Why I Care So Much About the Fediverse

• 🗓️ Mar 16, 2025

There’s been many names for what it is; or at least, I’ve seen it being referred to in different ways in different conversations at different times.

The one I like the most is “peopleverse”, but this is popularly used only in niche groups now, it seems.

In this post, I want to go write down why I care about this thing we now call “the Fediverse”.

Background

Before anything else, let’s step back a bit to understand where we are now…

Some years ago, there was a wave of popularity around “Internet of Things (IoT)”. It coudn’t be escaped back then – much similar to “blockchain” and the much more recent hype we have now with Gen AI.

Though these hypes come and go, the principles they leave have lasting effect… and the Fediverse, though not formally, can be traced back to IoT.

Technically, the Fediverse consists of protocols and platforms that facilitate how humans are represented and interact online in a decentralized manner (i.e., in contrast to the usual centralized architecture, but more on that later).

In simple terms, the Fediverse is the “Internet of People”.

Internet of People and the People behind

For the longest time, the way we would socialize online is via centralized platforms: Friendster, Plurk, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and others… these are all centrally owned.

We have seen where this goes mostly: the platforms become a reflection of their owners’ values, and most (if not all) of the time it does not work well for communities in there.

The Fediverse is a response to that: we want to move the ownership of our data and interaction into the people’s hands.

The World Wide Web Consortium has a set of recommendations for this, which is now being taken care of by a working group and the Social Web Foundation.

Brilliant people are putting their minds together so we can prevent more catastrophy that comes out from centralized social platforms. We are seeing a movement that is very real. The recent FOSDEM conference even had a dedicated session for the SocialWeb.

Not only that; privately owned platforms are also looking to join. Though, trying not to be cynical, it does remind me of Microsoft buying into the Open Source movement, which no one could have imagined many many years ago.

Now they own GitHub, we have Windows Subsystem for Linux, and it feels great… but we also have Copilot that trained itself from all our open source code without permission for profit.

It’s a long game, with many nuances.

But the point is: the Fediverse is a big enough movement to get big tech’s attention.

Threads by Meta has joined. And even though Bluesky (which started as a research in Twitter) has their own proprietary protocol (AT Protocol), the devs are very supportive of Bridgy Fed – a system for bridging interactions between the Fediverse’s protocol and theirs.

How it looks in the end

You will find a lot of parallels with how the Fediverse works and email works: Someone using gmail can exchange messages with someone using protonmail, for example, and someone using Mastodon (which you can host yourself) should be able to interact with someone using Threads or Bluesky.

It is not perfectly there yet, but that’s the intention of this movement.

Many institutions have put up their own communities now on the Fediverse, such as Amsterdam, The European Union, and various Academic institutions.

This is because you should own your data and not be dependent on any private party when communicating with your community.