The Fediverse Could Be The Next Frontier For Social Media: You Can Still Be An Early Adopter
If you ever feel tired of using the same social media apps, with algorithms that don’t prioritize your mental health, bots, spam, and harvesting of your data by the tech oligarchs, know that you are not the only one.
Each time, more and more people decide to step foot into the fediverse, a whole new sector of the Internet built on decentralized technology that brings the power back to the user. The fediverse, which connects the words ‘universe’ and ‘federation’, is a concept that conglomerates several social media, blogging spaces, video platforms, forums and more, all open source and built with democratic principles.
Yes, using the fediverse is more complicated at first, especially for a non-techie person, than using the massive Facebook or Instagram apps, that all of us are used to by now. The other problem is that the material that social media is really made of are people, and of course not so many are in the fediverse, at least not as much as in mainstream social spaces like X or YouTube.
Webs in the Fediverse
But that doesn’t mean these conditions can’t change. The technology will likely keep improving and using fediverse apps will become easier, while collective awareness of the importance of our data’s privacy will make people look for more alternatives than legacy social media.
You can still be an early adopter, and start using the fediverse today to start connecting with people with similar worries and perspectives to you.
An alternative to your favorite social app
The fediverse is not running short of options. As you can see in the projects page of fediverse.info, an open alternative to your favorite social media is very likely to already exist.
You have Pixelfed for photo sharing, like a decentralized version of Instagram. You have Mastodon as a substitute for Twitter/X, PeerTube as a second YouTube, WordPress or Microdotblog for blogging and sharing your thoughts in long format, or Loops, a short video sharing platform that reminds us of TikTok.
These are just some examples to show that we can avoid the monopoly of big tech by using these open-source initiatives. Now, how do all these different platforms interconnect with each other? That is thanks to the ActivityPub protocol.
ActivityPub protocol
ActivityPub, the skeleton behind the fediverse, is an open protocol developed by the World Wide Consortium (W3C) which allows for the creation of decentralized social media. It works as a common language that permits these different platforms to share information with each other, regardless of who has created the which app.
The federative part of it all resides in the protocol, given that data is not hosted in a unique server at some place. Every user can have their own server, building a network similar to the blockchains that power cryptocurrencies and that avoids power abuses or monopoly control.
Migration from big tech platforms to new options has already started, as we saw with the huge movement from X to Bluesky in the beginning of 2025. Exploring possibilities and gaining control of the way we spend time on the Internet will be key to improving the web in the coming years.
