Brent Jabbour:

When Instagram launched its Twitter alternative, Threads, on July 5th, new users were met with a message about future plans to join something called the fediverse.

So, what is it?

The Fediverse is a collection of decentralized platforms where users can interact and communicate across a host of different sites.

To get a better understanding, let’s take a look at the way mainstream social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and even LinkedIn work today.

Evan Prodromou:
“In order to participate in LinkedIn, you have to have a LinkedIn account, you can only connect to other people on LinkedIn. And all of your content kind of stays on LinkedIn, everything you post everything you talk about, in and that is a very centralized system, because it’s really closed off from the rest of the world.”

Evan Prodromou is a entrepreneur and technologist who led a team that helped develop ActivityPub, the backbone of the fediverse. Some would call him the godfather of the fediverse.

Evan Prodromou:

“Father of the fediverse Godfather of the fediverse, it is a long tradition, we’ve had distributed systems for the internet for a long time. So I stand on the shoulders of giants.”

Ross Schulman:

“ A lot of people already understand this concept, but don’t know that they do, because it’s the exact same concept as email”

Brent Jabbour:

Ross Schulman is a senior fellow for Decentralization at the Electronic frontier foundation, a nonprofit that works to defend civil liberties in the digital world.

Ross Schulman:
‘So, you know, when you say, I’m gonna send an email to my cousin who works at a school somewhere, he’s got a.edu address, right? I’m on Gmail, for example, there are two different servers, one is whatever, columbia.edu or whatever, and one is gmail.com. And those two servers are each, their own separate entities. And they talk to each other using a common protocol. And they exchange these little text messages that we call email.”

Brent Jabbour:

In the case of the fediverse, users on microblogging platform Mastodon can like, follow, and share content from other federated platforms including video platform PeerTube and wordpress. This allows users to theoretically have a single account and feed in the fediverse.

To date, Mastadon has been the most successful fediverse platform, receiving a lot of attention after Elon Musk took over twitter and users looked for other options.

Evan Prodromou:

“there are a number of players in the technology space, who have had to depend on Twitter for for quite a while, right. And as Twitter becomes less of a dependable partner for them, and they don’t, and they no longer have the same kind of arrangements, relationships. So classically, say the API for Twitter, the terms have changed quite a bit.”

Ross Schulman:
“there were mass layoffs, but but one one casualty of that was the trust and safety teams at Twitter, who by no means were getting perfect, but at least we’re you know, invested in trying and then after they left there was just nothing.”

“I think largely it was the it was this sort of movement from Hey, it’s not perfect, but they’re trying to it doesn’t even seem like they’re trying anymore that drove a lot of people away.”

Brent Jabbour:

While Mastodon may seem akin to Reddit there is a big difference. Subreddits act somewhat independently, but are still hosted by Reddit and subject to its rules and changes in policy, something that has caused issues in recent months.

When it comes to Mastodon, servers, known as instances, are completely independent and just use the Mastodon code to operate.

Ross Schulman:
“So there’s the mastodon code base, which is the computer code that runs the server, which is open source, and anybody can host on any machine that they want to, as long as it’s internet connected, obviously. And then there’s Mastodon dot social, which is the entity that runs one of the mastodon instances out there, but doesn’t have any control over any of the other ones.”

Brent Jabbour:

Not everyone is happy about Threads plans to join the Fediverse. A group of instance moderators have signed the Anti-Meta Fedi Pact, saying they will block any meta owned instances.

Evan Prodromou:
“A great part of the fediverse is that we’ve built those controls in, so those people can have the Fedi Pact and just say, Hey, we’re not going to have anyone from threads who can follow us. And it is an exercise of that control. And honestly, I applaud it, I don’t share the same concerns. But I do like the fact that they can make that decision and stick with it.”

Brent Jabbour:

But, this decentralized nature does raise some concerns.

Ross Schulman:
I think one of the one of the downsides that jumps out, I think, most strikingly is, is that it makes moderation harder, doesn’t make it impossible, but but it makes it harder”

“What we tend to see is that those those servers that that effectively don’t have enough moderation to stop that kind of problem from happening very quickly gets sort of like blacklisted from the rest of the Federer’s.”

Evan Prodromou:
“It is really up to the individual service providers to set the rules for how their users are allowed to post and also what kind of stuff they’re willing to have come in so they do have kind of a border control? Where it’s like, hey, we don’t want to have sexual content on our site, which is which is traditional for like Instagram, right?”

Brent Jabbour:

While the fediverse may be about to go through a huge growth spurt, Ross and Evan see upside for those looking for this type of social media experience.

Ross Schulman:
“the promise of the fediverse, for me, is this dichotomy between being able to find a place or a virtual place where, you like, the atmosphere, and that can be for, you know, a million different reasons.”

Evan Prodromou:

“If you do some innovation, if you build some cool new product, new search engine, new way of sharing video, audio games, the sky is really the limit, you launch it, and you’ve got a audience of 10s of millions, or coming soon, hundreds of millions of people who can start using it on day one.”

At this time, It’s unclear when Threads will officially become part of the fediverse.