Twitter is going through some things.

We seem to be at a critical point in the internet's growth. Twitter is having trouble (or is finally getting fixed, depending on which side of the fence you're on). In any case, the idea of a large social networking platform being largely controlled by one person should be frightening to anyone.

You may agree with the person in charge now, but that person can change over time or someone else can come along and take charge. And social networking platforms likely have the ability to broadly shape and influence sentiment and opinion in subtle ways.

Not great stuff. How do we make it better?

Federation

Federation isn't a new concept on the internet. In some ways, the most critical components of the internet could be considered federated because they speak a common language regardless of who operates them, and they more or less openly connect with each other.

Some of the lower-level services and protocols like BGP, DNS, HTTP, and SMTP support the internet and have successfully done so for decades. If they were to suddenly change how they operate, or become more expensive to operate, there would be significant economic impacts. That's how critical they are.

But a truly federated service that you're probably familiar with is, in fact, email. Federation ensures that, regardless of the platform (i.e.: Gmail) that offers the service (i.e.: email), you can talk to people who use that service on other platforms. The language that the service speaks is open and can be operated by anyone.

Imagine a world where folks using Gmail can't send messages to someone using another email provider. Or if you had to pay a fee to receive email from another country.

That's where we are with social networking right now.

Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, and others have become significant parts of society. So many people have collectively invested in them and they ways that they connect us with others. A growing portion of society gets their news from these services. Some government agencies provide critical and time-sensitive information on these platforms.

So, when one of these platforms has a crisis, it's troubling. And this is arguably the first time we're seeing it play out.

A more social network

Thankfully, there are federated social networks.

In recent days, Mastodon in particular has received an influx of people escaping the uncertainty of Twitter. Though it has been around a while, and has similarities to Twitter, the concept of federation means that it probably doesn't work quite they way you expect. There is not one singular site that hosts the entire Mastodon platform; if it's federated, there can't be a single authoritative site.

For example, If you sign up at mastodon.social, the Mastodon instance that's hosted by the creator of Mastodon, you'll get access to lots of content because there are a lot of people registered on that instance. If you join a smaller instance that has connected with fewer other servers, you'll see a whole lot less. But in either case you can still follow, interact with, and read what people on other Mastodon instances post. And as a Mastodon instance grows, its community of participants and content grows with it.

A side effect of federation is that many Mastodon instance have a specific niche or theme. There are Mastodon instance for art, technology, games, literature, religion, politics, and more. And each instance has its own rules and moderation policies. Federation allows you to align yourself with the walled garden that makes the most sense for you, and the flexibility to reach out of that walled garden when necessary. You also have the ability to pick up and move to another instance if you need to.

Mastodon instances are often supported by donations but, since Mastodon is open source and free, you can always run your own instance.

One more great thing about federation: Mastodon instance can share posts with sites that run entirely different social networking software using broker services called "relays." This broader coordination among different social networking software is collectively called the Fediverse.

Non-federated alternatives

I'm not a fan of exploring new non-federated networks. Most of these will be operated by an individual as a hobby project, an entrepreneur, or are actually a startup funded by venture capitalists. In other words: these are either tenuous side projects that could disappear at any point or are just different flavors of Twitter, and no matter how benevolent their operators are today, they may not be so tomorrow.

My advice would be to be wary of these, especially if the platforms are not built on open source code.

What's old is new again and never really left

What will social networking look like in the future? The desire to break away from conventional social networks run by companies seems strong, but there are still many flavors of social platforms that don't have good federated alternatives yet (TikTok, for instance).

I think the open and federated spirit of the early internet still echoes a bit today, and certainly still has its place. Hopefully we'll see a rekindling of that as people take back digital spaces for themselves.

Feature image by Barth Bailey via Unsplash.