Traditionally, social media is dominated by a few large companies, making profits from your social connections, hobbies, relationship status, and other data. But there are other options out there, and you can even set up your own server.
Welcome to the Fediverse
You may have already heard of the Mastodon open-source social network—every few years it’s touted as the next big thing in social media, accompanied by bold statements that it’s poised to unseat Twitter as the best microblogging social network out there. But Mastodon isn’t a social network, and it isn’t out to unseat Twitter from anything.
Mastodon is one of several distinct server types, all of which can interact with each other to make a vast, distributed social network with no centralized control. Individual server admins can create their own rules and codes of conduct, choose which instances to federate with (or block), and customize to their hearts’ content.
Instances are usually maintained by volunteers, who try to build an online community based around a common theme or interest. These can be anything: hobbies, locations, political standpoint, or diverse varieties of NSFW.
Science-fiction and fantasy fans might gravitate towards The Wandering Shop, for instance, while open source advocates tend to accumulate on Fosstodon. Free speech extremists pour forth on the somewhat predictable Free Speech Extremist server, and you can generally find black flag anarchists over at Kolektiva, along with other revolutionary types.
Although these instances are separate, all users can communicate and follow one another no matter what instance they belong to, thanks to the underlying ActivityPub networking protocol. An individual instance can have as few as one user, or hundreds of thousands.
How Does Federation Work?
Most Fediverse server types come with multiple timelines.
The home timeline shows posts from users you follow, regardless which instance they’re on. The local timeline shows posts from everyone on your local instance. The federated timeline shows posts from everyone being followed by everyone on your local instance, and can be wildly chaotic.
To look at this another way, any post you make will be visible to everyone on your local instance in their ’local’ timeline. If a user from a different server follows you, your posts will be visible in that user’s ‘home’ timeline, and in the ‘federated’ timeline of everybody on the same instance as that user, but will not be in their ‘home’ timeline.
Why Run Your Own Social Media Server?
Social media is all about community. In the days of bulletin boards and forums, communities were formed around common interests. Users would post and discuss the latest developments in their fandom or location, and discussion would occur spontaneously. The advent of large social media companies buried these smaller interest-based communities in a flood of groups, and firehose interactions.
By running your own Fediverse server, you can resurrect the cozy feel of interacting with people who like what you like, but without being restricted to certain topics. The Fediverse gives you the best of the old forum communities, along with neat UIs and the ability to follow individuals across radically different areas.
As the owner/admin, you can choose how members behave, and how your instance interacts with other instances out there.
Both Truth social and Gab are built on Fediverse technologies; however, their operators have chosen not to allow federation—keeping them in isolation from the rest of the Fediverse.
Is It Difficult or Expensive to Run a Fediverse Community?
That really depends on your ambition, how many users you want to have on your local instance, and how sophisticated you need the software to be.
You can run a fairly basic server such as Hubzilla on a $10 Raspberry Pi Zero 2, for example, and a Raspberry Pi 4B will take the far more sophisticated Pleroma software—along with a dozen or so local users—without breaking a sweat. A large instance running Mastodon and with tens of thousands of local users is probably best administered using dedicated hosting services in a data center, rather than on a single-board computer in your back bedroom.
What Kind of Fediverse Servers Are There?
There are dozens of different server types with which you can access the Fediverse and build your own online community. Most of these have different features and different aims. What they have in common is that they allow you to interact with friends on your local timeline, as well as following and engaging with people on other instances. These are some of the best:
Mastodon
Mastodon is easily the most recognizable Fediverse server type, and is best suited to instances with lots of users. Its flagship instance, mastodon.social is home to over 800,000 users, with around 35,000 active.
Posts are usually limited to 500 characters—more than double that of Twitter—although this can be edited by tinkering with the code. Mastodon offers a big friendly space, which is easy to navigate, and which scales well. If you have good hardware, and anticipate your community will have thousands of users (or even more), Mastodon is the one you’re looking for.
Pleroma
Pleroma will run comfortably on a Raspberry Pi 4B with as little as 2GB RAM, meaning it’s perfect for building a community from home. Pleroma comes with excellent and intuitive admin panels and settings menus, where you can alter the background, branding, administer users, and set the character limit, without needing to dive into the code.
While uncommon, it’s not completely unheard of for Pleroma-based Fediverse servers to have character limits set at almost a million. Posts made from these instances can be read in full by followers on instances with other software. If you want to run your community from home and have access to easy controls, Pleroma is perfect.
Hubzilla
Hubzilla has exceptionally low system requirements, and can be made to function even on a super-cheap Raspberry Pi Zero—although if you choose to do this, we would suggest limiting your instance to only one or two local users. Although the default interface is fairly plain to look at, there are plenty of add-ons available to make it suit the needs of your community.
The city of São Paulo, Brazil, uses Hubzilla as a tool for integrating and providing healthcare across for a neighborhood of 600,000 people—although probably not on a Pi Zero.
Pixelfed
Although all Fediverse server types support images and video, Pixelfed is especially geared towards it, and positions itself in the same space as image sharing platforms such as Instagram. Pixelfed has its own mobile apps for you to view and upload images, and the server software is easy to install.
The largest Pixelfed instance is pixelfed.social, which has around 70,000 users. If you’re into art or photography, and want your community to be visual-focused, Pixelfed is picture-perfect candidate.
Lemmy
A little different from other entries on this list, Lemmy is a link aggregator and discussion platform similar to Reddit, but federated, meaning you can follow discussions from other instances, as well as upvoting, downvoting, and joining communities. Due to some Lemmy-specific peculiarities, while you can engage with any Lemmy instance from any other Lemmy instance, you can’t get involved from the wider Fediverse.
Soapbox
Soapbox is a relatively recent arrival to the Fediverse and is built by one of the Pleroma developers; because of that common heritage, they have many features in common. Soapbox requires similar resources to Pleroma, and offers a completely different front-end, along with the ability to edit posts after they’ve been sent out—although the editing history is visible to any timeline. Fun fact: Truth Social runs a fork of Soapbox.
Accessing the Fediverse on Your Phone
While some Fediverse server types—such as Pixelfed, Lemmy, and Mastodon—have their own, dedicated mobile apps, others don’t. This is relatively unimportant as all Fediverse servers use the same ActivityPub protocol, meaning that what works for one server type should work for all of them. The Mastodon app, for instance, will allow you to access your account on a Pleroma instance.
There are also third-party apps available for both Android and iOS—the best of these, in our opinion, are Husky and its fork, Tusky. The main difference between the two is that Tusky blacklists certain inappropriate Fediverse instances, and Husky doesn’t. Unlike the Mastodon client, both Husky and Tusky offer multi-account support and the ability to view the local timeline.
Build Your Own Community in the Fediverse!
The Fediverse is a big place with thousands of servers already in existence—and there’s a place in there for your community, too. Running your own community social media platform means that you aren’t beholden to the whims of technology giants, and you can make your own rules for your own online spaces. There are no barriers to entry and even with old or exceptionally low-end hardware, there’s a solution which will work for you. What are you waiting for?
