Migrate from X/Meta platforms to the Fediverse

Why?

Maybe because:

• “Musk’s X Corp loses lawsuit against hate speech watchdog” Reuters, March 25, 2024;
• “Antisemitic and Anti-Muslim Hate Speech Surges Across the Internet” The New York Times, May 3, 2024;
• Meta is getting rid of fact checkers. Zuckerberg acknowledged more harmful content will appear on the platforms now CNN, January 7, 2025;
• Twitter under Elon Musk: Increase in Hate Speech (Wikipedia).
• Elon simply changes the algorithms to promote himself (Wikipedia);

Or maybe because they proclaim themselves to be all about freedom and free speech, yet:

• Elon bans people he disagrees with and reinstates people he agrees with (Wikipedia);
• Both Meta and X ban links that redirect to the Fediverse or sites that they don’t like (notably to sites related to Linux… what the hell?)

Or, more seriously, maybe because:

• Paul Bouchaud, David Chavalarias, Maziyar Panahi. Crowdsourced Audit of Twitter’s Recommender Systems. Scientific Reports, 2023, 13 (1), 10.1038/s41598-023-43980-4. hal-04036232v4
• “Le mythe de la liberté d’expression sur les réseaux sociaux” David Chavalarias, 2022-11-11
• “Les contenus haineux et négatifs sont rentables pour les médias sociaux publicitaires” LQDN, 2025-01-20
• TikTok censorship in New Caledonia: a review of a democratic failure LQDN, 2024-06-06
• “L’interopérabilité contre la haine” LQDN, 2019-06-12
• “Regulating the Internet through decentralization” LQDN, 2019-06-05

When?

Now.

What?

What is even the Fediverse?

The Fediverse is much like emails: It is a multitude of servers based on the same technology that enables you to talk to anyone having the same technology (contrary to the same app or service). Instead of emails, it is micro-blogging.

That means that before you start chatting, you need to choose your provider. We’ll come back to that later.

You can replace provider by instance; that’s the technical (and frankly the fediverse) jargon.

And you have tons of instances, which may feel like difficult to choose from. But don’t be upset! It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

Choosing your instance is like choosing your email provider, where all your messages, contacts, interactions will be stored. Yet, it’s not because you are hosted at www.nofacebook.com that you cannot talk to your friends at www.notx.com. Much like emails, from your name@gmail.com you can send emails to any one who has an email, even if they don’t have a gmail address like name@yahoo.com. That’s called interoperability, and that’s the beauty of the Fediverse.

So you can choose really any instance, you will still be able to talk to anyone on the Fediverse.

Now, what the hell does Fediverse stand for?

It stands for federated universe.

Federated because it federates all instances on the universe that speak the same language (ActivityPub in that case).

Mastodon? Pixelfed? Friendica? Peertube?

Those are not the names of services or instances, but of free software (free as in freedom, not free beer) running the fediverse servers.

They have different purposes, but because they speak the same language, you can be on Mastodon and subscribe to or comment on a Pixelfed or Peertube post.

In a nutshell:

• Mastodon = federated Twitter
• Friendica = federated Facebook
• Pixelfed = federated Instagram
• Peertube = federated Youtube
• Lemmy = federated Reddit
• Loops = federated Tiktok (still in beta I think though)

And you have plenty more: https://fediverse.info/explore/projects

Perks and Hicthes of the Fediverse

Firts, Mastodon is like your email: it’s unencrypted. Your server admin can see your messages (much like Elon on X/twitter actually). DMs do exist, but it is not a secure channel of communication. Bear that in mind.

Secondly, Although free software and decentralization doesn’t rhyme with privacy and avoidance of platform manipulation, because people making free software are usually politicized and care about ethics, usually Fediverse platforms are ads free, privacy respecting, inclusive, avoiding AI-slop, and human centric, meaning there are no algorithms that curate your feed for you. It’s a timeline, meaning… it is a line of posts chronologically sorted. You do have a few pages that show trending messages, etc. but it’s not the main feed.

That also means people recommendations are not based on your interaction, ideological biases,¹ and behavioral patterns. You choose who you follow. If you want your feed to have content, you need to follow people, news media, public organizations, artists, NGOs, politicians, etc.

Mastodon has a feature called lists which enables you to separate your feed into different topics. Again, it’s DIY.

I let you decide which are the perks and which are the hitches. In any case, you’ll probably end up curing your unacknowldeged addiction to social media, and more generally to the need of constant worthless information, meaning you’ll start enjoying life a bit more.

Where?

Now, since you have multiple software to choose from and multiple instances for each software to choose from, where do you go???

When it comes to the software, you really choose what you want. Search the web for what their UI looks like, etc.

I’d say, if you want a close one-to-one replacement of Twitter you go with Mastodon, and for Instagram you go with Pixelfed. Those are the two big ones right now; they have lots of attention, lots of development, and lots of intances.

Choosing your instance is not a big deal, so just go for one already!

Seriously, you can move to another instance anytime and both your follows and your followers will follow your move.

Ok, I said that choosing your instance is not a big deal. But, actually, kind of. The real power of the Fediverse is that you choose what moderation suits you by choosing your instance. Every instance has its own moderation rules. If you don’t like them, don’t go. If they change, leave. If you don’t like any, run your own instance; make your own rules. You want the intance just for you? Go for it. Want to host your friends or family? Sure can. Want to lock it down for internal use? Go ahead. Your house, your rules. Now, that’s what we call freedom, no?²

So you can choose instances by moderation rules (but usually, most of them apply basic moderation that everyone expects; i.e., don’t be an asshole), or you can choose your intance by topics. Indeed, you have general purpose instances (like mastodon.social), or topics based instances as well as region based instances.

Mastodon has a page where you can filter intances based on criteria: https://joinmastodon.org/servers

Same thing at fedi.garden that lists a little more instances I believe: https://fedi.garden/

Same with pixelfed: https://pixelfed.org/servers

How?

Fresh Start: Don’t Care About Your Followers?

Just go ahead, choose a server, register, done.

Care About Your Followers?

I haven’t tested it, but I’ve heard quite some good things about it.

Some French researches developed a platform to help you migrate from X/twitter to the Fediverse loosing the least potential followers.

It’s called helloquitteX.com. In just a few clicks you should be done.

What’s Next?

Download the phone app that you best like, connect to your account, and now you have an app for the Fediverse.

Also you can just go to your server’s web page. For me, because I am on pouet.chapril.org, I can just go to pouet.chapril.org, and enjoy.

Now, tell your friends and family to join you on the Fediverse.

A Word About Bluesky

Bluesky is a one-to-one replacement of X/twitter, but it’s not decentralized. It uses another protocol than ActivityPub (ATproto, they don’t speak the same language), and its design encourages centralization which is a big bummer for freedom, although they rely on the argument of offering a credible exit. I won’t go into the details here,³ but the thick of it is: don’t go on Bluesky, go on the Fediverse.

Read More

This was a very brief introduction to the Fediverse. If you want to learn more, and undertand better how moderation works on the federated universe, etc. you should definitely take a look at https://fedi.tips/. It’s got some great stuff for starters.