The Fediverse, its full of blogs!

The Fediverse is just blogs

And that’s great. It’s also the return of Google Reader, except now your feeds can talk back.

The Fediverse is really confusing for newcomers and there are memes about it, go look at Reddit. There are threads about it. There are people who bounce off it in ten minutes because they picked an app, got asked to pick a server, and immediately felt like they’d accidentally enrolled in a night class.

If you’re an internet user of a certain age, here’s the analogy that’s been working for me:

The Fediverse is just blogs.

Every account is a little blog

Every Fediverse account is basically a tiny blog that can publish posts.

You can post text and images. You can link to things. You can post a hot take and then regret it later. It’s a blog.

And you can subscribe to other people’s blogs:

• by following them (a subscribe in disguise)
• or, fun trick, by grabbing their RSS feed and using a normal feed reader like it’s 2009 again

A server is just shared hosting

A Fediverse server (often called an “instance”) is basically a shared blog host.

Kind of like putting your blog on shared hosting with a bunch of other people, except everyone gets a nice interface and federation comes included.

Want to go it alone? You can do that:

• run your own server on your own domain (don’t, this is a full time job)
• or pay someone to host one for you (join mine instead, there are nice people over there)
• or, if you’re feeling truly feral, implement ActivityPub yourself and build your own thing from scratch (um… ?)

You may have heard the term Mastodon but this is just the most popular software people run for this, but it’s not the only one.

So what’s different from “normal” blogs?

The Fediverse adds a bunch of social features that plain old blogs don’t usually ship with:

• Follows: follow other blogs, see who follows you, feel perceived
• Likes: like a post, let the author know you saw it
• Boosts: the “retweet” equivalent, except it republishes the post to your followers
• Replies: you can reply to posts directly, and the conversation stays attached
• Visibility controls: public posts, followers-only posts, and limited-audience posts

Add all of that to a blog and you basically get a blog dressed up as a Twitter account.

It’s still a blog though.

The shared hosting bit is where people get nervous

This is the root of a lot of the common complaints:

• “Server admins can read my private messages!”
• “They can ban me for no reason!”
• “They can delete my account!”
• “If the admin gets bored, the whole server could disappear!”

All of this is true.

And it’s also… basically true on any shared service. If your blog lives on someone else’s infrastructure, you’re always trusting someone, somewhere, to not be weird.

The grown-up answer, in both cases, is the same: host it yourself if you want full control.

The Fediverse has more moving parts than a static blog, so it’s harder, but it’s not impossible. It’s just more “weekend project” and less “upload some HTML and forget it exists”.

It’s also a shared feed reader

This is where it gets more interesting, and also where it gets more complicated.

A Fediverse server isn’t just hosting your posts. It’s also acting like a feed reader, shared by everyone using that server.

Users on one server can follow users on any other server and see their posts in near real time.

Old-school blogs and RSS work by polling. Check every few hours, maybe every 30 minutes if you’re keen.

ActivityPub is pushy in a good way: when you post, your server actively sends your post out to the servers where your followers live. And when someone you follow posts, your server receives it, stores a copy, and drops it into your feed.

Servers also tend to offer a “federated” or “local” timeline, which is basically a combined feed of public posts that have passed through your server’s social graph.

So yes, you’re kind of running a small, shared Google Reader… except it’s also a publishing platform.

May a thousand servers bloom

If you’re reading this with even a hint of systems brain, you might be thinking:

“Hold on, that sounds expensive. That sounds chatty. That sounds like a lot of background jobs.”

Correct.

The way the Fediverse scales is by spreading that cost out across lots of servers, instead of one giant platform trying to ingest the entire planet’s discourse.

And unlike Twitter or Facebook, nobody is supposed to own the whole thing. The pressure to centralise is always there, but decentralisation is literally the point.

This also helps with moderation, because instead of one global policy trying to satisfy everyone (it won’t), you end up with lots of independently governed communities with their own rules and boundaries.

It’s messy, but it’s human-scale messy, not “global platform policy team” messy.

How does it get paid for?

This is one of the genuinely refreshing parts.

No ads. No “engagement” treadmill. No VC-funded growth plan where the endgame is making your timeline worse on purpose.

There are just servers, and people paying to run them, and volunteers doing admin work because they care.

If you can afford it, chuck a few quid a month at the server you’re using. That’s the deal. It’s not glamorous, but it’s honest.

And the best part is you can usually see what you’re paying for. Server costs are not magic. Storage, bandwidth, compute. Boring, predictable, real.

Don’t judge the Fediverse by one mobile app

Like blogs, the Fediverse is fundamentally a web creature.

The official Mastodon app is fine, but onboarding via mobile is still one of the quickest ways to make the whole thing feel confusing. Lots of people’s first experience is:

download app → get asked to pick a server → close app → declare the Fediverse “impenetrable”

If you’re starting out, using the web UI first on a proper computer often makes everything click faster. Once you understand the shape of it, you can use whatever app you like.

And there are loads of apps.

Just… maybe don’t let your first five minutes be a fight with a server picker screen. Life is too short.