How the 'Fediverse' Works (and Why It Might Be the Future of Social Media)

Credit: Eukombos, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Idealist nerds have a long history of giving terribly confusing names to potentially revolutionary technology. So it goes with Fediverse, a portmanteau of "Federation" and "Universe," and the potential future of the social internet. But what does that mean?

Put simply, the Fediverse is the collective name for a bunch of different social networks and platforms that are connected to one another. Users on any of these services can follow users on any other one and respond to, like, and share posts.

There are a lot of articles and websites that explain this concept in detail, but most of them get bogged down in technical language pretty quickly. I'd like to avoid that, so here's my good faith attempt to explain what the Fediverse is in plain English.

First, though, let's talk about email.

Email is decentralized (and why that matters for the Fediverse)

Anyone with an email address can email anyone else. Gmail users, for example, aren't limited to talking with other Gmail users—they can send messages to Outlook users, Yahoo Mail users, and even people who are running their own email servers in their basement. Basically, anyone with an email address can write anyone else with an email address. To put it another way, email is decentralized.

There is no one company or institution that is in charge of email—there are many different email providers, all of which are compatible with each other. This is because email is an open protocol, one that anyone who wants to can build a service for.

The largest social media networks do not work this way right now. You can't follow an X user via Facebook, for example, or subscribe to a Reddit community from Tumblr. That's why all of those websites are full of screenshots from the other ones—people want to share posts from other sites but there's no good way to do so. That's a problem the Fediverse seeks to remedy.

Follow anyone anywhere

The Fediverse is an attempt to make social networks more like email—that is, to allow users on different services to follow and interact with each other anywhere they want, without signing up for a million different accounts.

Right now, one of the biggest services on the Fediverse is Mastodon, which started in 2016 as a Twitter alternative. Other open source networks on the platform include Pixelfed, a photo sharing service similar to 2010's Instagram, and Peertube. There's also Threads, as I mentioned, a Meta-owned network that allows users to opt into sharing their posts with the Fediverse.

How this works in practice: I'm pretty active on Mastodon but have a few friends who only post on Threads. Because Threads is connected to the Fediverse, I can follow Threads users, see their posts, and even write back comments while using Mastadon. It's as simple as searching for the Threads user from inside Mastodon, following them, and interacting the way I would with any other user.

This is the promise of the Fediverse: You use whatever social network you want to use and connect with people on whatever social network they want to use. And there are a few other perks. When I quit using Twitter a couple years ago (before it became X), I left all of my followers behind. That's not how it works with the Fediverse: You can switch from one service to another and take your followers with you. That's the kind of freedom you can't get from a centralized system.

A number of companies and enthusiasts are working on other ways to connect with the Fediverse. Wordpress offers a plugin that allows bloggers to share their posts, for example—replies show up as comments. Flipboard, the news reading app, recently added the option to follow Fediverse users from within the app, and email newsletter platform Ghost is also working on similar functionality. And there are hacks to connect other, non-Fediverse networks—you can connect Bluesky to the Fediverse with a bit of work, for example.

There's a certain idealism behind all of these efforts—a lot of the biggest Fediverse services are run by nonprofits and volunteers. But smaller publishing companies like Ghost and Flipboard getting involved suggests that the Fediverse could also be a place for writers and publications to connect directly with readers in the future. A decentralized social media system could also allow smaller social media upstarts to compete with the big platforms. It's a potentially exciting time for social media, and the larger internet.

All of this is possible because the Fediverse is based on an open protocol that anyone can build on. The hope is that, over time, more services will offer integrations and social networking will become as open as email. Is that what will happen for sure? I don't know. And the Fediverse, like anything that exists on the internet, has its share of problems. Moderation, for example, is a huge challenge, and bigger platforms moving into the space could make it harder.

I'm only scratching the service with this explanation—there's so much more I could dig into. For the most part, though, when you hear "the Fediverse" you'll now know what it means: a series of social networks and platforms that are connected to each other. You'll hopefully hear a lot more about it in the years to come.