The press and the fediverse.
You realize that someone has something to hide not for what they say, but for what they DO NOT say. And you know that something is considered “better not to spread too much) when they never talk about it, or talk about it too little compared to its importance.
An example is the fediverse. It is an archipelago of small social networking platforms, which instead of all belonging to the same big company, which inevitably imposes rules, is made up of small platforms that federate together using a certain protocol. In our case, the protocol that is “converging” the most is Activity pub.
In short, imagine breaking Facebook or Twitter into about 5000 pieces, each managed by a different admin, with different rules, different sensitivities and you can choose which one to subscribe to, knowing that you can say this and that without your account being suspended, as long as your sysadmin thinks like you do.
Even creating your own pod, perhaps even for a single user, is not difficult: using software like Pleroma it can also run on a raspberry 4 with appreciable results. In this case you will not be able to keep many users. I use similar hardware and have no particular performance issues, with 12 users besides me.
How many are the "inhabitants" of the Fediverso? There is some kind of aggregator that tries to count them, and these are the numbers :
POPULATION ~ 4,039,449 accounts
ACTIVE USERS ~ 1,193,486 people
SERVERS> 5,747 instances
in practice, the number of servers is just under 6000, and in one day about a million people wrote. There are about four million users, which means we are still in the “early users” state.
What do these servers do? Well then, there are many different platforms. Some are very similar to Facebook, some to Twitter, some to youtube (and you can put videos on them), others are blogging platforms (this platform is also federated), there are platforms on which to put podcasts, there are 'one to publish scientific articles, etc.
You can find a collection starting here: Awesome ActivityPub
Now, since 4 million users are about users of a darknet with internal services like Tor, one wonders why it is not talked about so much in the press. Because the press has decided that we must talk about Tor (so no problem if so many are interested and go there) while not about the fediverse (and therefore we want the masses to be in the dark?). And why would it be better if he did the opposite?
Let's start with the last question.
- the fediverse is very resistant to disinformation campaigns like Facebook's fake news. Some time ago it was part of gab.ai, which alone provided 1 million users. And they were all kind of Trump followers, neo-Nazis, and so on. And they wrote all the bullshit of the case. Result: almost all the sysadmins had defederated it. It meant they prevented their pod from interacting with bannon's. Result: they were part of the fediverse but they only spoke to each other. At some point they decided to break away from it, so much did not need to federate to remain isolated. The same happened to ByoBlu di Messora, which created its instance (about 15,000 grillini, novax & co users) and was immediately defedered by all Italian instances. In short, they sing it and play it by themselves. In short, the problem of Russian propaganda arises little on the fediverse.
- you can talk to the admin. And the admin has VERY powerful tools at their disposal. It can decide that everything that comes from a remote user (from another island) is potentially unsuitable for minors. In this case, an image chosen by the admin appears instead of the post. Mine is this . This means that if you click on the image then the real content appears, but it does not appear by default. You can also set your account as unsuitable for minors, and in that case everyone will see the replacement image. But you can also decide to defederate instances, to ban posts that contain some words, or to replace the words, for example "black" with "African American". You can ban links to some content, and many other things. If you are being harassed, then you can report it to your admin. You understand that in my case, with thirteen users (including myself) taking care of the pod is simple. It is satisfying.
- community rules are not necessarily a mysterious papyrus that is brought up. For example, the pod rules I have are “don't bother admin” and “if it's legal in Germany you can tell”. Others feel the need to add abstruse rules, because all bureaucrats love to create rules where they are not needed. I leave it to the legislator to write the rules: if something is legal, you can do it, and even say it.
- the fediverse lends itself to thematic instances: instances of Marxists, anarchists, lovers of manga (many!), instances dedicated to sex or prostitution , glbt instances, and so on. There are also many generic instances, of course, but once again the choice is the admin. Or yours, if you want to become admin.
- there are no artificial interactions. You are almost never fucking followed and you will not reach 5000 contacts like on twitter. Even if in theory you could have 5000 contacts, it doesn't happen because in general you talk with who you know or with people who know who you know. And in this way, you never go beyond a hundred or so. (of course, I'm not sure this would be true if Valentina Nappi opened an account. But it's a different case).
- all software has a private chat system, and especially: if the sysadmin deletes a data, it is lost. If you know the sysadmin personally, or are, you have 100% control of your data. They don't leave your database. And the "search" functions exist only on some software, like Mastodon, but they are still limited to that specific instance: you cannot search for content across the entire universe.
This would be worth a little article in the mainstream press, but my impression is that their bosses don't want this to happen and people are going to try to get an account, for example here for an Italian account, or here .
Let's go to why, in my opinion, the press does not want the masses to know that there is a social network where it is so good.
- they do not lend themselves to their “I pay, therefore I demand” games. They cannot post their pages everywhere asking Facebook to "facilitate" the dissemination of their content.
- they do not lend themselves to data collection. I have seen some crawlers who have tried, but since I put my instance in "private" mode, they have stopped. The advertising seller cannot easily "profile" you.
- creating bot networks is almost not possible. You can create a user-bot very easily, but it cannot send millions of messages because it would kill the instance where it is registered and risk defederation of the instance by all the other admins. The Beast of Morisi just wouldn't work here.
- Spam also has a hard life for the same reasons that make life hard for bots.
And this is a problem: most of the press, the whole in Italy, follows a sovereign agenda in a more or less hidden way. In this sense, the idea that there is a social network where the sovereigns would be immediately isolated and the propaganda relegated does not like anything.
Furthermore, the fediverse don't lend themselves very well to advertising discourse, and it doesn't pay very well: if people moved there, the economic model of online newspapers would be broken.
For this reason, when we talk about the fediverse we don't talk about it much and without giving people any entry points. It is not explained how to enter it, it is not said that it is possible to make one's own request, and so on.
Because let's face it: it's almost too good to be true.
But it is true: it is the place where you have every right to speak, but no one has the duty to listen to you.
And this feeling, in my opinion, is what the press doesn't want you to have.
If you want to try it, you can go to:
or if you prefer a generalist Italian instance,
Good luck.