Overview: Fediverse
What?
Strictly speaking, the Fediverse is a collection of interoperable social networks built on the open Web standard ActivityPub, including Twitter-lookalike Mastodon and YouTube-lookalike PeerTube, as well as Meta's Threads, which "federated" in 2024.
Unlike Twitter and YouTube, however:
- Mastodon/PeerTube are not owned and controlled by corporations. Anyone can launch and operate a Mastodon or PeerTube server, just like anyone can set up an email server and exchange emails with others using the email standard.
- The person who creates a server sets its rules (privacy, hate speech, etc).
- Users on any Mastodon/PeerTube server can not only interact with users on other Mastodon/PeerTube servers, they can interact across Fediverse platforms. For example:
- if Mastodon user A follows PeerTube user B, B’s PeerTube videos will appear in A’s Mastodon feed,
- user A can even comment on the video from within Mastodon, without visiting PeerTube or having a PeerTube account.
This would be like if my Twitter account followed someone's Facebook page, yet we could still interact seamlessly from our platform of preference. That’s impossible as Twitter & Facebook are walled gardens. Fediverse platforms like Mastodon and PeerTube are not – this is the Open Web on social.
So what?
While each Fediverse server is a community with its own rules, they're not walled gardens. This helps solve the vicious circle problem facing new platforms (why join a network where there are so few people on it? Hence noone joins it, so numbers stay low. So noone joins it): people don’t need to join the same social network, they just have to join any Fediverse network.
And that, in theory, changes everything. Instead of everyone being trapped in a few platforms owned by billionaires who impose the algorithm which maximises their profits (ie optimising for enragement), "The Fediverse thus promises a landscape of interconnected gardens of all shapes and sizes, each managed according to its inhabitant’s needs. People can roam everywhere, talk to anyone and change “home garden” at will" - Welcome to the Fediverse, starry-eyed noob.
Challenges
The ActivityPub approach, however, has some flaws - see:
- the singleton problem: it's "difficult to convince ... a major server to [federate] ... with a minor one... three Mastodon servers contain almost 60% of the known Mastodon population" - Peer-to-Peer Network Models and their Implications.
- "Federated networks become oligopolies at scale" due to forces seen everywhere ("airline routes, power grids, trains, banks, Bitcoin mining, protein interactions, ecological food webs, neural networks"), so the fediverse evolves to become something only a little better to the centralised apps it was trying to replace - see Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr
Other approaches to building alternative decentralised ecosystems therefore exist.
What about...?
Bluesky
By late 2024 I had opted for Bluesky as more promising for building decentralised collective intelligence, because:
- like Fedizens, Bluesky users own their data, but they can also move it wherever they like without changing their identity (unlike in the Fediverse).
- anyone can build on Bluesky, without asking permission, so any Bluesky user can subscribe to custom feeds and moderation tools developed by 3rd parties.
Derived from this Bluesky thread by @danabra.mov
Nostr & Farcaster
These both venture into blockchain territory. I'll be investigating these soon.
See also
- Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid, providing social media users with control over their data through personal knowledge graphs.
- adversarial interoperability - another part of the solution to this problem.
Personal state of play
ActivityPub
I was an early convert to ActivityPub as a theoretical idea, and in 2022 found myself writing a Fediverse strategy report for another EC department as the EU's Data Protection Supervisor and the EC's IT department launched social.network.europa.eu, the EU's own Mastodon server. The same year saw the EU Bubble's own server - https://eupolicy.social/ - launched. As I pointed out at the time, this had real potential: "it should be very easy for eupolicy.social to avoid creating a Brussels Bubble within the Fediverse... rather than building bridges outwards, we can pull national conversations into the Bubble, simply by following the right people." (Am I on the right Mastodon instance?).
At about the same time I took the plunge as part of the #TwitterMigration triggered by Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter. I was optimistic (my first post was literally Welcome to the Fediverse, starry-eyed noob), but within a few months I'd discovered an unhappy truth: the current infrastructure simply doesn't deliver content properly reliably.
I'd point you to the mid-2023 toot where I pointed this out, but (as if to illustrate my point) it's gone: in November my server simply disappeared, taking all my content and connections with it, without warning. I managed to dig out a screenshot of that toot from my phone and include it in All my toots gone.
Well before then the EU's experiments had become clearly underwhelming, with accounts limited to the institutions, rather than the people working in them. Someone clearly never read Euan Semple's "Organisations don't tweet, people do", missing a huge opportunity that news organisations started embracing in 2022: setting up a Fediverse server for their journalists to prove that they are their journalists, not an imposter. In April 2024 it was closed.
Meanwhile https://eupolicy.social/ was shrinking, from 720 active accounts soon after launch to 225 by late 2024.
From Threads to Bluesky...
Literally one month after my Mastodon server disappeared, Instagram's "Twitter-killer" Threads arrived in Europe, announcing their intention to join the Fediverse. I dug out my never-used Instagram account, and also launched a Bluesky account to kick both networks' tyres in parallel.
Currently I'm feeling confident about Bluesky, as set out in my November 2024 newsletter.
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Version control
I develop this Fediverse Overview using the permanent versions pattern described in Two wiki authors and a blogger walk into a bar….
- changes in this version:
- updated to reflect what I learnt about Bluesky, and generally shortened
- version control
- this is version: 4
- previous versions available on my experimental wiki
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More reading: resources tagged OR(#fediverse, #open web, #bluesky, #mastodon, #threads, #nostr) follow below:
Relevant resources
carnegieendowment.org
"the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace conducted a workshop with eighteen experts to explore governance challenges to defederation... on decentralized social media [which] offers new possibilities for online governance. Experts consider how it can be used responsibly, in a way that balances speech and safety".A good example of how the dis…
blog.blacksky.community
At last, a single page setting out the What and Why of Blacksky, which "builds infrastructure for social groups to control how they show up online: how their feeds work, how harm is addressed, and how costs are covered. Instead of one-size-fits-all rules set by a company with growth targets, Blacksky enables groups to govern themselves, and pool r…
lassehjorthmadsen.github.io
"We’ve built a network of scientists and researchers active on Bluesky. The goal is to better understand how this group of users interact on the platform... we arrived at a science-oriented network of 17,980", computed centrality measures to identify influential members, and created an interactive 3d visualisation.They also provide details of the …
www.nature.com
"Bluesky posts about science garner more likes and reposts than similar ones on X... according to the first large-scale analysis of science content on Bluesky... suggest Bluesky users engage with posts more than do users of X... The results were posted as a preprint on arXiv last month and have not been peer reviewed.""Interactions on Bluesky wer…
bsky.social
Collection of posts from media publishers on the traffic and engagement from Bluesky compared to X, Threads, etc. Image: Similarweb's report, which also said:"Threads generated 24.5 million outgoing referrals in November, but 42% of that traffic was to sister site instagram.com. Bluesky generated 38.6 million outgoing visits, spread more evenly ac…
www.emarketer.com
When this was written there were 23m Bluesky users: "Some publishers report traffic and conversion rates three to four times higher compared with platforms like Threads and X, despite Bluesky’s smaller user base.... EUobserver received 3,800 unique visitors from Bluesky (with 3,300 followers) compared to 1,320 from X (with 203,000 followers)...Fo…
bsky.app
X is still larger but very regularly Bluesky easily eclipses it in terms of research being shared.
dl.acm.org
"decentralized approaches come with their own trade-offs, and therefore multiple architectures exist... we conduct the first large-scale analysis of Bluesky... [which] decomposes and opens the key functions of the platform into subcomponents that can be provided by third party stakeholders".The intros of Fediverse and Nostr provide a useful spectr…
dl.acm.org
A 2024 paper from the Bluesky team where they "introduce the architecture of Bluesky and the AT Protocol, and explain how the technical design of Bluesky is informed by our goals: enable decentralization by having multiple interoperable providers for every part of the system; make it easy for users to switch providers; give users agency over the c…
www.sciencedirect.com
This study examines:"the shift in the scientific community from X to Bluesky, its impact on scientific communication, and consequently on social metrics", following the Academic Twitter migration. Is there "evidence of a community shift", and if so "examine the differences in values and indicators..."? "provide valuable insights into whether Blue…
www.altmetric.com
Altmetric's blog post announcing that they had "expanded its tracking capabilities by integrating Bluesky" when there were "over 20 million users".
arxiv.org
This preprint "looks at the dynamics of this migration" from X to Mastodon of academics: using "publicly available user account data, we track the posting activity of academics on Mastodon over a one year period... gathered follower-followee relationships ... finding that the subset of academics ... were well-connected. However, this strong intern…
techcrunch.com
"Jack Dorsey ... invested $10 million ... fund experimental open source projects and other tools that could ultimately transform the social media landscape." Original focus nostr, but now "will experiment with other tools, too, like ActivityPub... as well as Cashu.""operating like a “community of hackers,”... could include new consumer social apps…
www.fabriziomusacchio.com
Some thoughts from a neuroscientist who's been kicking Bluesky's tyres: "The scientific community is once again shifting platforms... Between Mastodon’s ideals and Bluesky’s usability, we are faced with a complex landscape of compromises".Background: first he left X for Mastodon following Musk's purchase"over time, activity on Mastodon — at least …
www.project-syndicate.org
"Europe’s systemic dependency on Big Tech’s social-media platforms threatens the continent’s digital sovereignty" - perhaps nothing new, but well argued nevertheless:"Just as the European Union seeks to reduce its reliance on external providers for semiconductors... it must do the same for social media. dominant platforms extract value from Europe…
www.eurosky.social
"the next era of social media—built in Europe, run on our cloud, ruled by our laws... Social media is critical infrastructure, and a vital piece of the European tech sovereignty agenda... we need to build infrastructure ... on the AT Protocol... We have a plan for immediate action that can begin having an impact in 2025".Part of Free Our Feeds, …
www.techdirt.com
Mike Masnick notes, as the "Bluesky is dying" discourse moves into it's 3rd? week, that it's "a bit odd: when something is supposedly dying or irrelevant, journalists can’t stop writing about it". But the premise of these critiques is wrong as they "fundamentally misunderstand what people want from social media and who gets to decide what constitu…
www.bskyinfo.com
"Deer.social is a soft fork of the official Bluesky client, offering enhanced features, customizable toggles, and a focus on high-impact improvements for power users" as options you can toggle on, like the ability to "see through quote blocks and detachment (nuclear block for quotes/reply chains)", ignore " !no-unauthenticated labels", which I thi…
mailchi.mp
In late April I was in Hamburg for Ahoy! 2025, the first European conference dedicated to the ATmosphere — the information ecosystem built atop of ATproto, the protocol underpinning Bluesky.
mathewlowry.myhub.ai
In late April I was in Hamburg for Ahoy! 2025, the first European conference dedicated to the ATmosphere - the information ecosystem built atop of ATproto, the protocol underpinning Bluesky. I proposed a couple of ideas for the unconference sessions, and came away with content for at least 5 posts, none of which I've found time to write.
Think
newsletter,
collective intelligence,
myhub,
early adopter,
tools,
bluesky,
atprotocol,
ahoy2025,
ahoy,
groundmist
fediversereport.com
A deep dive into the April 2025 "censorship" on Turkish Bluesky illustrates that government censorship on ATmosphere apps is limited and will become even less effective as more people exploit its decentralised nature.Context in brief:March 2025, the Turkish "government ordered X to restrict access to various X accounts ... associated with the prot…
www.skeetsapp.com
"Skeets is a 3rd party iOS / iPad OS client for Bluesky" which I saw at the Ahoy conference. It's a good example of how Bluesky is more than a X alternative: it can be used by any (iOS-carrying) Bluesky user, but offers other features than Bluesky PBC's own app, including:"Keep reading positionEdit postsPost notificationsBookmarks DraftsPush Notif…
whtwnd.com
"How would MyHub.ai evolve to become part of the ATmosphere?" - One of my suggested conversation topics at the Ahoy conference, April, 2025.
whtwnd.com
"Let's build a tool to help large organisations coordinate their Bluesky footprint, helping them get the most out of the platform" - One of my suggested conversation topics at the Ahoy conference, April, 2025.
www.noemamag.com
Renée DiResta, "Invisible Rulers" author, on why "user exodus to smaller platforms has become increasingly common... What ultimately splintered social media wasn’t a killer app or the Federal Trade Commission — it was content moderation. Partisan users clashed with “referees”; ... Principles like “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach” ... attem…
mailchi.mp
Last month I published a couple of posts on X and Bluesky. They make a nice pair, so I'm including both, below, and taking this opportunity to ask for your perspective. I'd really value getting you and your organisation's views on both platforms in 2025, and I'd be happy to answer any questions in return.
mathewlowry.myhub.ai
If, like many, you think Bluesky is "Twitter, but with less Nazis", this post is for you.
trotsky.pirhoo.com
"a type-safe library to build automation at the top of ATProto/Bluesky API... to make automating actions on Bluesky both friendly and highly flexible... a domain-specific language (DSL) and builder pattern abstraction ... to streamline common sequences of actions (like searching posts, replying, following, liking, etc.) which typically require jug…
www.niemanlab.org
"Sill shows the most popular links being shared by accounts you follow on Bluesky and Mastodon", linking through to "the individual posts... with what people said about" them. You can sort (“newest” or “most popular”), "hide reposts, and limit posts to the last 3, 6, 12, or 24 hours".Built in response to the death of the link: “On Instagram and Ti…