Most of you probably do not know what the “Fediverse” is. If you do know, great! Otherwise, this post will explain why the Fediverse is the social media, the true social media, and why Twitter, Fuckbook cough Facebook, Instagram and whatever other massive social media is the devil (where Facebook is just Satan, the king of devil social medias). Also, Threads does not count since it’s owned by Facebook, even though it’s technically part of the Fediverse.

The Timeline is Your Timelime

No fancy and creepy algorithm that knows all your personal lives, no black boxes owned by the NSA or CIA (hopefully). The timeline that you see and all the recommendations are based on what you follow, so basically, the timeline is your personal timeline for the stuff that you want to see. I mainly used timeline even though that is more specific to microblogging sites like Mastodon, but practically it means that you see content that you chose to follow.

Much tougher to take down

Due to the federated nature of the Fediverse, it is much tougher to DDoS the entire network. A federated network means that myriads of servers are hosts for the service, this is why there are so many “instances” of any Fediverse social media like Mastodon. This is true for all federated services, not just the Fediverse, like Matrix, though there needs to be a lot of servers for this resistance.

To be clear, this doesn’t make them fully resistant to DDoS attacks or a huge loss of users that make it seem like it’s down. This is all because there are lots of people that flock to what may be considered a default or neutral instance, an instance that has a large amount of space for many users and doesn’t cater to any specific community.

The Fediverse may not be very federated

This title may sound fake or convey a false sentiment, but there is some truth to what I want to say, plus this has a connection to the higher up topic. The Fediverse social medias like Mastodon and Lemmy all seem to have this “default” instance that most people use, like mastodon.social for Mastodon and lemmy.world for Lemmy, which could hurt the decentralized nature of these networks. I would always recommend that you at least move to a different instance catered to a community you are consistently involved in, Mastodon at least makes it easier in some situations to migrate accounts to different instances.

Less censorship

Not even the fascist Truth social media is free from censorship. If I want to use that social media as an example, it censors any form of content that isn’t right-wing oriented, which turns it into a feedback loop or circle jerk of right-wing fascist ideas and sentiment. Of course, some of the non-general instances of the Fediverse social medias can create feedback loops or circle jerk situations, but the generalized instances that cater to no specific community don’t really suffer from this problem as much.

“What did all of that mean for censorship?” You may ask. Well, unlike Facebook, who censored people who were critical of them, the Fediverse is not controlled by a central entity, which means less censorship on a mass scale. Censorship can happen on individual instances, but not on every instance, which can be avoided with ease by just moving to a different instance. One exception is mainly government censorship, mainly because they can ban the instances of these social media sites in the Fediverse, except they need to censor a ton of instances, since people can make new instances by themselves.

More private, generally

I say generally because social media is kind of a cancer on digital privacy, plus not every instance is made equal (Yes, they may use the same backend software to power the instance, but the owner could add stuff in to track the user activities). This is also because some parts of the user generated content are permanent (kinda) on some social medias on the Fediverse.

I mainly say it is more private in the sense of you not being actively tracked by company like Google, Fuckbook, or Microsoft or whatever other companies people know about selling people’s data and personal information. Some parts aren’t very private, on lemmy for example, your messages do not get deleted when you delete them, the moderators still can see the message and possibly recover them, plus the contents of the message are just hidden from the public. So if you delete a message on lemmy, you need to contact the admin to have it be permanently deleted as in removed from the server database.