The Power of Interoperability: Exploring the Fediverse and Its Potential to Revolutionize Online Interactions

Imagine being able to interact with posts from image sites, blogging sites, streaming services, and video sites all from the same account. Sounds like science fiction, right? But, thanks to a concept called the fediverse, this is now a reality. The fediverse is a network of decentralized web services that allow users to share content across multiple platforms using a unified protocol called activity Pub.

Activity Pub is a content protocol that enables different websites and services to communicate with each other seamlessly. It's like a glorified RSS feed that contains every piece of content, effectively making it the core of how online interactions work today. Platforms like Mastodon, PeerTube, and Pixel Fed use this protocol to create microblogging posts, video uploads, and image sharing experiences that are all connected through a single account.

The beauty of activity Pub lies in its ability to enable self-hosted instances of services that can be completely owned by the user. This means that users have full control over their data and privacy, keeping it away from prying eyes and being able to erase it at any time if needed. It's like having a superpower when it comes to online interactions.

One of the most exciting aspects of the fediverse is its potential to revolutionize the way we interact with each other online. Imagine being able to share your thoughts, ideas, and creativity across multiple platforms without having to log in or create separate accounts for each one. It's like having a superpower when it comes to online interactions.

Unfortunately, the current setup of the fediverse is still evolving, and there are some limitations to how content can be synced between services. However, with time and development, we can expect to see even more exciting features emerge. For now, users can follow and boost posts from other services, which provides a way to interact with content across multiple platforms.

The journey of the fediverse is a rabbit hole that's hard to resist. From hosting streaming services like Owncast to creating your own YouTube alternative with PeerTube, there are endless possibilities for exploring this new frontier. Even blogging and Flickr are integrating activity Pub soon, which is very exciting news.

If you're interested in learning more about the fediverse and its potential, I recommend checking out my web browser exploration playlist or clicking on the link below to discover more fediverse services. There's also a bundle deal available with CuriosityStream that includes access to Nebula, a creator-owned video site built by me and other talented creators.

For those who want to take control of their online interactions, I recommend exploring my streaming site, Nebula, where you can watch videos on topics ranging from tech to weirdness. With its low prices and ad-free experience, it's the perfect place to discover new content and creators. And, if you sign up at CuriosityStream, you'll get access to Nebula for free, along with an amazing bundle deal that includes two sites for the price of one.

In conclusion, the fediverse is a powerful concept that has the potential to revolutionize online interactions. With its unified protocol and self-hosted services, users can take control of their data and privacy while exploring new possibilities for content creation and sharing. As we continue to explore this exciting frontier, we'll likely uncover even more innovative features and applications that will make the internet an even weirder and more wonderful place.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enman the net just isn't what it used to be but we're seeing a massive shift to ditch Mega Corp own social websites for decentralized this isn't about crypto and user-owned data and platforms and it will change everything for years to come used to we had weird flash games everyone had blogs where they curated their special interests competed to see who had the best band fan page or poured their hearts out in them instant messaging was a thing we chose to log into and log out of so that it wouldn't disrupt the rest of our day and we could customize at least the background image of our profile Pages if not completely change everything the web was weird and it was great but the past decade and a half has gotten super corporate centralized boring and about as unhealthy as it gets things are getting exciting again but for those of us who weren't locking ourselves in our bedrooms during grade school and middle school it can be really confusing to navigate Mastodon decentralized internet Federated services that's so much jargon all of a sudden let's make it super easy as I could not be more excited that people are finally getting into this side of the net let's get you up to speed talk about why I'm stoked and set up who should and should not sign up speaking of ownership and control over your data I have my own video streaming site nebula that I built with my Creator friends and you can sign up for that with our bundle with curiosity stream linked below space car Emerald boy overpaid for Bird app and won the speed run for Burning It To The Ground while the cultists keep assuring each other this is some 4D chess play many like yourself have started looking elsewhere along with the surprise that Tumblr actually got bought away from Yahoo and has slowly been on the rise again you may have encountered no end of talk about services like Mastodon and something called the fediverse there's a lot of layers like an onion and while it sounds easy to get lost in it's actually simple as a concept you too can become a master of the fediverse in no time at all don't be like these people writing articles about how they couldn't find anyone on Mastodon or started to cry we're going to make it easy Mastodon is a social networking site it aims to hold that distinction of social networking versus social media where social media is about amassing followers and producing content under the veil of parasocial relationships meanwhile social networking is just about making friends and having conversations meeting people who knew it's more akin to a bunch of Discord servers aim chat rooms or a bunch of different mailing lists than what Twitter actually is being social on the internet used to mean adding people to your friends list chatting directly with them and joining group chats for shenanigans or specific topics not farming for likes quote retweeting to dunk on people and clamoring for check marks before you learn more go on and sign up I'll link a couple places you can sign up in the description those servers are regularly closing registration or at least limiting it for temporary Windows to help you know mitigate some of the massive influx of users right now and to keep servers from exploding you can also sign up on the mobile apps as well there's an official app now but on Android everyone seems to recommend tusky instead as the official one is missing some features and on iOS you have meta text which is what I use although it's not continuing development for now or toot plus some closed source and paid options if you want to check them out make your profile add a profile picture add some Flair to your bio all right let's make your first toot yes they started calling it tooting at some point as a joke but they're changing it back I'd recommend starting out with an introduction posts using the hashtag introduction or introductions hashtag or both and tell the world about yourself what are your hobbies what do you do what do you what do you want to chat about just like joining a forum a chat room or Discord server or being in a new class for the first time let people know who you are explore a bit then come back so we can keep learning that's the core of it it's kind of like Twitter but where the expectations and infrastructure are built less around shouting into the void and dunking on each other and more directly interacting and having real conversations it's the little stuff it's the like the content warning etiquette which you can choose how to follow yourself don't listen to all of the advice just pick and choose for yourself the lack of quote boosting boosting being the uh the appropriate name for the equivalent to retweeting and of course the ultimate W the complete lack of algorithm yeah the only way to find posts is by people boosting them searching for specific hashtags or going to specific user profiles if you're worried about losing your reach to shout your content at by by switching off of Twitter that's probably not the place this is a social website and it's about time we learned that throwing content at a public wall isn't socializing it's just yelling there are some search assist tools if you want to find more people to interact with of course such as the people directory at fediverse.info or ideally you would start by just interacting with the people in your instance and then following them see who they follow and boost and things like that oh boy I said instance this might be where you get stuck or or you're wanting things to be simplified but I promise that it's easy and it's a good thing you see Mastodon is a decentralized web service whoa whoa whoa before you freak out this has nothing to do with crypto nfts or any of that it's honestly tragic that the Silicon Valley blockchain Bros have tainted the image of decentralization to most people as the concept was around long before then and will hopefully be around long after the decentralized web is a concept that honestly just Harkens back to what the internet originally was a bunch of computers that can connect to each other and communicate but don't rely on any singular computer to keep everything going when Twitter burns down goes bankrupt or becomes a bank everyone's account and clout go down with it I'd argue that's no longer a bad thing but for many of us who spent a decade or more building up our profiles discovering you know ourselves alongside everyone else building a following are really just appreciating the unprecedented and convenient access to contact other people or other creators than ways that just didn't happen over email or other social media sites foreign when a major CDN has outages and half of the internet goes down disrupting work play and relaxation all at once that's the problem decentralization is about reducing dependency on Tech Giants for basic things moving power back into the hands of the people and keeping the internet weird getting off my Podium now what does this mean for you if you've ever played an MMO you know the experience of going from the big open server to a smaller instance for specific story quests or Raid battles where only a limited party can participate at a time you're still on the full server you can still interact with and do other things with the people on it but you also have this little instance to do your own thing or think of it like a bunch of cities within a state each City or Mastodon instance in this case has its own identity culture reasons to live there or avoid it and rules on governance to be its own but the city still has to follow some higher level rules and obligations set in by the state Mastodon software and etiquette implied through functionality in this case but every citizen of every city are also still citizens of the state that can move freely through the state as they wish chat or interact with other citizens and other cities relocate themselves between cities and stay in touch with people from every city they wish there is a slight change here in that Mastodon instances could completely lock themselves out and restrict access in or communication out or outright block other instances from being seen by theirs this can get awkward in rare occasions where drastic action is made such as entire instances blocking the entire Game Dev instance because of one person but those even out with time as moderators fluctuate plus you can always completely transplant your profile followers and follows and so on to another instance if you don't like what yours is doing plus often this is this is a good thing truth social it uses Mastodon after all just most instances have it blocked this has plenty of advantages in terms of decision making control and privacy there's no 4 profit Corporation or sink carrier in charge to push your instance to do bad things or to sell off your data there's no data collection there's no trackers there's no ads and there's no algorithm at all there's not even plain text search for posts which means you may struggle to vaguely search for a specific post you saw and lost track of but strongly helps filter trolls and targeted harassment the lack of algorithm is crucial as is the point is to have conversations and socialize not to push multiple generations to become addicts of scrolling content feeds desperate for that slot machine dopamine Federated services are nothing new either Humanity has kind of always relied on Federated services for survival the post office telephone carriers libraries all commonplace services that speak the same language and interact with each other in some regard but are operated independently with some unique rules and a crap ton of resilience as a result loading up the web UI and enabling Advanced view from the settings you can get a tweet deck like interface but you know for free because paying just a few your lists of posts is kind of nonsense let's cover what all you can look at first there's the home feed these are the people that you follow your friends or acquaintances or people you just like what they post these posts are displayed in Reverse chronological order as they come in no algorithms no recommendations you can filter it to hide boosts and even replies from the feed if you purely just want the posts from only the people that you follow which is totally fine feeling quiet though don't freak out let's find some people to follow head on over to the local timeline to find other people in your instance if you joined a smaller Community instance the admin probably has some recommended accounts for you to follow that it showed you during sign up as well these are just people who signed up through the same site as you it's like people who are in the same Discord server as you that's that's what the local timeline is if you if you use Discord that's what it's like you can still talk to all the people from all the other servers if they're not blocked but your profile is primarily hosted from that one instance your handle is identified with the instance in it as well instead of just at eposvox I'm at eposvox at glitch.lg BT it's kind of like an email address pretty simple posts are all email is a concept but your email provider and client May differ wildly from everyone else which is fine you can still email anyone from any other domain yes I do I do keep switching analogies here that's because Mastodon and the greater Federated services are its own think it's so there's no perfect parallel with other surfaces it's its own concept and Paradigm it'll make sense as we build it up if it hasn't already but the combined analogies work here you can reply to people follow them see who they're boosting and so on but then you also have the Federated tab this is kind of like the r slash all page on Reddit or the trending tab on YouTube Just without any of the upvotes or suggestions just some actually influencing things that's just reverse chronological there just the latest posts from literally everyone well well not literally everyone actually it's the it's the six degrees of separation of Kevin Bacon kind of thing it's based on everybody that you or people in your instance knows about and follows through mutuals creating the Federated web network of connections of something it's generally not a good idea to Wade through there but you can if you're just looking to see what everyone's talking about at the moment or you're desperate to just find people without using hashtags for some reason hopefully a feature will be developed to let you add other instances to your feed so you can peek into other communities important for people like me with so many varying interests that being locked into one instance based on a specific topic would be be way too restrictive in the meantime you can add people you follow to lists much like on Twitter or you know sorting a contacts list Google Plus circles that kind of thing and group them up by genre the type of thing they usually post interest area Etc and then you can pin panels with lists to your window and this Advanced web view to keep tabs on those groups which is super handy you can also pin panels with individual or groups of hashtags as well which means you can just search for a specific topic and keep a feed of everyone posting about that topic do find while you're tweaking things you can customize your notifications panel either just look at mentions or you can filter specific things from it I recommend filtering favorites or likes as they don't do anything they just say hey I liked this but they don't feature your posts in someone's feed they don't increase the value of your post the more you can train yourself to fight the instinct to be checking for likes on every post the better your quality of life will be when writing your posts you can customize your post type based on privacy settings public is standard visible to everyone everywhere unlisted is still visible to everyone but it's removed from Discovery settings such as hashtag searching and local and Federated timelines people can view it on your profile and followers can see it in their feeds but that's it followers only only shows to your followers and mentioned people only you you get the idea this is really powerful posts can be much longer than Twitter as well but you're still limited to four images and short small videos just to keep costs down for your server provider for your instance admins images are capped to eight megabytes I believe and then they get compressed from there and videos are limited to 40 megabytes which admittedly is not much to work with you can run polls too it's recommended adding image descriptions or alt text to help those with screen readers and people will remind you of that simply stating that the image has already been described in the text can help make sure that folks know they aren't missing anything nice content warnings are a way to collapse the body of your texts below a button which can be used for lengthier posts to prevent from spamming your feed or to you know protect people from certain subjects almost like using a subject line for an email this can be used to hide messages containing sensitive topics like violence sexual assaults or other triggers or it can just make it easier to ignore a bunch of posts on a specific topic like the ongoing Twitter drama there's no hard rules just don't be a jerk if you're tired of clicking to expand them like I was in your preferences you have full control over Auto expanding content warning posts and you can still leave on blurring possibly sensitive images things like that you get a lot of control anyone can set up and run an instance as long as you have a bit of coin and can use a web host or a Raspberry Pi or a Chromebook people are run those instances from those as well there are more and more tools available to make setting up instances and things like that super simple you can set up instances for topics that you care about for work organizations the internet archive provides a honestly just wonderful example of the kind of structure that goes into what a you know what an organization should follow for their instance or you could even just run an instance for yourself as a way of self verifying who you are so that people know you're the real deal one of our Discord mods runs a master instance that a lot of us are in and I'm pretty sure I heard him forgetting to use the push to talk while trying to justify to his wife while he was spending money on this project hey everyone I am Cujo the admin for minely.social I've been running my own Mastodon server since April of this year so I'm still kind of new to it but I figured I have some insight that I'm able to share with people who might be interested in running the server I was getting kind of tired of traditional social media by that I mean social media that was being ran by corporations and kind of you had no say in how anything happened or why anything happened or in your data or anything like that so I ended up looking into different Alternatives and I found Mastodon these servers that were currently out there were not related to my liking so I just decided to spin up my own I want the DIY routes because I wanted to start a community wanted to you know build something myself instead of having everything dictated to me like I was on all the you know Corporate social media sites first was just me and a couple of my friends for the first seven months or so not a whole lot of you know new users joined I can late October I hit 100 users and that was a huge milestone for me I was like that is awesome like 100 people care about what I'm doing or people are interested in this community 100 people now have a home on the fediverse that didn't have it before then uh things got a little crazy on the bird's side as people call it we've hit 100 users and 24 hours later we had 5 000 users and that was about two weeks ago and we're currently around 30 000 users lots of growing pains in that short amount of time but definitely an interesting experience now you know why I started the server let's go over some pros and cons of running your own Mastodon server so one of the pros is like I said building a community you get to dictate the terms and set the rules set the topic set the vibe of the whole environment and basically what you say goes if you you know want a server specific to Ham radios well now you have a whole social media feed of just people talking about Ham radios because the only people on that server are people that are interested in that and that is really cool to have the ability to bring together a niche Community like that it's something that you really can't do outside of maybe Discord in my case my server is a general you know non non-topic specific server so when people are looking for a new place mine's usually the first one they go to so a lot of mine are you know new signups we have had a lot of people transfer into the server and we've all said a lot of people transfer out of the server because you know they'll join my server and go yeah the local timeline is nice and all but I'm more interested in art or I'm more interested in writing or I'm more interested in Tech and then they move their account to the server that better fits them that's you know that's totally cool I have no issues with that people can you know join my server hang out for a little bit go to a different server we're all in the same fediverse so doesn't matter where they go like if I want to follow them and talk to them and interact with them I still can another Pro is you have control over all your data there's you know there's a growing concern of privacy and all this you know security and all these things that are basically behind the scenes that you have no idea what's going on well you're running your own server you have control over those things you can delete all your stuff at a moment's notice it's gone if you're running your server and you know you're concerned about privacy laws set up your server in a country that has really strict privacy laws simple as that now for the cons number one con the the financial aspect of it um it can get pricey depending on how big you want to scale it um right now 30 000 users roughly about 60 to 70 a month after all said and done not a huge expense but for a lot of people that's definitely not worth it for them if you want to run like a single user instance or an instance for you and 10 of your friends you can probably do it as cheap as under 10 a month easily if you have the the knowledge to run the server yourself another con is if you decide to go with the mixer the like a big Server create a big server like I did uh where you let everyone in all of a sudden decisions you're making aren't just for you the decision making it for everyone so if you are comfortable with being in charge making those decisions this probably isn't for you have to make the decision to block or defenerate a another server that impact is on everyone that's not just oh I don't want to see that anymore that's nobody in my server can see that anymore that's usually a big thing it's a lot of responsibility at that point so I guess the question is should you run your own Mastodon server if you're asking yourself that then the answer is probably yes if you're this is a very difficult question to answer because there are lots of factors involved let's say I guess the first one would be if you didn't start your own server where would you go where would you create an account on right now we have a big issue with a lot of the vast majority of users on Mastodon or on the fediverse itself are on a handful of large servers there's I think last I checked there was about 16 000 instances out there servers that were online and accessible the majority of them I I think it was like close to 80 of them were like single user instances they had one user on them when I checked there's a couple hundred that have over 10 000 and then the rest are you know usually some very small instances private instances uh invite only stuff so with that being said this decentralized uh platform well if like the top 10 servers have like 80 something percent of the users it's not really that decentralized is it like those top 10 people that own those servers can dictate the direction of the network basically they could easily say we don't want any of anybody that's got under 10 users we don't want to talk to them they block them nothing we can do about it all of a sudden 80 percent of you know the network is inaccessible to us we can't talk to those 80 of the users they can block us they can make this agreement where hey if you don't follow these rules or you don't you know agree to our terms we're just not going to Federate with you and that's a problem what we need now is we need more small servers and we need to get the people off of those big servers one of the biggest complaints right now is the biggest server out there right now which is mastodon.social people are complaining it's you know under moderated well I don't know how big their mod team is but I think they have close to 500 000 users so yeah that's going to be hard to moderate something like that what we need to do is we need to get people off of that server and onto the smaller servers we need to get a big chunk of those users onto smaller servers and split them up to you know a point where it balances out the network if you are looking at getting onto one of the main servers the top 10 big ones or starting your own start your own don't go to the don't go to the big ones start your own invite all your friends over to that one find people that you know have similar interests and fight them over say Hey you tired of all the bs's going on in that server you're tired of your local timeline just you know being spam links or whatever it is come come it's my smaller server invite people over that's what we need now if you're thinking I like ham radios I found this server with 500 people they all talk about Ham radios all day every day that's all they do that might be the server for you no reason to start another one because that one's already there that that little niche that you want that exists go help that server take whatever money you're going to spend on a server throw some of it towards the admin let them you know help them pay for that server and Bam you're helping build that Community right there if you are looking around you're like they don't have a server for something I'm interested in I want a server that's all about fishing lures I don't want to talk about the fishing rods I don't want to talk about fishing I just want to talk about the lures those things are cool hey make a server maybe you'll have you know 10 15 people that are interested maybe you'll have 200 people that are interested maybe there's a thousand people out there that are like I just want to talk about lures start that server build that community all of a sudden people that are on those big servers that are like man nobody's here talking about fishing lures all of a sudden banned there's a server they're gonna start you know migrating over you've got this community that you've just built based on a topic that really interest you that wasn't there before yeah if that's the case build the server get it whatever you got to do start that server yeah this is uh been my experience I have a lot more to talk about on the subject but I think that epost is a probably not too happy with how long this video is already so I'm gonna go ahead and cut this one a little short Maybe might do a part two later somewhere I don't know talk to him about it see what see what's in you know see what's in the cards for us so thanks for watching peace out now that you've gotten set up and comfortable it's time to grab your computer screen or phone and just Chuck it out the window I'm about to blow your mind the account you use for Mastodon can be used to interact with posts from image sites blogging sites streaming and video sites and more altogether that one profile interacting with posts across a huge family of services this is called the fediverse and as silly and trekkian as it may sound it's honestly kind of magical and shows the potential of decentralized web services and interoperability that nft Bros just keep dreaming of you can run your own Instagram like service with pixel fed host your own videos with peertube publish fan fiction with write freely and then stream q a with owncasts natively in your website all while interacting with those posts from the same Federated account over on Mastodon or Miss click or something unfortunately as things are currently set up you write freely blog your peer 2 website uh whatever will effectively have their own Federated profiles that they post to whenever you make a new post on those sites so you can't sync the output to One account but you can follow it and boost it to your viewers and followers and such for example it's a weird system at the moment think it's being worked on these Federated services are built upon the same API called activity Pub this is a unified content protocol almost like a glorified RSS feed that contains every piece of content well the core piece of the content effectively every post on every website is speaking the same language and can all talk to each other this is really hard to wrap my head around but the way it was easiest easiestly explained to me was that Mastodon posts or missed key posts or peer tube video posts saying that the videos are up they're actually just an activity Pub message that each platform can read like like like an email if they're shown it and then they can do something with that so Mastodon uses it to create microblogging posts like Twitter equivalents peer tube uses it to make post that and contain video uploads off their server pixel fed for images and so on this takes all of the advantages of a traditional kind of single sign-on like option like using your Google account to sign into other websites and then cranks it up to 11. because you could self-host whatever Federated instance of a service your account is based upon and completely own your data and privacy which means keeping it not only you know away from prying eyes but also being able to erase it in a snap if that's what you need or want to do where do we go from here is usually the question I get asked the most after videos like this instead of making you wait for my next video it's already available right now to watch over on my own streaming site nebula nebula is a creator-owned video site built and shaped by me and my Creator friends such as low spec gamer Thomas Frank Renee Richie and plenty plenty of others polyphonics on there legal eagle so many awesome creators my videos are higher quality they're ad-free and now early on nebula so if you want to see my next video and keep learning how to master your Tech and make things weird that would be where to go the best way to sign up for nebula is with curiositystream another great streaming site full of thousands of documentaries and entertaining content including NYC revealed all about how the underlying infrastructure of New York City makes it tick just like this video was learning all about the underlying means of social media and how those things interact with each other so that you know how to navigate it better we worked out a fantastic bundle with curiositystream where if you sign up at the link below you get nebula bundled with it for free at just 14.79 for a year of amazing content two sites for the price of one and an amazing low price get the best deal in streaming and see my videos early plus my documentary series print screen at curiositystream.com ebos we can dive more into the rest of the fediverse if you're interested I would love to cover you know hosting streaming with owncast or your own YouTube alternative with peer tube and Flickr and Tumblr are both apparently integrating activity Pub soon which is very exciting but I'm still digging in myself I've moved over my blog to a write freely setup at Analog dreams.blog and adhd.analog dreams.blog since Twitter's review is shutting down I'm going to be setting up Bookworm to track what books I've been reading each year and I'll be completely moving from Instagram to pixelfed soon as well most likely the rabbit hole is endless I'll have a couple links below for you to discover more fed of our services if you're interested let's make the net weird again learn how to take control over your privacy online by watching my web browser exploration playlist right over here or click this video to discover how to make your PC weird again Be Kind Rewindman the net just isn't what it used to be but we're seeing a massive shift to ditch Mega Corp own social websites for decentralized this isn't about crypto and user-owned data and platforms and it will change everything for years to come used to we had weird flash games everyone had blogs where they curated their special interests competed to see who had the best band fan page or poured their hearts out in them instant messaging was a thing we chose to log into and log out of so that it wouldn't disrupt the rest of our day and we could customize at least the background image of our profile Pages if not completely change everything the web was weird and it was great but the past decade and a half has gotten super corporate centralized boring and about as unhealthy as it gets things are getting exciting again but for those of us who weren't locking ourselves in our bedrooms during grade school and middle school it can be really confusing to navigate Mastodon decentralized internet Federated services that's so much jargon all of a sudden let's make it super easy as I could not be more excited that people are finally getting into this side of the net let's get you up to speed talk about why I'm stoked and set up who should and should not sign up speaking of ownership and control over your data I have my own video streaming site nebula that I built with my Creator friends and you can sign up for that with our bundle with curiosity stream linked below space car Emerald boy overpaid for Bird app and won the speed run for Burning It To The Ground while the cultists keep assuring each other this is some 4D chess play many like yourself have started looking elsewhere along with the surprise that Tumblr actually got bought away from Yahoo and has slowly been on the rise again you may have encountered no end of talk about services like Mastodon and something called the fediverse there's a lot of layers like an onion and while it sounds easy to get lost in it's actually simple as a concept you too can become a master of the fediverse in no time at all don't be like these people writing articles about how they couldn't find anyone on Mastodon or started to cry we're going to make it easy Mastodon is a social networking site it aims to hold that distinction of social networking versus social media where social media is about amassing followers and producing content under the veil of parasocial relationships meanwhile social networking is just about making friends and having conversations meeting people who knew it's more akin to a bunch of Discord servers aim chat rooms or a bunch of different mailing lists than what Twitter actually is being social on the internet used to mean adding people to your friends list chatting directly with them and joining group chats for shenanigans or specific topics not farming for likes quote retweeting to dunk on people and clamoring for check marks before you learn more go on and sign up I'll link a couple places you can sign up in the description those servers are regularly closing registration or at least limiting it for temporary Windows to help you know mitigate some of the massive influx of users right now and to keep servers from exploding you can also sign up on the mobile apps as well there's an official app now but on Android everyone seems to recommend tusky instead as the official one is missing some features and on iOS you have meta text which is what I use although it's not continuing development for now or toot plus some closed source and paid options if you want to check them out make your profile add a profile picture add some Flair to your bio all right let's make your first toot yes they started calling it tooting at some point as a joke but they're changing it back I'd recommend starting out with an introduction posts using the hashtag introduction or introductions hashtag or both and tell the world about yourself what are your hobbies what do you do what do you what do you want to chat about just like joining a forum a chat room or Discord server or being in a new class for the first time let people know who you are explore a bit then come back so we can keep learning that's the core of it it's kind of like Twitter but where the expectations and infrastructure are built less around shouting into the void and dunking on each other and more directly interacting and having real conversations it's the little stuff it's the like the content warning etiquette which you can choose how to follow yourself don't listen to all of the advice just pick and choose for yourself the lack of quote boosting boosting being the uh the appropriate name for the equivalent to retweeting and of course the ultimate W the complete lack of algorithm yeah the only way to find posts is by people boosting them searching for specific hashtags or going to specific user profiles if you're worried about losing your reach to shout your content at by by switching off of Twitter that's probably not the place this is a social website and it's about time we learned that throwing content at a public wall isn't socializing it's just yelling there are some search assist tools if you want to find more people to interact with of course such as the people directory at fediverse.info or ideally you would start by just interacting with the people in your instance and then following them see who they follow and boost and things like that oh boy I said instance this might be where you get stuck or or you're wanting things to be simplified but I promise that it's easy and it's a good thing you see Mastodon is a decentralized web service whoa whoa whoa before you freak out this has nothing to do with crypto nfts or any of that it's honestly tragic that the Silicon Valley blockchain Bros have tainted the image of decentralization to most people as the concept was around long before then and will hopefully be around long after the decentralized web is a concept that honestly just Harkens back to what the internet originally was a bunch of computers that can connect to each other and communicate but don't rely on any singular computer to keep everything going when Twitter burns down goes bankrupt or becomes a bank everyone's account and clout go down with it I'd argue that's no longer a bad thing but for many of us who spent a decade or more building up our profiles discovering you know ourselves alongside everyone else building a following are really just appreciating the unprecedented and convenient access to contact other people or other creators than ways that just didn't happen over email or other social media sites foreign when a major CDN has outages and half of the internet goes down disrupting work play and relaxation all at once that's the problem decentralization is about reducing dependency on Tech Giants for basic things moving power back into the hands of the people and keeping the internet weird getting off my Podium now what does this mean for you if you've ever played an MMO you know the experience of going from the big open server to a smaller instance for specific story quests or Raid battles where only a limited party can participate at a time you're still on the full server you can still interact with and do other things with the people on it but you also have this little instance to do your own thing or think of it like a bunch of cities within a state each City or Mastodon instance in this case has its own identity culture reasons to live there or avoid it and rules on governance to be its own but the city still has to follow some higher level rules and obligations set in by the state Mastodon software and etiquette implied through functionality in this case but every citizen of every city are also still citizens of the state that can move freely through the state as they wish chat or interact with other citizens and other cities relocate themselves between cities and stay in touch with people from every city they wish there is a slight change here in that Mastodon instances could completely lock themselves out and restrict access in or communication out or outright block other instances from being seen by theirs this can get awkward in rare occasions where drastic action is made such as entire instances blocking the entire Game Dev instance because of one person but those even out with time as moderators fluctuate plus you can always completely transplant your profile followers and follows and so on to another instance if you don't like what yours is doing plus often this is this is a good thing truth social it uses Mastodon after all just most instances have it blocked this has plenty of advantages in terms of decision making control and privacy there's no 4 profit Corporation or sink carrier in charge to push your instance to do bad things or to sell off your data there's no data collection there's no trackers there's no ads and there's no algorithm at all there's not even plain text search for posts which means you may struggle to vaguely search for a specific post you saw and lost track of but strongly helps filter trolls and targeted harassment the lack of algorithm is crucial as is the point is to have conversations and socialize not to push multiple generations to become addicts of scrolling content feeds desperate for that slot machine dopamine Federated services are nothing new either Humanity has kind of always relied on Federated services for survival the post office telephone carriers libraries all commonplace services that speak the same language and interact with each other in some regard but are operated independently with some unique rules and a crap ton of resilience as a result loading up the web UI and enabling Advanced view from the settings you can get a tweet deck like interface but you know for free because paying just a few your lists of posts is kind of nonsense let's cover what all you can look at first there's the home feed these are the people that you follow your friends or acquaintances or people you just like what they post these posts are displayed in Reverse chronological order as they come in no algorithms no recommendations you can filter it to hide boosts and even replies from the feed if you purely just want the posts from only the people that you follow which is totally fine feeling quiet though don't freak out let's find some people to follow head on over to the local timeline to find other people in your instance if you joined a smaller Community instance the admin probably has some recommended accounts for you to follow that it showed you during sign up as well these are just people who signed up through the same site as you it's like people who are in the same Discord server as you that's that's what the local timeline is if you if you use Discord that's what it's like you can still talk to all the people from all the other servers if they're not blocked but your profile is primarily hosted from that one instance your handle is identified with the instance in it as well instead of just at eposvox I'm at eposvox at glitch.lg BT it's kind of like an email address pretty simple posts are all email is a concept but your email provider and client May differ wildly from everyone else which is fine you can still email anyone from any other domain yes I do I do keep switching analogies here that's because Mastodon and the greater Federated services are its own think it's so there's no perfect parallel with other surfaces it's its own concept and Paradigm it'll make sense as we build it up if it hasn't already but the combined analogies work here you can reply to people follow them see who they're boosting and so on but then you also have the Federated tab this is kind of like the r slash all page on Reddit or the trending tab on YouTube Just without any of the upvotes or suggestions just some actually influencing things that's just reverse chronological there just the latest posts from literally everyone well well not literally everyone actually it's the it's the six degrees of separation of Kevin Bacon kind of thing it's based on everybody that you or people in your instance knows about and follows through mutuals creating the Federated web network of connections of something it's generally not a good idea to Wade through there but you can if you're just looking to see what everyone's talking about at the moment or you're desperate to just find people without using hashtags for some reason hopefully a feature will be developed to let you add other instances to your feed so you can peek into other communities important for people like me with so many varying interests that being locked into one instance based on a specific topic would be be way too restrictive in the meantime you can add people you follow to lists much like on Twitter or you know sorting a contacts list Google Plus circles that kind of thing and group them up by genre the type of thing they usually post interest area Etc and then you can pin panels with lists to your window and this Advanced web view to keep tabs on those groups which is super handy you can also pin panels with individual or groups of hashtags as well which means you can just search for a specific topic and keep a feed of everyone posting about that topic do find while you're tweaking things you can customize your notifications panel either just look at mentions or you can filter specific things from it I recommend filtering favorites or likes as they don't do anything they just say hey I liked this but they don't feature your posts in someone's feed they don't increase the value of your post the more you can train yourself to fight the instinct to be checking for likes on every post the better your quality of life will be when writing your posts you can customize your post type based on privacy settings public is standard visible to everyone everywhere unlisted is still visible to everyone but it's removed from Discovery settings such as hashtag searching and local and Federated timelines people can view it on your profile and followers can see it in their feeds but that's it followers only only shows to your followers and mentioned people only you you get the idea this is really powerful posts can be much longer than Twitter as well but you're still limited to four images and short small videos just to keep costs down for your server provider for your instance admins images are capped to eight megabytes I believe and then they get compressed from there and videos are limited to 40 megabytes which admittedly is not much to work with you can run polls too it's recommended adding image descriptions or alt text to help those with screen readers and people will remind you of that simply stating that the image has already been described in the text can help make sure that folks know they aren't missing anything nice content warnings are a way to collapse the body of your texts below a button which can be used for lengthier posts to prevent from spamming your feed or to you know protect people from certain subjects almost like using a subject line for an email this can be used to hide messages containing sensitive topics like violence sexual assaults or other triggers or it can just make it easier to ignore a bunch of posts on a specific topic like the ongoing Twitter drama there's no hard rules just don't be a jerk if you're tired of clicking to expand them like I was in your preferences you have full control over Auto expanding content warning posts and you can still leave on blurring possibly sensitive images things like that you get a lot of control anyone can set up and run an instance as long as you have a bit of coin and can use a web host or a Raspberry Pi or a Chromebook people are run those instances from those as well there are more and more tools available to make setting up instances and things like that super simple you can set up instances for topics that you care about for work organizations the internet archive provides a honestly just wonderful example of the kind of structure that goes into what a you know what an organization should follow for their instance or you could even just run an instance for yourself as a way of self verifying who you are so that people know you're the real deal one of our Discord mods runs a master instance that a lot of us are in and I'm pretty sure I heard him forgetting to use the push to talk while trying to justify to his wife while he was spending money on this project hey everyone I am Cujo the admin for minely.social I've been running my own Mastodon server since April of this year so I'm still kind of new to it but I figured I have some insight that I'm able to share with people who might be interested in running the server I was getting kind of tired of traditional social media by that I mean social media that was being ran by corporations and kind of you had no say in how anything happened or why anything happened or in your data or anything like that so I ended up looking into different Alternatives and I found Mastodon these servers that were currently out there were not related to my liking so I just decided to spin up my own I want the DIY routes because I wanted to start a community wanted to you know build something myself instead of having everything dictated to me like I was on all the you know Corporate social media sites first was just me and a couple of my friends for the first seven months or so not a whole lot of you know new users joined I can late October I hit 100 users and that was a huge milestone for me I was like that is awesome like 100 people care about what I'm doing or people are interested in this community 100 people now have a home on the fediverse that didn't have it before then uh things got a little crazy on the bird's side as people call it we've hit 100 users and 24 hours later we had 5 000 users and that was about two weeks ago and we're currently around 30 000 users lots of growing pains in that short amount of time but definitely an interesting experience now you know why I started the server let's go over some pros and cons of running your own Mastodon server so one of the pros is like I said building a community you get to dictate the terms and set the rules set the topic set the vibe of the whole environment and basically what you say goes if you you know want a server specific to Ham radios well now you have a whole social media feed of just people talking about Ham radios because the only people on that server are people that are interested in that and that is really cool to have the ability to bring together a niche Community like that it's something that you really can't do outside of maybe Discord in my case my server is a general you know non non-topic specific server so when people are looking for a new place mine's usually the first one they go to so a lot of mine are you know new signups we have had a lot of people transfer into the server and we've all said a lot of people transfer out of the server because you know they'll join my server and go yeah the local timeline is nice and all but I'm more interested in art or I'm more interested in writing or I'm more interested in Tech and then they move their account to the server that better fits them that's you know that's totally cool I have no issues with that people can you know join my server hang out for a little bit go to a different server we're all in the same fediverse so doesn't matter where they go like if I want to follow them and talk to them and interact with them I still can another Pro is you have control over all your data there's you know there's a growing concern of privacy and all this you know security and all these things that are basically behind the scenes that you have no idea what's going on well you're running your own server you have control over those things you can delete all your stuff at a moment's notice it's gone if you're running your server and you know you're concerned about privacy laws set up your server in a country that has really strict privacy laws simple as that now for the cons number one con the the financial aspect of it um it can get pricey depending on how big you want to scale it um right now 30 000 users roughly about 60 to 70 a month after all said and done not a huge expense but for a lot of people that's definitely not worth it for them if you want to run like a single user instance or an instance for you and 10 of your friends you can probably do it as cheap as under 10 a month easily if you have the the knowledge to run the server yourself another con is if you decide to go with the mixer the like a big Server create a big server like I did uh where you let everyone in all of a sudden decisions you're making aren't just for you the decision making it for everyone so if you are comfortable with being in charge making those decisions this probably isn't for you have to make the decision to block or defenerate a another server that impact is on everyone that's not just oh I don't want to see that anymore that's nobody in my server can see that anymore that's usually a big thing it's a lot of responsibility at that point so I guess the question is should you run your own Mastodon server if you're asking yourself that then the answer is probably yes if you're this is a very difficult question to answer because there are lots of factors involved let's say I guess the first one would be if you didn't start your own server where would you go where would you create an account on right now we have a big issue with a lot of the vast majority of users on Mastodon or on the fediverse itself are on a handful of large servers there's I think last I checked there was about 16 000 instances out there servers that were online and accessible the majority of them I I think it was like close to 80 of them were like single user instances they had one user on them when I checked there's a couple hundred that have over 10 000 and then the rest are you know usually some very small instances private instances uh invite only stuff so with that being said this decentralized uh platform well if like the top 10 servers have like 80 something percent of the users it's not really that decentralized is it like those top 10 people that own those servers can dictate the direction of the network basically they could easily say we don't want any of anybody that's got under 10 users we don't want to talk to them they block them nothing we can do about it all of a sudden 80 percent of you know the network is inaccessible to us we can't talk to those 80 of the users they can block us they can make this agreement where hey if you don't follow these rules or you don't you know agree to our terms we're just not going to Federate with you and that's a problem what we need now is we need more small servers and we need to get the people off of those big servers one of the biggest complaints right now is the biggest server out there right now which is mastodon.social people are complaining it's you know under moderated well I don't know how big their mod team is but I think they have close to 500 000 users so yeah that's going to be hard to moderate something like that what we need to do is we need to get people off of that server and onto the smaller servers we need to get a big chunk of those users onto smaller servers and split them up to you know a point where it balances out the network if you are looking at getting onto one of the main servers the top 10 big ones or starting your own start your own don't go to the don't go to the big ones start your own invite all your friends over to that one find people that you know have similar interests and fight them over say Hey you tired of all the bs's going on in that server you're tired of your local timeline just you know being spam links or whatever it is come come it's my smaller server invite people over that's what we need now if you're thinking I like ham radios I found this server with 500 people they all talk about Ham radios all day every day that's all they do that might be the server for you no reason to start another one because that one's already there that that little niche that you want that exists go help that server take whatever money you're going to spend on a server throw some of it towards the admin let them you know help them pay for that server and Bam you're helping build that Community right there if you are looking around you're like they don't have a server for something I'm interested in I want a server that's all about fishing lures I don't want to talk about the fishing rods I don't want to talk about fishing I just want to talk about the lures those things are cool hey make a server maybe you'll have you know 10 15 people that are interested maybe you'll have 200 people that are interested maybe there's a thousand people out there that are like I just want to talk about lures start that server build that community all of a sudden people that are on those big servers that are like man nobody's here talking about fishing lures all of a sudden banned there's a server they're gonna start you know migrating over you've got this community that you've just built based on a topic that really interest you that wasn't there before yeah if that's the case build the server get it whatever you got to do start that server yeah this is uh been my experience I have a lot more to talk about on the subject but I think that epost is a probably not too happy with how long this video is already so I'm gonna go ahead and cut this one a little short Maybe might do a part two later somewhere I don't know talk to him about it see what see what's in you know see what's in the cards for us so thanks for watching peace out now that you've gotten set up and comfortable it's time to grab your computer screen or phone and just Chuck it out the window I'm about to blow your mind the account you use for Mastodon can be used to interact with posts from image sites blogging sites streaming and video sites and more altogether that one profile interacting with posts across a huge family of services this is called the fediverse and as silly and trekkian as it may sound it's honestly kind of magical and shows the potential of decentralized web services and interoperability that nft Bros just keep dreaming of you can run your own Instagram like service with pixel fed host your own videos with peertube publish fan fiction with write freely and then stream q a with owncasts natively in your website all while interacting with those posts from the same Federated account over on Mastodon or Miss click or something unfortunately as things are currently set up you write freely blog your peer 2 website uh whatever will effectively have their own Federated profiles that they post to whenever you make a new post on those sites so you can't sync the output to One account but you can follow it and boost it to your viewers and followers and such for example it's a weird system at the moment think it's being worked on these Federated services are built upon the same API called activity Pub this is a unified content protocol almost like a glorified RSS feed that contains every piece of content well the core piece of the content effectively every post on every website is speaking the same language and can all talk to each other this is really hard to wrap my head around but the way it was easiest easiestly explained to me was that Mastodon posts or missed key posts or peer tube video posts saying that the videos are up they're actually just an activity Pub message that each platform can read like like like an email if they're shown it and then they can do something with that so Mastodon uses it to create microblogging posts like Twitter equivalents peer tube uses it to make post that and contain video uploads off their server pixel fed for images and so on this takes all of the advantages of a traditional kind of single sign-on like option like using your Google account to sign into other websites and then cranks it up to 11. because you could self-host whatever Federated instance of a service your account is based upon and completely own your data and privacy which means keeping it not only you know away from prying eyes but also being able to erase it in a snap if that's what you need or want to do where do we go from here is usually the question I get asked the most after videos like this instead of making you wait for my next video it's already available right now to watch over on my own streaming site nebula nebula is a creator-owned video site built and shaped by me and my Creator friends such as low spec gamer Thomas Frank Renee Richie and plenty plenty of others polyphonics on there legal eagle so many awesome creators my videos are higher quality they're ad-free and now early on nebula so if you want to see my next video and keep learning how to master your Tech and make things weird that would be where to go the best way to sign up for nebula is with curiositystream another great streaming site full of thousands of documentaries and entertaining content including NYC revealed all about how the underlying infrastructure of New York City makes it tick just like this video was learning all about the underlying means of social media and how those things interact with each other so that you know how to navigate it better we worked out a fantastic bundle with curiositystream where if you sign up at the link below you get nebula bundled with it for free at just 14.79 for a year of amazing content two sites for the price of one and an amazing low price get the best deal in streaming and see my videos early plus my documentary series print screen at curiositystream.com ebos we can dive more into the rest of the fediverse if you're interested I would love to cover you know hosting streaming with owncast or your own YouTube alternative with peer tube and Flickr and Tumblr are both apparently integrating activity Pub soon which is very exciting but I'm still digging in myself I've moved over my blog to a write freely setup at Analog dreams.blog and adhd.analog dreams.blog since Twitter's review is shutting down I'm going to be setting up Bookworm to track what books I've been reading each year and I'll be completely moving from Instagram to pixelfed soon as well most likely the rabbit hole is endless I'll have a couple links below for you to discover more fed of our services if you're interested let's make the net weird again learn how to take control over your privacy online by watching my web browser exploration playlist right over here or click this video to discover how to make your PC weird again Be Kind Rewind\n"