We’ve been trained to believe that the way things are is the way they have to be
I’m increasingly of the opinion that being on any centralised platform is waste of time, at least in the long run. I’m not even sure what I’m doing on LinkedIn these days, as it’s certainly not useful for finding an actual job.
The Fediverse is the future; at least the future I want to inhabit.
The fediverse is a jailbreak. It’s not a product, not a single platform, it’s not something you can buy stock in or use to enrich yourself at the cost of our shared humanity. It’s a network of independent, interconnected social platforms, all running on open protocols like ActivityPub. It’s an ecosystem where you - not some incellionaire obsessed with eugenics - own your digital identity. Where your social graph belongs to you, not an algorithm’s shifting fucking whims. Where moving from one service to another doesn’t mean losing everything you’ve built and everything you’ve ever said.
We’ve been trained to believe that the way things are is the way they have to be. That Meta, Google, and whatever the hell Twitter is calling itself today are the price of admission to digital society. That you can’t have discovery without algorithmic engineering. That the internet was supposed to become a shopping mall where every interaction is measured in ad revenue. But none of this was inevitable. It was built this way—on purpose. And the fediverse offers something else: freedom.
[…]
The fediverse won’t succeed just because it’s better. It will succeed if and only if people choose it. If they reject the idea that being trapped in someone else’s ecosystem is just the cost of existing online. If they stop believing that “free” means surrendering ownership of your own connections, your own history, your own data. If they see that the internet wasn’t built to be a factory for engagement metrics and AI-generated content farms. It was built to connect us, not silo us to pad a wealth-extremist’s bank account.
[…]
The fediverse isn’t a distant dream—it’s here, right now, waiting for you to step outside the walls and see what’s possible.
Source: Joan Westenberg
Image: Ayrus Hill