The Multifediverse? How’s That Working Out for You Marvel
We did it people. We federated. Or so we thought. For you see, it's not enough to have just one “fediverse”. We must have more!
There's a common refrain among superhero movie nerds that “multiverse” storylines get real old, real fast. It's cute at first, with plenty of oohs and ahhs from the audience as they see the fifth Leafcruncher from Earth 92742 meet up with the second Leafcruncher from Earth 27583 who somehow also shares an identity with Puddlestomper from Earth 27582 because, you know, those dimensions are so close together.
OK. Yeah. It gets pretty silly after a while. 😅
And then we look at social networking on Earth 1 in the year 2024.
Find yourself intrigued? Make sure you don't miss another issue of Cycles Hyped No More:
What's in a Fediverse?
It's a question on a great many people's minds right now. It was easier back when the “federated universe” of social web instances was a handful of Mastodon servers run by volunteers for whom “The Year of Linux on the Desktop” was already a given. But now we have many more platforms, and many more people, and suddenly that old Genesis song comes to mind…
There's too many men, too many people
Making too many problems
And not much love to go round
Can't you see this is a land of confusion?
But I digress.
For a split second, it seemed like maybe ActivityPub had won. People were leaving Twitter (this is pre X, mind you), Mastodon was the primary social software which spoke this new W3C standard protocol, and lo and behold, @Gargron is suddenly in TIME Magazine.
Even Meta hopped aboard the hype train. Post a thread of threads on Threads! And toot a reply from Mastodon!
We did it people. We federated.
Or so we thought.
For you see, it's not enough to have just one “fediverse”. We must have more! We must have a plurality of fediverses, a…multifediverse, if you will.
Because you see, ActivityPub did not win, apparently. Bluesky launched to the public in February 2024, and with it, the rise of the ATmosphere, a decentralized* mix of software and services which all speak AT protocol, a rival to the canonical fediverse's ActivityPub protocol.
* decentralized is doing a lot of heavy lifting here…
And of course there are other platforms and protocols (Nostr, a “simple” protocol) which have come and gone and come again. Because no matter what you do, you just can't get away from xkcd #927.
Some people* say there's only One True Fediverse, the one which speaks ActivityPub. Others say the fediverse is whatever you make it, that's it's simply enough to say you're part of the fediverse to be part of the fediverse. Or maybe the rumors are true: there really are fediverseS (fediversi?).
* me
Own Your Data (OYD)
There's a longstanding Indie Web concept called Own Your Data, with similar alternatives floating around out there like Own Your Own Content, Own Your Platform, etc.
The idea is that, rather than be beholden to whichever “corporate silo” you happen to be trapped in on any given day, you can publish your work on a platform you control, a platform you have some kind of ownership of (and thus final say in what happens there). As years of online turmoil have clearly shown, this is wise policy.
So with the recent metoric rise of the ATmosphere presumably, as Bluesky reports metrics like 20 million users having signed up, it's important to step back from the yada yada yada of how protocols work or what's good UX or whatever, and ask this very simple question:
If whoever's running this service turns into a Nazi, am I protected? If this service goes to utter shit, am I screwed?
That answer is extremely clear when it comes to the ActivityPub-derived fediverse.
- You can set up your own social media account on your own server (Mastodon or otherwise). It can be provided via a managed hosting service, or you can host it yourself on bare hardware or a VM. Every single decision of what happens there, down to what color is the page background or if you like the word "Toot" instead of "Publish", is under your direct control.
- You can fork the open source social media software you use and make changes. People have. People do.
- You can use any third-party client you want. There's no penalty for not using the “official” first-party client, like there was on the Twitter of old.
- You can join community groups and network with people from a variety of companies and organizations who have influence on the future of the ActivityPub open Web standard and related Web standards.
Meanwhile, that answer is extremely unclear when it comes to the ATmosphere.
- How do you set up your own server where your identity, content, and user experience is under your direct control?
- How do you “fork Bluesky” and create a new/different service?
- Where are all the third-party clients with feature parity?
- Is the AT protocol even a web standard?
There are numerous reports out now on how the “decentralized” nature of Bluesky is really not. Perhaps it is in spirit, if you're feeling generous, but in practice it is not—and just because CEO Jay Graber shows up on a puff piece CNBC segment—which curiously left out that Bluesky is funded by VC crypto-bros—and says it's “billionaire-proof” and that people can leave at any time and take their followers with them to a rival service doesn't mean anyone is actually doing that or is even technically able to do that.
And I think this is a real, serious problem because Bluesky is clearly riding on a wave of good vibes right now in part because it bills itself as a different kind of social network. One that's architected precisely so that it can't become irrevocably enshittified just like every other corporate silo on the Internet. Read this article published literally today on Forbes touting how Bluesky is a decentralized platform just like Mastodon is a decentralized platform.
There's only one problem.
Bluesky is not decentralized in the way that Mastodon is decentralized, nor is Mastodon a platform. I repeat, Mastodon is not a platform. Mastodon is software powering thousands of instances on an open social network colloquially called the fediverse. And you don't need to even be running Mastodon at all to participate in this network.
Poor journalism like this, where X, Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, and other commercial Internet services are all lumped together in a muddy morass of rhetorical sameness, is a major category error which is threatening to upend years of progress in the growth and capability of the fediverse. Users are confused—heck, technical users are confused (I know, because I talk to them all the time)—and the marketing message out there of why anyone should even care about the fediverse is being obscured by misinformation. It's weird indeed when Meta, of all people, is arguably doing the best job of educating people what the fediverse is…and even then people often don't get it.
Maybe Evan Prodromou and some other folks have got a point. Maybe we should stop calling it “the fediverse” and start using the term social web. And just like there's only one document/application web speaking one language (HTML), there's only one social web speaking one language (ActivityPub). Anyone can build anything any time anywhere, and as long as they speak the language (ActivityPub), they are natural participants on the social web—just as literally anyone can own and operate a website and serve it to anyone with a web browser.
Personally, I like the term fediverse. I think it's fun, and I like being part of the Federation. But if it's devolving into a term without meaning, more “vibes” than anything technically descriptive, then perhaps it's time to find other ways of communicating with the public. Because if the “ATmosphere” is too “a fediverse”, then everything and nothing is.
My Review of Vivaldi and Conversation with Bruce Lawson
In other news, I published a review of the Vivaldi Web browser on The Internet Review, including my conversation with Vivaldi's Technical Communications Officer Bruce Lawson.
From the review:
While under the hood Vivaldi is a Chromium-based browser, and hence uses Blink as its engine, Vivaldi offers a distinctive and customizable user interface and a raft of features catering to power users.
Let’s talk about that for a moment, because this is a key point I think often gets overlooked in browser comparisons.
There’s only one reason why anyone who’s not a computer power user would go out of their way to pick a different browser than what ships by default on the operating system they use, and that’s market dominance. To wit:
- If you use a Windows PC, if you’re not using Edge you’ll use Chrome.
- If you use a Mac, if you’re not using Safari you’ll use Chrome.
- And iPhone and Android users are pretty much stuck with Safari or Chrome respectively. (Though there are signs the mobile market will look more like the desktop market in the future…)
And that’s it for the vast majority of users. Furthermore, if you were to come along and suggest to those folks they should switch to another browser with low single-digit marketshare, they’d probably give you a weird stare and ask why and who cares?!
Therefore, I consider it nearly indisputable that the people who will bother to take the time to (a) install a new Web browser that’s (b) not a dominant marketshare browser with huge name recognition are power users.
And thus the single most important question anyone can ask as they evaluate one of the alternative Web browsers available today (and let’s face it, Firefox is now one of the “alternative Web browsers”) is this:
What have you done for me lately?
In other words, how responsive are the developers of the browser to the power users who are going out of their way to champion and build workflows around that browser?
- Does the browser respect the user’s unique and quirky functionality needs?
- Does the browser respect the user’s requirements around security and privacy?
- Does the browser foster a sense that “there’s no wrong way” to configure the browser to work across a variety of workflow styles?
- Does the browser convey the impression that the stewards of the browser will make good decisions to put the user first when controversial questions may arise during future development?
I’m not here to claim Vivaldi score big on all of these points, because I simply haven’t had enough time with it. But of all the alternative browsers I’ve heard of and taken the time to really try out in earnest, Vivaldi does indeed seem to rise to the top.
“A lot of people who won’t consider themselves nerds who do care about their data, they do care about their privacy, they do care about being followed,” says Bruce Lawson. “And customization, it’s not a sell initially, but very quickly when people switch to a new product, they think: Oh, I wish I could do X or Y. There’s so many options, but you become accustomed to them. Theme switching, changing your icons, choosing where your tabs are, choosing how your tabs stack. These are the gateway drugs into customization. We want to show people that the software should adapt to them. They should be able to make the software theirs rather than you are subject to the machine. Too many people have become enslaved by technology, and it’s time to take that back.”
Read the full review on The Internet Review.
Things that make you think…
I don't know why Bluesky hasn't added the federation systems that would enable freedom of exit to its service. Perhaps there are excellent technical reasons to prioritize rolling out the other systems they've created so far. Frankly, it doesn't matter. So long as Bluesky can be a trap, I won't let myself be tempted. My rule – I don't join a service that I can't leave without switching costs – is my Ulysses Pact, and it's keeping me safe from danger I've sailed into too many times before.
–Pluralistic by Cory Doctorow
Thanks for reading Cycles Hyped No More! See you next time,
–Jared ✌️