The Fediverse is a decentralised social media network. This includes Mastodon, which is where a majority of the users are, but it is not the only option. I have been using Mastodon for seven years. I made my home on Fosstodon, an instance focused on free and open source software.
Last month, it came to light that Fosstodon had a far-right moderator and some other instances defederated with Fosstodon over this. I don’t want to get into the specifics of this situation; whilst it is an important topic, it isn’t something I have any desire or qualification to discuss. I’ll leave this to other people. However, having to move instances did raise some thoughts about the federation model and owning your identity and data.
Owning your identity and data #
The problem #
When you join the fediverse, you need to find a home instance to sign up to.
It’s quite like email - you sign up to a domain, get a handle like
@rubenwardy@fosstodon.org, and can then communicate with people on other
domains.
This handle is your identity on the fediverse. If the instance you are on dies without warning or bans youfootnote 1, you have no recourse. There’s no way to migrate your followers to another domain if you no longer have access to that domain.
Another issue is that you cannot bring your posts with you when moving instances. Mastodon can “migrate” followers - you sign up for a new account, import your following lists, and set up your old account to move followers across to your new account. You lose all your posts as they are bound to the old instance and old handle.
Single-user instances #
Ideally, it would be possible to use your own domain as a fediverse identifier.
You can do this already with a single-user instance. This is your own Mastodon (or alternative) instance, which you either self-host or pay a service to host for you. This has a maintenance cost and means you don’t benefit from a local community and moderation.
I’m interested in finding out how practical single-user instances are for discovering content; they are less connected to other instances. I use hashtags quite extensively to find good content on Mastodon. A post will only appear in a hashtag if your local instance has been sent that post. As a result, single-user instances will only see posts in hashtags by those they follow, or posts boosted by those they follow. It looks like you can solve this issue by connecting the instance to an ActivityPub relayfootnote 2, which will deliver posts from across the Fediverse to you.
Multi-tenancy #
One way that Mastodon could resolve this is by allowing custom domains on a single server. This is known as multi-tenancy. This would allow you to participate in a community server using your own domain as an identifier, retaining ownership of your identity and making migration seamless. There’s a Mastodon issue requesting support for this, but Mastodon developers aren’t currently planning to add such a feature. This solution means you don’t fully own your data, however, but with frequent backups this may not be a problem.
I found a new fediverse server called Takahe that is based around this premise of multi-tenancy, although it is unfortunately unmaintained.
The Indie Web #
The Indie Web is a movement towards owning your own domain, using it as your identity, and owning your data. The Indie Web approach to this problem would be to post to your website first - as notes - and have the posts automatically syndicated to Mastodon. I think this is a good idea for some of the more serious posts, like project teasers, but I wouldn’t want all of my posts to be on my main website or blog.
Federation #
The Fosstodon situation also highlighted another issue - the brittle nature of
the fediverse. If the connections of 20,000 users can be broken because of the
actions of a few people, then it doesn’t seem very sustainable. Perhaps the
future is with smaller instances. Or perhaps it’s with “too big to block”
instances like mastodon.social. Who knows. I like smaller instances. If I
could own my identity and migrate my posts, then moving in the future wouldn’t
be as big of a problem.
Conclusion #
I moved from Fosstodon to Hachyderm, but I’m thinking I might look into hosting a single-user instance using GotoSocial and importing all my posts from Fosstodon into there.
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