My experiences with the Federated Network (AKA Fediverse)

Since May 2022 that I've been part of the fededated network, originally in the since now long defunct mastodon.lol instance. I've hopped to many instances since them, and i tend to be on instances who use Misskey or forks of them for some reason lol.
I originally had an older version of this article in late 2023, but i decided to rewrite it after gaining a more nunanced experienced of what this whole thing is, isn't and means..

Please note that at the moment I'm rewritting this article to be a lot more accurate towards how i feel about it nowadays; and although it already has sort of an ending it still doesn't say everything about how i feel, so it will take a while until it is truly finished. Sorry x . x

I will probably get the more technical aspects and side of the federated network and comparisons towards existing technology wrong since i'm not super deep in that field, so please feel free to correct me at least in that area.

I've been told of this concept as something that would revolutionize or at least change how people would interact in social media spaces, that would actually make people co-operate more instead of tearing each other apart over meaningless things, etc.
Also the idea of a federated network consisting of individual instances and websites communicating each other through a protocol and network instead of just being in the same centralized space seemed really neat, and it made me wonder why this hasn't been tried before.

It turns out it was already tried before, the federated social network has existed since at least 2009 and there were fediverse clients like Frendica and GNU Social before Mastodon became the dominant force.
Also XMPP (and eventually Matrix) applied the federation idea towards chatting and for social media Movim was and is still a thing in that side

So i guess this federation thing isn't as new and shiny as I and many others previously thought, but still so many people were unaware of it since the idea of instances communicating with each other via a protocol seemed like an exciting concept to many people when they first heard it.
Each instance is able to decide what other instance(s) they connect with, with whom they serve ties with, to set their own ruleset and community inside it, etc.

It seems like a very novel idea compared to how traditional social media and communities have been handled before, where those topics ultimately rely on central decisions coming from that place; and for the first time in a long time i could sense some genuine optimism over social media in ages.

Unfortunately, at least in my own experience, i feel in my heart and soul that after giving it a chance for 2 years: the federated network has failed what it has set to do and turned out to be just an extension of contemporany internet misery, false promises and countless metas over what could've solved if people just decided to talk to each other a bit more.

So, one thing that i was told about fediverse is that it has the potential to be adapted for many purposes, like a video sharing site, file hosting, social media, news aggregator, etc.
Pixelfed proves that a primarily image shaing website can be hosted on the federated network, and so does Peertube prove it when it comes to video sharing; there are also some Reddit-like news aggregators on Activitypub too

However most of the time i see it being used for social media. Well at least it can be used for different kinds of social media, Frendica proved that you can emulate an early era Facebook on it (although everyone hates Facebook nowadays lol) along with a project i forgot the name of to emulate Tumblr via the Activitypub protocol fediverse runs on.

One thing that is defintiively obvious is that most of fediverse has decided to choose the microblogging format primarily shapped and used by Twitter and it's many clones.
So should a lot of the fediverse landscape be considered a Twitter clone then? But when people call it that a lot of fediverse users get really defensive as hell about it.

However my time being spent in this platform makes me feel like that the pararrels to Twitter don't end there. It also expands over how the userbase acts and responds to conflict, discourse, infighting, etc.
Like, it's the same shit all over again, except it's now even worse since with the ability for instances to choose to excommunicate from each other; that usually ends up being decided out of arbitrary or nonsensical reasons instead of just trying to talk to each other, dividing and potentially destroying communities in the process.

Also like from what I've seen in Twitter, people just don't disengage nor take a walk when something goes wrong, instead continuing tearing each other apart over what can a lot of the time turn out to be nonsense or at the very least solved if they just talked to each other and calmed down for a bit.
And I've seen a lot of the people around my cirlce inside that platform fall for this shit and perpetuate it along with pressuring me to get involved in it instead of just letting me be.
I already have my own issues going on, I do not want to get involved in irrelevant internet drama that could cost my entire reputation or even life. Or meta like how you people call it.

From what I know microblogging social media has this popularity contest problem, which also applies to a lot of fediverse as well despite it's claims of being decentralized.
The big boys always get the saying while the smaller ones are left in the dust, and if you disagree with a common talking point there might be even a meta as people suddenly see you as the villian as the villian of the week.
This makes the whole promises of fediverse being decentralized fall flat to me, and it ends up repeating the same patterns of Twitter and it's clones that i hate.

Sorry, this kinda devolved into a rant ;_;. I'm just tired.

So yeah, the federated network at least by how experienced it doesn't have the healthiest community. This is unfortunately made worse by how people handle the fact that it's federated and end up deciding to defederate, spread rumors and nonsense that can hurt people's lives and their communities, etc.
It's like the federation idea turned out to be abused and misused, maybe by it's own design flaws, maybe due to how people handle (and fail to handle) conflict, etc

I noticed that there isn't really many people of the likes of me in it.
There aren't many artist on the federated network, most of them deciding to be in Bluesky or Cohost instead (or staying in Twitter for some reason).
There's a lot of tech people in there, i mean they're really cool; but it feels really lonely sometimes being a musician when everyone talks about Arch Linux. There is an artist-led instance called mastodon.art, but that one has fallen under a gigantic drama lately i don't really wanna elaborate here.

One thing i genuinely love in fediverse is the amount of trans and queer people I've found in there. It makes me feel genuinely less alone in this world and I've made some amazing friends through that plaform despite It's flaws.
However it's not all sunshine and rainbows since leftist and queer drama turns out to be some of the most miserable kinds of conflict I've experienced (it might be since I'm trans and a leftist myself it's a lot more personal than say other kinds of drama i can mostly ignore), and when all of that is combined with fediverse meta it becomes a toxic cocktail that makes me wanna destroy the computer.

I also wanna talk about how instances can suddenly die for many reasons. Sometimes their shutdown is actually announced by advance, but other times server failures or some drama bullshit leads to sudden shutdown without real notice.
There are some mechanism in Activitypub to do backups when you move and all, but there isn't really any of them to do them on the fly nor sync them towards other instances; which means if a catastrophe like what i described earlier happens and you didn't backup earlier you pretty much have to start all over again.

About the instances dying... it's really scary how a place you call a community can suddenly close down and stop existing for whatever reason.
An entire history of people talking in that instance suddenly gets wiped out of existence due to a server failure, the admin(s) having a mental breakdown, some bullshit drama causing the admin to act in a really careless way instead of deciding to solve things in a more careful way and not put the entire community in risk, etc.
The federated network is very volatile, and you can't really call any place home as everything can just disappear for whatever reason, leaving you notihng left in some cases.

I honestly don't know. Maybe what I want to say is not to get hyped about what seems to be an advancement in the way we communicate online without reading the fine print first.
I don't think there isn't an one way solution, since other places like forums, other chatting spaces, other kinds of social media already had their own problems and bullshit too.
Maybe fedi doesn't even have to be a big innovation neccessary, and what it needs is just to have a more healthy community; because you can have a big innovation but the community surrounding it can still be toxic as hell that it undermines what it's set to do.

Maybe i just don't like contemporany social media nor how it has shapped how people interact, but i still feel like if things were better fediverse would have been alright.