Social Media
Fediverse FTWWWWWWWWWWW
So you know how you can send an email from your gmail account, and someone using yahoo mail can still read it?
The fediverse is based on a similar concept, under a standard called ActivityPub.
There are many services that are part of the fediverse, and I'm gonna pick Mastodon and PeerTube to explain.
These are the fedi alternatives to Twitter and YouTube respectively.
Also, while these can be self-hosted, I do not plan on exploring the self-hosted options here.
It works just as well to join a community that already exists, especially if it's a tight knit one.
Anyone can host their own Mastodon servers, and "federate" it with other Mastodon servers.
This way, all posts you see are under the control of your host (who is likely a volunteer, don't forget to tip them), while also being able to share posts with other servers.
This decentralized architecture is wonderful for escaping the algorithm and the ads that necessitate it.
So let's say you have a network of Mastodon servers giving you a Twitter-like interface with less toxicity, and the same with PeerTube.
Here is where the beauty of ActivityPub comes in.
(Warning: oversimplified explanation coming up)
Since Mastodon and PeerTube both implement ActivityPub, all users on both services are identified as <username>@<server.address>.
All content on both services are stored with the following details:
- Content ID (in a similar way to how every tweet or youtube video has a unique ID)
- User who posted it
- If replying to or commenting on someone else's post, the ID of that post
- The content matter
Whether it's a video, or a post, or a comment, or an image, everything is stored in the same format, which means an account on Mastodon can like and reply to a video on PeerTube, and they would show up on the PeerTube video as likes and comments.
You can have all your content in one central feed, if you so wish.
But... what about my For You Page?
Something that you might not like is that there's no recommendation algorithm.
If you prefer having content recommended to you via an algorithm, that might not really work for you.
I know I am a nerd and have enjoyed watching random youtube videos.
However, recommendation algorithms are obviously bad for privacy.
In addition, they're addictive, and radicalizing (will get into that later), and are likely an overall negative on my life.
Trending feeds do not take the user into account, so they can be considered the private version of a recommended feed, but that doesn't work too well on the fediverse.
I will likely resort to personal recommendations - having a creator explicitly recommended to me by another creator.
The lack of a recommendation algorithm also ensures you only see content from people you intentionally follow, which means your feed is less cluttered.
Detour: Tom Scott's There Is No Algorithm For Truth
Tom Scott gave a wonderful 1-hour talk at the Royal Institution in Oct 2019, going into the problems with algorithms.
Here's the link to the video on YouTube.
Detour in a detour: WTF, YouTube???
I was originally intending to embed the video here to be fancy and all.
Embedding the video allows you to play the video without leaving the page.
Howeverrrrrrrrrrrrr, apparently youtube collects data about the google accounts that visit my site when I do that!
This blog is about privacy, so you are all gonna have to be happy with the link instead of an embedded video.
Detour in a detour in a detour: Share IDs
Instagram and youtube append share IDs to the links when you share content by copying links.
This allows them to track the shared video from original sharer to sharee.
Tiktok does this in a way that's scrambled into the content ID, so that's not avoidable.
But for the other services, consider downloading this URL cleaner to share links, or manually stripping out the share IDs from the links.