1996)

The crucial decision is between the policy that defends the common interest and deliberately favors the emergence of new digital institutionalities on the network, and the blind policy that, through inaction, allows the evolution of the digital environment to occur randomly, at the whim of the interests of large foreign technology companies.

We could perhaps imagine a “Declaration for a Public Interest Cyberspace” to counter John Barlow’s declaration in the 90s.

Slide 9 – The App as an Adoption Strategy

Here I want to mention one last development of Ibram’s experiments with the Fediverse, which emerged as a very interesting opportunity.

The great challenge is how to guide the transition from the centralized, proprietary environment to the decentralized environment, which establishes distributed responsibilities and an expanded role for institutions that promote access to knowledge.

In the last 2 years, we have conducted some experiments, and recently we have been in contact with Michael Foster from the NewsMast Foundation. It is an organization dedicated to developing the WebSocial, offering the possibility of creating community apps for organizations interested in exploring the Fediverse.

The app works integrated with WordPress and promotes community engagement based on a Mastodon instance. In other words, through the partnership with the NewsMast Foundation, Ibram plans to boost the strategy of occupying the Fediverse by Brazilian museums.

Michael Foster, who is part of the project, often says that the Fediverse is an environment determined by technology, where everything starts with a server or even a protocol. However, this is not the case for people in general or communities in general. For communities and people, especially in Brazil, social spaces start with an app.

The Ibram app is born from the set of users of the Forum (WordPress) that developed the National Sectorial Museums Plan – PNSM in a participatory manner and is coupled to the Fediverse instance (social.museus.gov.br) where we intend to offer Brazilian museums the opportunity to create institutional accounts. If everything goes as planned, at the beginning of 2026, we will launch the “Museums in the Fediverse” app in the Android and Apple stores.

Slide 10 – Summary

The network technology that mediates much of our lives is social engineering—which means that deciding how it works is (or should be) a political issue. If we want to have any hope that these collective digital spaces will result in a world worth living in, we need to build our Internet policies based on solid institutional principles.

It matters to museums, for example, that if there is a social network service willing to host memory institutions of public interest, the data of the museums’ interaction with their interested public is also preserved as a digital collection and for research.

Ibram understands that Brazilian museums have a contribution to make in reflecting on the future of the digital environment, especially concerning the issue of digital memory.

The Entry Guide to the Fediverse

O “Guia de Entrada para o Fediverso”
lançado pelo Ibram por ocasião de evento, em 03/12
As a result of this internal reflection by Ibram-Museus, and in support of the 1st WebSocialBR, the Brazilian Fediverse Forum was an opportunity for the launch of the ‘Entry Guide to the Fediverse.’ It is a digital booklet with basic information for anyone interested in exploring the universe of decentralized social networks. We invite you to discover this alternative to the capture promoted by centralized platforms and their algorithms — download the Guide and take your first steps into the Fediverse.

Building apps for social spaces

The Newsmast team was in Rome last week, working through our messaging and branding with a non-profit agency. It was hot, hard work, ending up with a lot of mosquito bites, some fabulous memories and a clear plan to take forward.

^{Michael Foster (Paths & Patches)}

Sam’s Vids

2025-09-03 21:49:32

Better Than That by Summer of Sam & sknob

Music video for the song ‘Better Than That’ by Summer of Sam & sknob, made for the Bonkwave Summer Compilation Album.

The song and video are inspired by the use of fair music platforms, decentralised social media and open source software over the exploitative walled gardens of big tech.

Thanks to Elena, Framasoft and Meljoann whose videos, Introducing the Fediverse: a New Era of Social Media, What is the Fediverse? and How to join Mastodon are used inside this video.

Music, lyrics, lead vocals, lead guitar by Sam.
Keyboards, guitar, background vocals by sknob.
Arranged and mixed by sknob.
Mastered by Ordos Mk.0

jaz-michael king's blog

2025-08-14 11:00:00

There is One Fediverse. There are a Million Fediverses.

Over the past several years, I’ve listened to administrators, moderators, and community managers from across the decentralised social media landscape. I’ve been in the chats, attended the FediForums, read the forum debates, and watched them keep their corners of the internet safe and welcoming for the people who inhabit their communities.

One phrase comes up often in these circles: “We need to grow the fediverse.” This always sparks a spirited debate: what does growth mean? Who’s welcome, and who’s not? And what even is “the fediverse” anyway?
A visual representation of fediverse servers clustered by language or topic and their connectivity to each. Source: www.comeetie.fr/galerie/mapstodon
I recently attended FediCon in Vancouver, full to the brim of amazing people pursuing roughly similar goals; and again I heard about “preserving and growing the fediverse”. It was inspiring, but also thought-provoking.

All conferences are self-selecting, drawing together people with similar values. It can create a snapshot that feels unified, but may not reflect the wider and more varied reality. In the same way, everyone’s fediverse is a reflection of their own perspective, the people they follow, the conversations they join, the boundaries they set.

When people speak about “the fediverse” in the singular, they often mean a familiar network of interconnected servers with shared norms and moderation values. It’s a compelling vision, but I don’t believe it’s the only one. As part of my work at IFTAS, I operate a server that blocks no one so I can see a broader view: the friendly spaces and the chaotic ones, the small communities quietly thriving, and the loud, messy edges many people never encounter.

Seeing that full spectrum reminds me why I care deeply about this space, and why my vision for its future is maybe a little different.

The Fediverse I’m Fighting For

My goals for the fediverse are simple: a safer internet, and access for everyone to the benefits of being connected to the world wide web. For me, this doesn’t mean attracting celebrities and their millions of followers. It’s about enabling people – especially in developing nations dominated by “zero rate” services from telcos and tech giants – to build their own platforms, in their own languages, free from corporate control. It means helping communities preserve their languages and the culture those languages carry on an increasingly homogenised internet. In many places where mobile data is “free”, the limited options provided by the chosen platform is the only internet that many know.

The fediverse offers an escape hatch: a broader, freer, and community-led web. I want people to have safe, self-governed spaces.

According to Ethnologue, “greater than 50% of the world’s population suffer from Digital Language Divide issues.” The UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues states: “Indigenous languages are central to the identity of Indigenous peoples, and an expression of self-determination. When Indigenous languages are under threat, so too are Indigenous peoples themselves.“ Yet as these communities come online, modern tools often fail them.

The Welsh language is by no means endangered to the same degree as many Indigenous languages, but it still faces barriers online. That’s why I created toot.wales, a bilingual service where around 10% of posts are in Cymraeg (Welsh). The platform is fully translated, allowing members to converse in the language of their choice, enjoy a local cultural flavour, and still connect with the wider fediverse – from Finnish photos to Brazilian book reviews. A growing number of federated services already exist to support languages and locales, with local governance and local norms. In a previous post I’ve highlighted over a dozen endangered languages that already have fediverse support, and we need many, many more of them.

This is the fediverse I’m fighting for – a million places for a billion voices.

But it’s about more than language and culture

When I say I want to invite people in, I don’t mean into “my” fediverse. Mine is small, and would be unusable with billions in my feed. Robert W. Gehl speaks of a “covenantal fediverse” in Move Slowly and Build Bridges, “a network where ethically aligned communities band together” under “an ethical covenant as a social protocol”. In practice, this means communities agreeing on shared moderation values and working together as a trusted network – a kind of federation-within-the-federation. I believe this is the fediverse many think of when they speak of preservation and growth, but perhaps it is instead just one model, one success story, one use case – and yes, it needs to be preserved, strengthened, and where appropriate, grown.

Other models include island networks cautiously connected to trusted neighbours; thematic communities joining people across space and time over a shared interest; or large communities gathering around shared photographs or book reviews or classic cinema. For some communities, connection to the widest network is a survival strategy. Reducing it to “small fedi” and “big fedi” obscures this diversity.

I share with the community leaders of these spaces a desire for people to find useful, joyful alternatives to the social networking giants who hoover up our most intimate data and “enrich” it with yet more data to sell that data to yet more giants who do awful, awful things with that information.

I believe the open social web contains a multitude of fediverses – some connected by protocol, others by platform, denylist, or shared governance. Is Nostr the fediverse? Bluesky? Maybe it doesn’t matter. What matters is that anyone can create their own fediverse and choose their connections.

One world wide web, a handful of protocols networking in the space, and 30,000 federating domains. So is there one fediverse, three, or 30,000? There are over a million active members using ActivityPub online right now so…

Maybe there’s a million fediverses.

Protocols

Many speak of the fediverse as if it were a single network because so much of it runs on ActivityPub, the protocol connecting Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Lemmy and more. But ActivityPub is only one option.

ATProto, used by Bluesky, takes a different approach to federation and portability. Nostr offers a bare-minimum protocol for microblogging, chat, and other formats. Older protocols like OStatus, and newer experimental ones, also play their part. These protocols are not interchangeable.

Without bridging, they cannot talk to each other, and even with it, some features break. A Mastodon user cannot natively follow a Bluesky account. A Pixelfed post will not simply appear in a Nostr client. This fragmentation means there’s no single fediverse protocol, only overlapping technologies with different strengths.

Mike Masnick’s Protocols, Not Platforms imagined a world without the walled gardens of big tech, where openness and interoperability would be the norm. That idea was vital in getting us here: a landscape of many platforms on a handful of protocols, with bridges connecting them. But protocols alone don’t address abuse, disinformation, or harmful speech – those are shaped by the communities and tools built on top.

Connecting these protocols is often treated as an inherent good, but in reality not all conversations are meant for everyone. Consent-aware federation, like Bridgy Fed’s approach, is vital. When I invite friends over for dinner, I don’t broadcast our conversation to the whole city. I choose the guest list, and the conversation flows accordingly. The same should be true for online communities: we connect where it makes sense, and we keep some spaces more private, because not every exchange belongs on every network.

Platforms

Even when platforms share a protocol, they develop distinct cultures. Mastodon’s vibe is not Pixelfed’s, despite both using ActivityPub. Lemmy’s threaded discussions create different norms from PeerTube’s video-first approach.

Digging deeper, there isn’t even really a single “Mastodon vibe” – we only see the parts we experience. What is Mastodon’s vibe in Japan, Chile, or Madagascar? For outsiders, language and cultural norms make it opaque. This isn’t deliberate exclusion, but it means English-speaking members often mistake their fediverse for the fediverse. Without the language or social context, we cannot fully understand another community’s norms.

People notice when a platform prioritises short text posts over photos or long-form discussion, and new expectations form around those design choices. Culture rarely crosses these boundaries. A Lemmy regular may feel out of place on Mastodon, and vice versa. Protocol compatibility is not cultural compatibility – nor should it be. There is no global town square online, and experience shows that trying to build one is a recipe for conflict.

Some argue this is a weakness, that a truly global network should strive for more cultural blending. But attempts to force one universal town square almost always flattens local norms, erases minority and marginalised cultures, and sparks avoidable conflict. The internet’s healthiest spaces are not uniform but neighbourly, many different gatherings, each with its own atmosphere, connected by shared roads. You can visit, stay, or go home, but you don’t have to merge all the gatherings into one.

People

In early 2024 I was invited to speak on a panel discussing decentralised platforms. While answering a question, I spotted the afore-mentioned Mike Masnick in the audience, and my thinking crystallised right there and then: the next step is people, not protocols.

In my years designing software, I always centred the person, the user, the member. We should do the same for the fediverse. Instead of trying to centre “the fediverse” as a whole, we should centre the people using it and those who want to use it.

Some might say that decentralisation without a unifying centre will weaken our collective voice. But history shows that movements thrive when they are many-voiced. A network of independent spaces, each with its own governance and culture, is harder to silence, co-opt, or corrupt than any single global fediverse could ever be.

Most people want their own space, shaped by their needs and their values. Who you follow and who you block shapes your conversations, your values, your tone – that is your fediverse. The fediverse is less like a single public square and more like a city full of homes, gardens, and community halls. You can visit others, invite them over, or keep your doors shut. The foundation is choice – and that choice belongs to the people.

In other words, fediverse is in the eye of the beholder.

Connect the world, but, you know, don’t

I’m not here to grow the fediverse in terms of protocols or platforms. I’m here to grow it in terms of people, offering them the same freedoms, safety, and self-governance that I have seen delivered to marginalised communities, to linguistic communities, to regional communities, to sports communities, to scientific and academic communities… to all the fediverses we’ve already created. Some of which talk to each other and some that don’t. And that’s OK. That’s how it’s supposed to work.

Protocols and platforms will come and go. People will remain, and they will need places that reflect and serve their needs, their norms, and their rules. That is the promise of the fediverse – people communing and communicating in ones and twos and threes and hundreds and thousands, in whatever ways they choose.

The fediverse is not a place, it is the means to build a place.

It’s the means to build a million different places.

There’s a future where every device could be its own single-person instance. Where there’s a Bonfire Social for every neighbourhood, a NodeBB for every sport, a PeerTube for every film genre, a Lemmy for every language, a Pixelfed for every school. We’re not there yet, but we’re on our way.

I don’t want to grow “the fediverse”, because there is no single “the” fediverse. I want to help humanity step out of walled-in, private platforms and onto the open social web – a web where everyone can exercise their rights to free expression, free association, and just as importantly, the right to choose who they associate with.

Some worry that too much autonomy leads to silos, echo chambers, or even harmful spaces. They’re not wrong to be cautious, but centralisation carries its own risks: capture, homogenisation, and the erosion of cultural sovereignty. A healthy networked planet will have both bridges and boundaries, each community deciding how porous it wants to be.

Some will find their home in communities that already exist. Others will create new spaces that meet their own needs, in their own languages, with their own rules. Some will connect widely, others will keep to themselves. All of them will be valid. All of them will belong.

Let a million fediverses bloom.

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Further reading

Many others have explored this subject with depth and clarity. Below is a selection of their work, which adds important context and perspective to what I’ve shared above. I’m deeply grateful for the time, thought, and care they’ve invested in shaping the open social web.

• Protocols, Not Platforms – by Mike Masnick
• Governance on Fediverse Microblogging Servers – by Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi
• Moderate people, not code – by Ryan Barrett
• Move Slowly and Build Bridges – by Robert W. Gehl
• New Paradigms in Trust and Safety: Navigating Defederation on Decentralized Social Media Platforms – by Samantha Lai, Yoel Roth, Renée DiResta, Kate Klonick, Mallory Knodel, Evan Prodromou, and Aaron Rodericks
• Priorities to Make the Fediverse Sustainable – by Alek Tarkowski
• Scaling Trust on the Web – Atlantic Council’s Task Force for a Trustworthy Future Web

To explore how the fediverse is already a collection of fediverses, see:

• Understanding the growth of the Fediverse through the lens of Mastodon (La Cava, L., Greco, S. & Tagarelli, A. Understanding the growth of the Fediverse through the lens of Mastodon. Appl Netw Sci 6, 64 (2021). doi.org/10.1007/s41109-021-003…)
  
  • The study’s exploration of subnetworks is especially revealing, see Fig. 5

  
  

• Mapstodon – by Etienne Côme – a visual depiction of federating services clustered by connectivity

Scaling trust on the web - Atlantic Council

The Task Force for a Trustworthy Future Web's report on gaps and opportunities for how the next generation of online spaces will be built.

^{Atlantic Council}