How Fediverse Works (and Why It Could Be the Future of Social Media)

Idealistic geeks have a long history of giving horribly confusing names to potentially revolutionary technology. So it is with the Fediverse, a portmanteau of “Federation” and “Universe” and the potential future of the social internet. But what does he do? that average?

Simply put, Fediverse is the collective name for a bunch of different social networks and platforms that are connected to each other. Users of any of these services can follow users of any of the others and reply to, like, and share posts.

There are tons of articles and websites that explain this concept in detail, but most get bogged down in technical jargon pretty quickly. I’d like to avoid that, so here’s my good faith attempt to explain what Fediverse is in plain English.

First, though, let’s talk about email.

Email is decentralized (and why it matters to Fediverse)

Anyone with an email address can email anyone else. Gmail users, for example, aren’t limited to talking to other Gmail users—they can send messages to Outlook users, Yahoo Mail users, and even people who run their own email servers in their basements. Basically, anyone with an email address can write to anyone else with an email address. In other words, email is decentralized.

There is no single company or institution that handles email – there are many different email providers, all of which are compatible with each other. This is because email is a open protocolone that anyone who wants to can build a service for.

The biggest social networks don’t work that way now. You can’t follow user X through Facebook, for example, or subscribe to a Reddit community on Tumblr. That’s why all these websites are full of screenshots from other people i want to share posts from other sites, but there is no good way to do this. This is a problem that Fediverse is trying to fix.

Follow anyone anywhere

Fediverse is an attempt to make social networks more like email, that is, to allow users of different services to follow each other and interact wherever they want, without creating a million different accounts.

At the moment, one of the biggest services on Fediverse is Mastodonwhich started in 2016 as a Twitter alternative. Other open source networks on the platform include Pixelfeda photo sharing service similar to Instagram since 2010 and Peertube. There’s also Threads, as mentioned, a Meta-owned network that allows users to opt-in to share their posts with Fediverse.

How this works in practice: I am quite active on Mastodon but have a few friends who only post on Threads. Because Threads is connected to Fediverse, I can follow Threads users, see their posts and even write comments while using Mastadon. It’s as simple as searching for the Threads user inside Mastodon, following them, and interacting as I would with any other user.

That’s the Fediverse promise: you use any social network you want to use, and you connect with people on any social network they want to use. And there are several other advantages. When I quit Twitter a few years ago (before it became X), I left all my followers behind. That’s not how it works with Fediverse: you can switch between services and take your followers with you. That’s the kind of freedom you can’t get from a centralized system.

A number of companies and enthusiasts are working on other ways to connect with Fediverse. WordPress offers a plugin that allows bloggers to share their posts, for example – replies appear as comments. Flipboard, the news reading app, recently added the option to track Fediverse users within the appand the Ghost email newsletter platform is also working on a similar functionality. And there are hacks to connect other non-Fediverse networks – you can connects Bluesky to Fediverse with a little work, for example.

There’s a certain idealism behind all these efforts—many of Fediverse’s biggest services are run by nonprofits and volunteers. But the involvement of smaller publishing companies like Ghost and Flipboard suggests that Fediverse could also be a place for writers and publications to connect directly with readers in the future. A decentralized social media system could also allow small upstart social networks to compete with the big platforms. It’s a potentially exciting time for social media and the wider internet.

All of this is possible because Fediverse is based on an open protocol that anyone can build on. The hope is that over time more services will offer integrations and social networks will become as open as email. Is that going to happen for sure? I don’t know. And Fediverse, like anything on the Internet, has its share of problems. Moderation, for example, is a huge challenge, and larger platforms moving around in space could make it difficult.

I’m just scratching the surface with this explanation – there’s so much I could go into. Mostly, though, when you hear “Fediverse,” you’ll now know what it means: a series of social networks and platforms that are connected to each other. I hope you’ll be hearing more about it in the years to come.