Federate, liberate

I started composing this as a Facebook post but it started being a bit more long form so I figured why not post it from my shiny new blog? I don’t claim to be an expert in any of this but it has been interesting to look into this again. It’s more of a reflection/conversation than a technically informative piece

It has been a theme of the week for me. It started very early one morning. We’ve all been there as I had a thousand times before, awake, pick up phone open Facebook and start scrolling. After a few minutes of this I just thought “enough is enough”. The user experience has eroded more and more over the years and on mobile, it’s so unusable and irritating. I need to change my digital habits, at least this part and if I must scroll on my device then at least find something better to do

My first job was to sort out the newsreader so I can scroll through RSS feeds. I host my own FreshRSS server which takes care of the collection of articles, I just needed to update NetNewsWire, the mobile client so it connected nicely

Secondly, I had been meaning to sort out a previous failed attempt to adopt Bluesky. Being a self-host enthusiast I didn’t want to just sign up and join. The thing that interested me in this service in the first place was that it was decentralised with no ads or sponsored posts

Thirdly I wanted to revisit the Fediverse properly in the shape of Mastodon

So I read up more about it and came to the conclusion that decentralised social networking is cool as fuck! Once you wrap your head around how it works that is. And that’s the main problem, people aren’t adopting it because it’s not as obvious. It’s more about “having” something than being “on” something. I read into it a few years ago but it is only really this week that the penny has fully dropped for me

As we are, we are “on” Facebook. You log on to the web interface (client) which accesses your account and data on the same server and you interact with other accounts on that server. It all lives in/on the same place and is owned and controlled by the company who owns the service so they can sell and profit from your data. They can moderate everything at their own will and nothing is really yours. You are the product not the customer and the algorithm manipulates what you are exposed to to maximise engagement

The Fediverse is completely different, more akin to having an email address. The confusing part is that those who have used the likes of Mastodon have kind of experienced a very similar thing to centralised services in so far as they’ve used an “instance” (say mastodon.social) which makes the whole thing easier for the user. It hosts your account and info and has a web interface. There are many such instances and they all federate with each other to make it sort of look like one big thing

Now what you can do is host your own server (GoToSocial is the service) – something I’ve just brought online, which houses (or will anyway) my account and data, posts, replies, timeline etc. and I can communicate with accounts on other servers using a client (kind of like you do with email). All the different parts are separate and you retain total ownership of all your stuff. The thing that hangs it all together is the ActivityPub protocol. Mastodon is just one popular server platform that uses it.

The Bluesky model is similar but different. You own your own data on a PDS – Personal Data Server and use this to access the Bluesky app / network. The protocol is different, called AT Protocol. You are more beholden to the Bluesky network if you want to use that as the app server is all in one place bsky.app. Other networks exist with this protocol but it’s a little more centralised in nature

So I now have my own self-hosted ActivityPub server and PDS server. It’s kind of like a farmer owning his own land to a degree. Apart from the hardware and telecoms cost, it was completely free and I will not see any ads or sponsored posts on these platforms. Sure the userbases are small but at least the experience will be cleaner

It’s not necessary to go to these lengths, you can as I said sign up to the main mastodon.social instance or open an account on bsky.app and enjoy the same advantages. If we all did this at the same time and added each other then we’d all have a far better online social experience

As it stands I shall continue to use Facebook because most people use it and that’s probably the only reason anyone else does too. It’s not an enjoyable user experience for anybody but we just put up with it. I completely deleted it for a couple of years a few years ago and it was liberating but also very isolating. It’s amazing at how many people think of Facebook as “the internet”. My usage will mainly be on desktop though where I can at least tailor it with the FB Purity extension, not to mention lock it right down to try and minimise all the tracking it does