The Central Problem
Right now the most popular social media networks are centralized. What this means is that there is a central place to go to access your social medial. For example, if you want to visit Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, or Instagram, then you need to go to their website and you can only interact with people who are also on those websites.
The problem with this is that they are in a central place and a single person can dictate what can and cannot be on their website. If all the sudden Reddit wanted to remove the r/cats subreddit then they could essentially push a button and wipe it away. They own the servers and the services and they can do whatever they want with it. This problem applies to all of these centralized social media websites.
But there is an alternative! There are social media networks that can replace these centralized ones. They are often referred to as decentralized or federated networks and collectively as the fediverse.
So what does it mean to be decentralized? Decentralized means that different people can host the software on their computers whether it be a server in their home or a server in the cloud. There is no one single place that controls everything.
OK then, what about federation? Federation means that they can all talk to each other as if they were in the same location, even if they are owned and operated by different people or physically located in different places all over the world.
Let’s take a look at the Twitter alternative, Mastodon. Mastodon works exactly as Twitter does except it is decentralized and federated. If you want to create an account the first thing you have to do is decide which Mastodon server you want to create an account on. All that means is choosing the server will log into and which server will physically store your data. If you are technically savvy enough, then you can host your own server. Don’t worry though, regardless of the server you choose you can still communicate with every other Mastodon server because it is federated. Most, if not all of these platforms have a “flagship” server which is just a server that is operated by the people who wrote the software.
Many of these federated social media platforms are built based off of something called activitypub. You do not really need to remember this, but I wanted to mention it as it allows us to do something that the centralized platforms do not. Which is that it allows for people on Mastodon to follow and see content from the Instagram and Reddit alternatives without needing to log into or even have an account on those platforms.
Imagine using Twitter... now you are caught up and want to see Instagram so you switch apps to see what is happening on Instagram. This is not too difficult but with the federated networks, you can follow accounts across different platforms. So if you are logged into your Mastodon account you can follow someone who only has a Pixelfed (Instagram alternative) account. Their Pixelfed posts will appear in your Mastodon feed as if they were posting to Mastodon directly.
These platforms are mature and ready for mainstream use. Here is a list of centralized platforms and their decentralized and federated alternatives.
Twitter > Mastodon Instagram > Pixelfed Reddit > Lemmy Facebook > Diaspora or Friendica Discord > Matrix
You can also visit Fediverse.Party for more details about each of these networks and learn about a few more that I did not mention in this writing.