Federate, liberate

The whole thing began very early one morning. We’ve all been there. I was awake too early, picked up my phone, opened Facebook and started scrolling as I had done a thousand times before.

After a few minutes I simply thought, “Enough is enough.”

The user experience has eroded more and more over the years and on mobile it has become almost unusable. I needed to change my digital habits, or at least this part of them. If I was going to scroll on my phone then I might as well find something better to look at.

My first job was to sort out my newsreader so I could scroll through RSS feeds instead. I host my own FreshRSS server which takes care of collecting the articles. I simply needed to update NetNewsWire on my phone so that it connected properly.

Secondly, I had been meaning to sort out a previous failed attempt to adopt Bluesky. As a self-hosting enthusiast I did not want to simply sign up and leave it at that. What interested me in the first place was the prospect of a decentralised social network without the barrage of advertising and sponsored posts that now clutters the established platforms.

Thirdly, I wanted to revisit the Fediverse properly, starting with Mastodon.

So I read 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.

That is also the main problem. People are not adopting it because the whole thing is not immediately obvious. It is less about being “on” one particular service and more about having an identity that can communicate across a wider network. I had read about it a few years ago but it was only now that the penny fully dropped.

With Facebook you are very definitely “on Facebook”. The interface, your account, your data and the people you interact with all sit within an ecosystem owned and controlled by one company.

That company decides how the service works, what you see and how your data is used. It can change the rules or moderate the platform as it sees fit and you have very little meaningful control over any of it.

You are the product rather than the customer. The algorithm determines what you are shown in order to maximise engagement.

The Fediverse works differently and is more akin to email. The confusing part is that using a large Mastodon instance can initially feel much like using a centralised platform. An instance such as mastodon.social hosts your account and information and provides an interface through which you use it.

There are many independent instances and they federate with one another, allowing people on different servers to interact as though they were part of one wider network.

You can also host your own server. I have brought one online using GoToSocial which is server software built around ActivityPub. It houses my account and posts and lets me communicate with accounts on other servers through a client, much as an email client lets you communicate with people using different email providers.

Self-hosting gives me far greater control over my account and data. ActivityPub is the protocol that allows the different servers to communicate. Mastodon is simply one popular piece of server software that uses it.

Bluesky’s model is similar but not the same. A Personal Data Server, or PDS, hosts your account repository including posts, likes, follows and profile information. Bluesky uses a different protocol called AT Protocol.

The wider system also relies on relays and App Views with Bluesky’s own infrastructure still doing much of that work. The data-hosting layer is therefore decentralised although the Bluesky social app remains more dependent on centrally operated services than the Fediverse.

So I now have my own self-hosted ActivityPub server and PDS. It feels a little like a farmer owning his own patch of land. The analogy only stretches so far but the principle is similar.

The software itself cost me nothing although naturally there are hardware, domain and connectivity costs. More importantly, I can use these networks without the constant barrage of advertising and sponsored posts found elsewhere. Their communities are smaller than Facebook’s but the experience is cleaner.

You do not have to go to these lengths. You can sign up to a public Mastodon instance such as mastodon.social or join Bluesky through its normal app and still enjoy a much cleaner social experience. Self-hosting simply gives you more control.

If more of us moved across and added one another we could create a far better online social space without everyone needing to run their own server.

As things stand I shall continue to use Facebook because most people are there and that is probably the only reason many of us remain. It is not an enjoyable user experience but we put up with it because leaving can be isolating.

I deleted my account entirely for a couple of years and found it both liberating and lonely. It is astonishing how many people now treat Facebook as though it were the internet.

My Facebook use will mainly be on the desktop where I can at least tailor the experience with the FB Purity extension. I can also lock the browser down and minimise the amount of tracking Facebook is able to do.

It is not liberation but it is at least a start.