Note: This article is translated from Chinese.

The Twilight of the Empire and the End of Social Networks

When social networks are mentioned today.

What comes to mind first?

That movie about Facebook? Cyberbullying? Information cocoons? Algorithms? Brain Rot ? Clout chasing? Doxxing? Abstract memes? Account bans? Internet cesspools? Trolling for conflict? Gender wars?

Even from these keywords, it's clear that many people feel social media is deteriorating, or at least something isn't quite right.

12 years ago, as the golden age of social networks and the internet was unfolding, Tom Standage published "Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2,000 Years," expressing great optimism about the future of online social networking:

The period from the founding of the New York Sun in 1833 until the television era-the age of "old media"-was an anomaly;

The era of newspapers, radio, and television was merely a "small detour" in the history of social media;

For 150 years, person-to-person media was overshadowed by the centralized broadcast model of mass media, but now the pendulum has swung back.

But the pendulum doesn't stop swinging just because it has reached the "right" position.

Now, visibly, all social media applications are inevitably becoming or transforming into TikTok's shape:

Increasingly driven by artificial intelligence that pushes video clips based on user viewing behavior rather than social relationships, becoming a new kind of "super television."

In October 2022, Twitter was sold to Musk due to economic pressures.

On November 4 of the same year, social network giant Meta's stock price plummeted to $88, less than a quarter of its $384 peak.

On February 1, 2024, as Meta's stock price finally reclaimed lost ground and Facebook approached its 20th birthday, The Economist published an article declaring "The End of Social Networks."

Social media is becoming less "social"

People are posting less frequently

Since 2020, the percentage of Americans who say they enjoy documenting their lives online has fallen from 40% to 28%

Those still posting are hoping or fearing to be chosen by the algorithm gods, imagining how they might experience their "15 minutes of fame," and their speech is becoming increasingly bizarre

Meanwhile, more and more countries are beginning to legislate restrictions on minors using social networks, treating them like alcohol, driving, and R-rated movies:
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The lights of Empire Square have gone dark.

People scatter in all directions.

Fleeing Facebook, escaping Twitter, abandoning Instagram, deserting TikTok.

Fleeing all algorithms and social media platforms.

And then...

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If you want to move forward a little bit more...


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::: █̶̧̢̡̭̭̯̭̯̝̯͉͉̫̝̟̬̺̬̙͉̟̀̋̌̍̎́̀͆͂͆͐͆͗̋̂̀̂͊̏͛̊̎̕͜͜͜͠I̴̧̧̢̧̨̙̻̮̻̜̪̫̦̖̥̜̪̝̳̙̯͉͕̜̦̻̝̘̦̪̦̞̯̘̝̲̻̹̮̗̟̖̱̣̯̯̱̥̣̜̭̯̤͖̞̊̏̌̐̂̅͛̓̂̊̈́̑͛͋̑̇̃̎̒̈̀̍̀̚͜͜͜͜͝Ǹ̴̡̧̛̯̫̻̺̘̬̤̿̌̎̆̏̊̄̽̐͝T̴̢̡̛̛̼̻̪̜̫͚̙̼͓̮̭̻̪̯̣̝̺̟̮̥̪̼̬̦̰̖̥͙͈̐̍̀̈́͐̂̀́̓̇̒̉͛̉̀̎̓̈̍̂͛̈̐̊̐̅̃̂̾͋̇̂̚͘͘̚͘͘͜͜͜͠ͅE̴̛̛̩̣͕̯̓̇̆̏̃̌̿̏̎̈́̃̃̊̏̎̈̀͊̄̿͌̋̉̈́̒̒̈̄̈́̀̄̿͝͝G̴̛̛̭̯̳̣̲̘̹͖͙̞̤̯̦̺̼̱̪̗̬̊̊̎͋̊͒̑̂̑̇̿̇̽̓̈̊̎̾̉̿̑̈́̓̇͐͋̀̾͝͝͝͠͝E̴̛̛̹̜͖̝̹̘̩̮͎̜̯̝͛̔̏̒͌̽̀̒̄̆̉̒̆̔́̑̀̓͆̓̀̒̈̍̆̋̋̀̇̉̍̎̓̋̔͌̇̚̚͘̚͝R̷̨̡̤̬̦̮̻̹̬̃͆̃̓͗̄̓́̋̐̀̓̍̏͆̔̾͑̽̓͊́̍̑̇̆̐̔̐̈̒̓̓̾̍̑͆̑̉̿̄̑̽̓̽̾̊̓̕̚̕͘͘͝͝_̸̢̢̨̧̡̛͕̮̮̺̹̥̼̞̬̥̙̠̜̜̲̙̙̪͕͚̹̦̝̭̺͔̪̗̣̦̠̪̼͎̼͎̟̙̰̮̠̟͇̤̯̘͕̲͚̘̹̭̠͈̭̗̤̝̼̯̜͉̠͉̣̹͚̼̮̰̟̬̻̘̣̭͖͍̘͋̓̓͂́̓̐̏̿̋͗̆́̈́̈́̂̏͒̏̍̑̃̍̇̐̔̀̽̅̌̈́̋́̄̾̏̈̽̿̅̽̀͋̓̽̈́̋̄̇͑̈́̇̄̽͊̒̊͛͊̍͋̈́̄̈́̽̋̓̒̇͂̓̿̃͂̌̔͐͘̕͘̕̚̕͘͜͜͝͝͠͝͠ͅͅͅO̴̧̧̢̨̡̧̧̢̧̢̢̧̡̝̦͎̦̦̖̬̫̞̮̞̥̩̤̟̫̠̙̹̲̘͓̮̪̥̗̠̠̣̼̬̯̠̪̥̟̙̼̺̞̜͍̦̺̻̩̬̝̥̦̖̣̲̞͈̭̟̠̝͍̝̞̟͉̹̥̖̝̦̙̬̬̭̥̦̟̟̣̬̖̘̮̿̀̃̀̉̅͋̅̍̄̒̈̐̀̆̌̄̽͛̎͛̋̔̏̓̓̉̃̓̔̉̊̑̍͊͌̇̂̊̄̂̈́̇̚͘̚͠͝͝͝ͅͅͅͅV̴̧̡̡̛̛̛̛̛̬̤̘̘̠̻̬̜̭̝̗̮̘̤̪̺̼̜̞̞̮̹͚̠̭̹̦̻̪̟̭̻̖̓̇̌̽̽̋̌̿̐̓͐͊̿̃̋̽͋̀̂͂̈́́͋̄͑̓͛̍̈͆̊̽̐̆͆̀̏̍̐̀̐̀̅̄̌̀̿̎̊̊̈́͌̎̇̿͐͐̏̒̓̚̚̕̚̚̕͘͘͜͜͜͝͝͠͝͝ͅE̸̢̧̡̧̢̢̨̫̭̩̫̦̣̦̺̲̩̩̹̰̭͖̣̗̖̘̬͎̜̩̦͉̘͎̩̩̻̞̹̺̩̙̯̘̼̪̘͖͎̝̠̻̗̥̤̹̜̞̹͚̦̝̜̣̪̗̼̜̫̪̤̬̣̦̤͖̝̣̻̦̫̭̯̹̼̫̼̣̦̠̬̝̯̦̤̔̌̓̋̄̊̏̓̂͋̾̽̾̚͜͜͜ͅͅR̸̡̢̨̡̧̡̢̢̛̛̜̣̣͖͖̦̹̝̯̦̖̮̥̙̟͓̤̘̦̭̹̦̞̝̤̦̠̖̖̬̠̮̞̗̗̣̝̙̦̩̝̦̼̦̖̝̯̙̰͖̝̹̹̫̭̝̠̯̗̻̮͈̠͇̹̽̋͒́̃̄͑̄̔̓̎̾̽̽̃̾̾̽̍̎̽͒̈̌̂̿̃̾̀̉̄̽́́̓͋̑̂͊̈́̈́̄̉̃͒̆̏̒̈́̏̅̉̎̽̔̿̄̈̽̅̈̑̽̑̾̃͒̅̃̏̚̕̚̕͜͜͜͝͝͝͠ͅͅͅͅF̴̨̢̡̨̧̡̢̡̢̧̛͚̰̘͎̖͓̻̟̘̞̯̺̻̫̼̮̣̼̬̺̥̟̠̥̗̙̩͎̖̤̣̺̳̣̪̪̱̞͔̫̪̠̰̙̼̪͈̯̩̘̼̗̫̟̗̞̬̠̻̣̦̻̻̯͚̪̲̤͍̯̰̭̥̮̳̫̱̥͑̉̑̈̊̂̍̑͐̀̾͂͋̒̐̇̌̂̈́̐̿̃͒̑̍̊̏̑̉͆̈́̉̈̇͑̀̈́͗̒̿̔̐͒̂̋̌̏͑͋̓̈̾̽͆̈́͐̅͌̃̿̋̔̀͗̂̃̇̎̋̈͒̕̚̚̕̚̕͘͜͜͜͜͠͝͝͝͝͝͝ͅͅͅĻ̴̡̧̡̢̛̫̪̯̬̠̩̙̭̹̜̺̥̫̮̯̯͉̠̞͎̭̫̫̠̯͕̫̮̦̘̞̻̞̜̭̤̖̮̤̠̮̤̙̥̫̦̫̪̔̏̅̂̎̓̅̎̎̒̾̋͐̄̉̿̾̇̑̌̐̅̿̒̅͑͐̃̋̐͑̓̈́̾͐́̈́͐̈́̀̔̂̀̒̏̍̌̆̇̈́̎̈͊͂͛̋͗̒̆̒̋̋̊͂̒̿̽̈́͑͛̈́̇̊̈́̑̾̒̔͛̕̕̕̚̚̕̕͘̕̕͜͜͜͝͝͝͝͠͝͝͠͝ͅO̷̧̡̨̧̢̨̡̢̢̡̨̭̩̮̘̠̮̟̤̹̣̠̠̲̜̥͕̝̠̩̖̪̣̫̝̠̪̦͙̣̣̩̜̞̤̯̱̻̹̦̖̬̝̠̲̙̪̞̬̞͉̣̻̘̺̿̋̊̊̈̔̈́̍̍̈́̀́̍̑̀̚̚͜͜͜ͅͅͅẄ̷̨̨̨̛̛̟̜̱̺̬̮̠̭̤̤̯̤̙̯̰͇̥̪̙̖̻̻̮̺̮̮͈̭̰̠̣̗͍̖͎̙̟̻̦̤̣̫̪̺̠͉͖̩͚̯̖̟͂̾͐̑̈́̍̂̈̊̋̑͒̀͂̈́̑̀̐̀̀̃̅͂̄̊̃͒̇̊̈́̄̒̂͗̈̀̏̽̇̏̌̒͑̂̈́̾̀̔͛̍͒̎̐̍̉̌̄̿̓̌͆̄̿̀̆̐̉͋̔̀̃̐͐̈̔̏̅̅̚̕̚̕̕̕͘̚͘͝͝͝͝͝͝͝͠ͅ
:::

////////////////// CORE DUMP ///////////////////

0x6f76c3572: 0xDEAD0000 0xDEAD0000 0xDEAD0000 0xDEAD0000
0x6f76c3582: 0x00000000 0x00000000 0xFEEDBEEF 0x00000000
0x6f76c3592: 0xFADEBEEF 0x00000000 0xC0DEFACE 0x00000000
0x6f76c35a2: 0xD15EA5ED 0x00000000 0xDECAFBAD 0x00000000

████▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓
███▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓
██▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓
█▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓

╔════════════════════════╗
║  FATAL ERROR #C0DE-47D ║
╚════════════════════════╝

[SYS_CRIT] // Node Fault // Integer Overflow // 0 x 7 FFFFFFF -> 0 x 80000000

>> MAX_INT_VALUE_EXCEEDED >> SYSTEM_BUFFER_OVERFLOW
>> CYBERNETIC_IMPLANT_FAILURE >> BIOCHIP_MAX_CAPACITY_REACHED

NËØN-SYÑTH CORP™
Warning: database overflow // Trying to reset neural network connection...

// Trying to recover the system...
// Reboot the network interface...
// Reconfigure the quantum processor...
// Error: Could not load memory module. 0 xFADEC 0 DE

DATA_CORRUPTION_DETECTED = TRUE;
MEMORY_INTEGRITY = 13.7%;
NEURAL_LINK_STATUS = COMPROMISED;

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[The timeline is restarting....]

E̸̡̧̝̯̼͉̟̣̼̯̪̓̐̄̈̄̇̿̓̓̉̈̚͝R̸̡̖̮̥̗̝̮̺̼͎̗͒̓͊̉̇̀̽̆͠Ŗ̷̥̖̠̞̬̜̉̋̊̈́̉̅̋͗̅̑

A brief history of social networking

PRIMEVAL NIGHT

Many years later, faced with TikTok, humans might recall that distant afternoon on the savannah, tens of thousands of years ago, when they groomed each other.

We've come to the long night before modern homo sapiens and language emerged 35 million years ago.

The camera zooms in — these primates are not foraging, patrolling, fighting over territory, or mating, but grooming each other.

⏩ Fast forward to a certain moment in prehistory, humans stopped grooming each other by hand and instead began spending large amounts of time engaging in another strange behavior — chatting.

Language emerged.

This new tool was used by humans primarily to exchange ‘social information’ about other members of their social group, aka all sorts of gossip and rumors.

As with hands-on grooming, the seemingly ‘non-essential’ act of taking the time to chat and socialize with someone fostered the formation of society,, and may even be considered one of the reasons why people are human.

Cicero and his papyrus network

“News or no news, write me back.”

In July 51 BC, the ancient Roman statesman and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero , came to take up his position as proconsul, or regional administrator, in Cilicia, in southeastern present-day Turkey.

Being at the center of Roman politics, Cicero was eager to get all the latest news about Rome and was eager to communicate with his network of contacts in Rome.

But as the picture shows:
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With today's road network and sea transportation, it would take 21 days to travel from Rome to Cilicia.

And it took Cicero only 5-6 weeks to receive news and letters from Rome.

This was due to the social networking system of the time:

People (mainly the ruling class) copied long-distance letters and documents onto rolls of papyrus, wrote their own comments, and then shared them with others.

Some letters had more than one recipient and were meant to be read aloud in public or used to be posted in public places for the benefit of the public.

Those who heard or read them went on to share them in a similar way.

The empire had not yet been established, and information flowed between the city-states of the Republic.

Later

Later the medium of social networking went through pamphlets → poetry manuscripts → coffee shops → newspapers → radio → television, all the way to the familiar Internet.

In the Internet era alone, we went through the forum era, the blog era, the microblogging era, the short video era, and so on.

We can see that sharing and communicating is human nature, and social networking will not end.

But social networking, and people's willingness to socialize openly, does seem to be on the decline again.

The authors of Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2 , 000 Years argue that the historical experience of mass media shows that centralized power structures inhibit people's social nature.

The book argues that the pre-Internet era of mass media was a totalitarian era of expression, where the right to speak was monopolized by the old denizens, the antithesis of social media, and so all personal social expression belonging to the masses was suppressed during that period.

On June 13, 1938, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution formally limiting the power of radio broadcasting stations to 50,000 watts for AM stations in the U.S. This resolution was sponsored by Senator Wheeler. This resolution was sponsored by Senator Wheeler and is commonly referred to as the Wheeler resolution.

Senator Wheeler argued that AM radio stations with power in excess of 50 kilowatts were contrary to the public interest and would lead to the concentration of political and economic power and social influence in the hands of a very few. In addition, high-power radio stations inhibit low-power radio stations and deprive small radio stations of revenues, making it impossible for these stations to fully and effectively serve social, religious, educational, civic, and community services.

The natural limitations of the traditional media and the control of the authorities have made it so that, except in a few centralized countries, there is no dominance of paper radio and television program platforms, or one.

By 2024, Facebook will have more than 3 billion users, far, far more than the number of users of these old-fashioned ‘centralized mass media’, which even the state can hardly match.

These business empires wield immense power, far more totalitarian than the so-called “centralized mass media,” and without restrictions like those that prevented dominance in the radio age.

The Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU's restrictive law on large platforms, was finally introduced in 2023, and platforms with more than 45 million users in the EU are considered VLOPs (Very Large Online Platforms) and will face stricter regulation.

Last year there was a book called Techno Feudalism, which was very popular for a while. , the book that:

Humans are like returning to the feudal era, only with more high technology.

The vast number of Internet users are actually digital serfs (also known as cloud slaves). By posting in the lord's territory and uploading photos and videos, you are working for the lord. You don't get much in return, your free labor just adds value to the lord's company.

Over time, you may even become psychologically dependent, and if you don't visit your lord's land, you'll be lost in your heart.

Although I think these views are a bit radical, they do speak to some realities and resonate quite well with netizens, providing a glimpse of people's dissatisfaction with centralized platforms.

At the end of the book, Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2 , 000 Years speculates on the future shape of social media and comes up with two different directions:

  • Large centralized social platforms, which may be able to maintain a semi-open status for a long time due to the presence of competitors and concerns about user exodus
  • Social networks going decentralized. Several such technical standards had already been proposed, but none were yet universally supported, and decentralization is naturally less efficient than centralized messaging.

Twelve years on, we have already witnessed the disappearance of the first possibility.

What once seemed like a marginal, fragmented effort — decentralized social networking — has now grown into a universe of its own.

世界の終りとアクティビティパブ

Welcome to the Fediverse.

Imagine if one day it was possible to use your Twitter account to comment Little Red Book, your reddit account to like a Youtube video, and your Goodreads account to comment to 4 chan.

If one day a platform makes you feel uncomfortable, you can easily migrate your entire following, followers, and postings to another platform.

In the traditional subgenre this is impossible, but in the Fediverse it is no longer out of reach.

The Fediverse, an artificial word for Federation + Universe, is often shortened to Fedi.

This universe is a federation of social networking sites that follow the same specifications and protocols, allowing users on different sites to communicate with each other.

And I believe you have already come across such federated applications, such as mailbox, XMPP, IRC.

Characterised by the fact that users do not have to register on the same platform, but can communicate through any platform as long as they comply with the protocol and know the address.

An image to describe post

From left to right: Centralised, Federated,Distributed.

The universe is vast, what will we encounter?

We'll meet prehistoric elephants together

“Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.
'But which is the stone that supports the bridge?' Kublai Khan asks.
'The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,' Marco answers, 'but by the line of the arch that they form.'
Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: 'Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.'
Polo answers: 'Without stones there is no arch.”

Currently the largest galaxy in the Federation, with over 60% of the Federation's population.
Open source software founded in October 2016 by Eugen Rochko, a German programmer born in 1993.
A micro-blogging application, the post is called ‘twoot’ (corresponding to the twitter tweet).

Rochko says: An important goal of Mastodon is to maintain communities that feel safe for all of its members).
There are many magically altered versions, such as the gilitch version https://glitch-soc.github.io/docs/

Also a popular micro-blogging app
Similar to GoToSocial, designed with single-user use cases in mind, but more mature and popular

Designed for single instance users, written in go, very lightweight and suitable for home servers.

The Fediverse version of Goodreads
The drawbacks are obvious: the federated architecture means that each instance can only maintain bibliographic data on its own.

  • Peertube
    Probably the Fediverse's version of YouTube / Vimeo.

  • Misskey
    A micro-blogging application written in Nodejs, with support for many new features such as emoji reaction and markdown syntax, it is a popular application outside of the mastodon system.
    Originally developed as a BBS-style internet forum by Japanese high school student Eiji Shinoda in 2014.
    In 2018, Misseke added support for ActivityPub.
    The name doesn't mean much, it comes from a song lyric

  • Writefreely
    Federated Blog with markdown support

  • Lemmy
    Reddit for the Fediverse

  • PixelFed
    Federated instagram

  • Neodb
    Not technically Fediverse-native software, just software that has access to
    Book, film, audio, game, podcast tagging platform, best place to go outside of Douban

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Cities & Signs 1

"The empire is being crushed by its own weight,"
Kublai Khan thought.
He dreamed of cities as light as kites, or as transparent as lace, or as delicate as mosquito netting, or as leaf veins, or as the lines in the palm of a hand, or as intricate as inlaid metalwork-cities you could see through their deceptive thickness, as if they had no substance.

Central City-States

  • mastodon.social
    2.7 million registered users, 310,000 active users, the largest city in the Fediverse.
    Because of this, some worry it could impact the stability of the decentralized network.

  • pawoo.net
    Launched by Pixiv shortly after Mastodon's inception in 2017, the largest Japanese instance and once the largest in the world
    In December 2019, Pixiv transferred Pawoo’s management to Russell.
    Acquired by Mask Network in 2022.

  • mstdn.jp
    Run by a Japanese grad student named nullkal, Japan's second-largest instance.
    Also acquired by Mask Network.

  • misskey.io
    The official instance of Misskey, 650,000 registered users, mainly Japanese-speaking, the largest Misskey instance
    Blocked by most European instances

Larger Chinese Towns

  • m.cmx.im
    It's often called 「草莓县（Strawberry Prefecture）」 by the residents.
    The earliest Chinese Mastodon instance
    In early July 2019, cmx.im shut down due to the admin being summoned by authorities
    In October 2019, former users registered the new domain m.cmx.im
  • o3o.ca
    It's often called 「嘟站」by the residents.
    Operated by O3O, a nonprofit project based in Canada
  • wxw.moe
    It's often called 「呜站 」by the residents.
    A pan-ACGN instance, political discussions are prohibited
  • nya.one
    It's often called 「喵窝」by the residents.
    A large Simplified Chinese Misskey instance, ACGN-themed
    Runs a relay to help connect small and mid-sized instances

Miscellaneous

  • Truth Social
    Created by Donald Trump after being banned from Twitter.
    Launched on February 21, 2022 (same year, October: Twitter was acquired by Elon Musk).
    Declared “war” on the Fediverse from day one, applying a 120% tariff on all instances equally!
    The code was copied by an outsourcing company from Mastodon. Due to Mastodon being under the AGPLv3 license, it was warned by the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) and eventually made its source code public.

  • Gab
    A notorious far-right American social network, founded in 2016, started using a heavily modified Mastodon codebase in 2019
    Over 5 million registered users, but only around 100,000 active users
    Attempted to federate but was widely blacklisted

  • Donotban / 避秦中心
    It's often called 「里瓣」by the residents.
    One of the earlier Chinese instances, provided refuge to a wave of banned Douban users; closed registration, somewhat isolated, heavily modified

  • Liker.Social
    An instance where you can earn money through likes
    One of the early attempts to integrate blockchain into the Fediverse
    Founded by the same person behind Matters

  • Social.Vivaldi.net
    Official instance of Vivaldi

  • Mozilla Social
    Mozilla's official instance. Discontinued in December 2024

  • Friends.Nico
    Mastodon instance launched by Niconico, shut down at the end of April 2019

  • b612.icu
    A quiet little planet with only a few inhabitants and a lighthouse keeper

  • Flying Spaghetti Monster FSM
    RAmen!

  • fedilove.cyou
    Med Station, a modern medicine-themed instance

  • CDROM
    A retro-style instance that has been running for years on the admin’s old personal laptop

Access terminal

Here's how we're going to do it: we have a staircase in the dinghy, and one of us holds it, and the other one climbs to the top, and the others start rowing until we're right under the moon, and that's why we have to have so many people.

Web Client

  • Official Default Frontend
  • Support for adding as a PWA application
  • If you're tired of the default theme, you can also customize the layout of various skin themes
  • Elk Deer
  • More twitter-like and modern UI, also supports adding as PWA apps

Recommended for IOS

  • Ice Cube
  • Recommended mastodon client
  • Kimis
  • Recommended misskey client

Android
I'm not familiar with Android, so I'll just recommend an interesting one:

  • Fread
  • A hybrid feeds stream app with both fediverse users, bluesky users, and RSS content.

Star Map

From afar... this appears to be a slightly raised rectangle on a flat plane, and a black dot invisible from above.
A three-dimensional structure made up of a plane, the people, the rectangle, a king, and space.

Protocol Turbulence

When we defined it earlier, we mentioned that instances need to follow the same standards and protocols in order to communicate and be part of the Fediverse.

Currently, the most widely adopted and universal federation protocol is アクティビティパブ(ActivityPub).

  • In September 2017, Mastodon adopted the ActivityPub protocol
  • In January 2018, the W3C officially recommended it as a web standard

Before that, there were several older protocols, which still exist in small amounts today (OStatus / Zot / Diaspora).

However, as Mastodon’s own documentation says, you can basically consider:

The Fediverse is the collective name for all websites that can communicate with each other via ActivityPub and the World Wide Web.

Some articles include all federated applications in the Fediverse — this is incorrect. For example, Matrix is often mentioned. While Matrix is indeed federated, it uses a completely different protocol and is not part of the Fediverse, nor is it interoperable with it.

P.S.:

  • OStatus is the “marginal” protocol mentioned earlier, used by Mastodon at its inception in 2016.

An image to describe post

Population Shifts — A Peach Blossom Land or a Refuge for Art

  • In 2017, Pixiv launched Pawoo. On April 23rd, it enabled login via Pixiv accounts, attracting a large influx of users.
  • By October 25th, Pawoo had surpassed 300,000 registered users.
  • In February 2018, a constitutional amendment in China removing presidential term limits triggered a wave of account bans on Weibo — likely the first refugee wave from the Chinese-speaking internet to the Fediverse. Exact numbers are unknown.
  • In October 2020, Douban — already known for heavy censorship — suddenly disabled hashtag indexing in its broadcast feature, causing a "#LeavingHome" incident. Many users migrated to the Fediverse.
  • Before Twitter's acquisition in 2022, the Fediverse had fewer than 500,000 active users.
  • On October 28, 2022, Elon Musk finalized his acquisition of Twitter.
  • Within a week, a massive wave of users migrated, pushing Mastodon's active users to 600,000.
  • On November 7, 2022, Musk tweeted:

If you don't like Twitter anymore, there is awesome site called Masterbatedone.

  • “Masterbatedone” is a crude pun (a play on “Mastodon”) implying masturbation had finished — a clear jab at Mastodon.
  • In December of the same year, Twitter banned the hashtag #mastodon, prohibited users from posting any links to Fediverse instances, and for a long time even disallowed users from putting any identifier like xxx@xxx in their profiles. The migration wave cooled off afterward.

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  • By the end of 2022:
  • 8.7 million registered users
  • 2.5 million active users
  • July 2023: X (formerly Twitter) announced that free users could only view 1,000 posts per day
  • October 18, 2023: X announced a test program requiring new users in New Zealand and the Philippines to pay $1/year to interact on the platform
  • By the end of 2023, registered users surpassed 10 million
  • October 17, 2024: X updated its terms of service to allow the platform to use user-generated content for AI training. A wave of artists and creators wiped their accounts and fled to the Fediverse. Numbers are unknown.
  • As of May 2025:
  • The Fediverse has over 15 million registered users
  • Over 1 million active users

Project 92: The Lizard Man 🦎 Invade the Fediverse!

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On March 22, 2024, residents of the Fediverse received a message from another dimension — the Meta-verse:

An image to describe post

This sent shockwaves through the Fediverse. English-speaking users quickly launched the “# ANTI-META FEDI PACT,” with over 900 instance admins signing on to sever all connections with Threads.

In the Chinese-speaking community, many instance admins also announced that they would block Threads and called on others to do the same — a move widely supported.

Mastodon’s founder Eugen Rochko published a response on the official blog: What to Know About Threads.

So why did the people of the Fediverse treat Threads’ “olive branch” like an incoming invasion?

Timeline

  • October 28, 2021: Facebook announces it is rebranding as Meta.
  • November 4, 2022: Meta's stock price drops to $88, a drastic fall from its $384 peak.
  • March 2023: 18 TV network group reveals that Meta is developing a mysterious app—internal codename "P 92".
  • June 2023: Meta begins leaking information to the media about its new “Twitter-killer” app, PROJECT 92.
  • July 2023: Twitter, under Musk's leadership, announces that free users are limited to viewing only 1,000 tweets per day.
  • Just days later, Threads officially launches, gaining tens of millions of users within hours.
  • The official blog post Introducing Threads: A New Way to Share With Text already mentions plans to support the ActivityPub protocol.

🪐

For various reasons, Meta introduced its own visual representation of the Fediverse in 2024:

An image to describe post

In the Fediverse, a prevailing metaphor is that of "planets"—whether in older official logos, illustrations in documentation, educational materials, or the new icon “⁂”, instances are imagined as a constellation of stars connected to each other.
Meta’s arrogance is laid bare when juxtaposed with this metaphor:

A supermassive celestial body at the center of the universe, while scattered minor stars merely orbit around it.

“Second-Class Citizens”

If the iconography can be dismissed as over-interpretation, then Threads’ behavior in handling federation clearly treats native Fediverse residents as second-class citizens.

Threads users must manually enable the deeply hidden option to federate with the Fediverse.

During the process, users are subtly warned: once you turn this on, you can’t delete anything, it’s dangerous, your privacy won’t be protected, and if something goes wrong, it’s your own fault.

Fediverse users can like and boost Threads posts, but Threads users won’t even see it—they get no notifications, can’t respond, and can’t initiate any interaction with Fediverse posts.

It's a bit like having an “imaginary friend.”


%%The image shows the post of the Threads searched for at the instance of the Threads that are not blacked out%%An image to describe post

Rebranded Shells

According to a reverse-engineered API, the backend of Threads actually connects to Instagram.

So essentially, it’s the same system under the hood—just accessed through different apps for brand separation.

— from Some of My Thoughts on Threads

How your privacy is exploited on Instagram? It’s the same on Threads.

Mr. Zuckerberg, the Man Himself

Beyond the old tales of plagiarism and betraying friends to found Facebook…

The book *Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism—was published in 2024. The author is a former Facebook executive from 2010 to 2017, and is currently being sued by Meta over its release.

The book recounts Zuckerberg’s efforts to break into the Chinese market, including (but not limited to):

  • Voluntarily offering to hand over data from users in Taiwan and Hong Kong to the Chinese government
  • Expressing willingness to adjust the platform's algorithms to support ideological propaganda in mainland China
  • Reportedly asking Xi Jinping to name his child—only to be refused

As the book circulated, another wave of digital migration began in 2025—the hashtag " # FB Refugee Wave") trended, with over ten thousand users fleeing into the Fediverse.

Big Player Wrecking Ball

One of the most common analogies used: email is also federated. Anyone can run their own email server.

But nowadays, only a handful of major platforms dominate.

While technically still possible to self-host, individual servers face endless hurdles and discrimination from big providers.

An article from 2022, After 23 Years, I Gave Up Self-Hosting Email and Surrendered to Big Tech, sparked intense debate on Hacker News.

Blogs, personal websites, RSS, even the web itself—all are decentralized in nature. Anyone could build their own search engine.

But the story often plays out the same way:

Big players enter, scoop up users, and—if profitable—make services increasingly closed-off, raising the entry barrier. Small players get squeezed out.
If it's not profitable, they pull the plug, collapsing the already fragile ecosystem.

Resistance is useless...?

"The inferno of the living is not something that will be;
if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."

A Very Real Problem Facing the Fediverse:

Money

Running an instance is powered entirely by passion—and doesn’t bring in profit.

A few well-known examples:

  • A Korean instance was found attempting to sell user data on the dark web due to the admin’s financial distress
  • Pawoo has been sold multiple times—not profitable, too costly to maintain
  • Niconico’s instance shut down due to lack of profitability
  • Mozilla’s instance closed because of budget cuts
  • And countless small, lesser-known instances have come and gone, fading into obscurity

Cost of Running an Instance

According to instance admin fivestone’s estimate:

Even ignoring the technical barrier and the time spent on setup and maintenance, just the domain and server alone cost roughly ¥500–¥1000 (RMB) per year.

For larger instances, the numbers balloon.

Suji, the founder of Mask Network, mentioned in a podcast interview:

We calculated the company’s expenses—it loses hundreds of thousands of dollars per year...
With all the big instances combined (like mstdn. Jp, pawoo. Net, mastodon. Cloud), the total annual loss is over a million dollars.

On top of that, ActivityPub has design limitations, and the lack of unified standards has made the Fediverse far less harmonious and ideal than imagined.

  • Some mockingly say the Fediverse is “just not good enough”—wave after wave of new users, and yet it still struggles to onboard them properly.
  • Some worry that it hasn't collapsed yet simply because it hasn't scaled up. Historically, multiple instances have crashed due to user surges.
    The scalability of its architecture remains questionable.
  • Others argue the Fediverse is "fake decentralization", because over 97% of users are concentrated on just a few major instances.
  • Some note that most nodes are hosted on just a few cloud providers—if those services go down or change policy, the entire Fediverse could crumble faster than Thanos snapping his fingers.

Meanwhile, over on Threads…

Threads has surpassed 350 million users.

Chapter III

In Melania, every time you enter the square you find yourself in the middle of a dialogue:

a soldier swaggering with a prostitute, a lawyer haggling with the landlady, a young man in love with a girl and she with another, a drunk spilling secrets to the stammering barber, a beggar quarreling with the fruit seller, a nun admonishing a gambler, a father scolding a son, a madman talking to himself.

Many years later, you return to Melania. You find the same people, the same conversations, repeating themselves word for word.

Simplifying narratives into a struggle between an evil empire and a just federation is always straightforward and convenient.

Declaring an "escape" from certain software, cutting ties, and imagining oneself resisting the erosion of dark algorithms easily leads to self-pitying posturing.

Here, I want to discuss something else.

Socrates' Anxiety

What exactly causes people to reduce social interactions on social networks? We happen to have a decent control group: WeChat Moments.

  • No algorithmic recommendations interfering
  • Clean chronological ordering
  • Still centered around real human connections (usually people with real-world relationships)

Yet people are still expressing less.

The most common complaints are "too troublesome" and "feeling unsafe."

After WeChat became a national app, it's no longer just for close friends. First came parents and elders, then bosses and colleagues, business partners, and eventually even delivery drivers.

The complexity of relationships skyrocketed. Being seen by "inappropriate" people could easily lead to real-world complications.

Though WeChat later introduced friend grouping features, it didn't solve the problem-only added maintenance complexity, with many awkward cases of grouping failures.

Beyond Facebook's inherent design issues, people's main complaints revolve around:

On social networks, content is visible to everyone, but those most interested in you are often CDEs - <ruby>Criminals<rt>Criminals</rt></ruby>, <ruby>Despots<rt>Despots</rt></ruby>, and <ruby>Employers<rt>Employers</rt></ruby> (in police states, the final S might stand for "<ruby>Secret Police<rt>Secret Police</rt></ruby>"), rather than well-meaning individuals.

User huoju observed that Fediverse residents, whether in Chinese or English-speaking communities, exhibit a "techno-conservative" tendency:

Frequent profile warnings like "Do not boost outside Mastodon | Fediverse," resistance toward creating a Fediverse-wide search engine, and feelings of violation when personal blog RSS feeds get indexed by aggregation sites.

This anxiety about "being seen by too many" echoes Socrates' concerns millennia ago. When writing first emerged as a new tool, he harbored deep reservations:

Once words are written down, their spread becomes uncontrollable, reaching far more people than face-to-face conversation ever could. This makes them prone to misunderstanding or distortion, leaving authors powerless to defend themselves.

We see that as audience sizes grow, unease persists across eras-an anxiety that directly suppresses our innate urge to express.

People want to "be seen" when expressing themselves, yet fear "being seen by too many, risking misinterpretation or attracting bad actors."

But does this "too many" have a precise numerical threshold?

Dunbar's Magic Number

I shall give you a master number

"Deep Thought" spent 7.5 million years computing and verifying before concluding that the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42.

British anthropologist <ruby>Robin Dunbar<rt>Robin Dunbar</rt></ruby>, through complex reasoning and precise calculations, arrived at another number:

148

This magic number recurs throughout history:

  • Average size of hunter-gatherer tribes
  • Earliest agricultural settlements in the Ancient Near East
  • Villages recorded in the 1086 Domesday Book survey of England
  • Most active social media users' friend counts (if mutual follows equal friendship) hover between 120-130
  • Many WeChat users aim for sub-200 contacts during digital decluttering

Known as "Dunbar's Number," derived from studying primate brain sizes and social group relationships, it signifies:

The average human capacity for stable social connections is 148, often rounded to 150.

Beyond this limit, social bonds fragment. For "safety," people instinctively suppress their social nature and reduce self-expression.

Our brains struggle to handle modern social networks where influencers boast hundreds of thousands of followers. KOLs and celebrities endure extraordinary psychological pressures.

As of May 10, 2025, the Fediverse contains 27,752 Mastodon instances. Only 342 (1.2%) have monthly active users exceeding Dunbar's Number (150).

Town Squares vs. Toot Cafés

Software development has the classic "Cathedral vs. Bazaar" metaphor.

In social media, an analogous comparison exists: "Town Squares vs. Cafés."

Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2 , 000 Years argues:

Blogs are the new pamphlets; microblogs and social networks are the new coffeehouses...
The 21 st-century internet resembles 17 th-century pamphleteering and 18 th-century coffeehouses in many ways

It posits that 18 th-century coffeehouse-scale interactions represent ideal social media.

Facebook executives have repeatedly called their platform a vast "TOWN SQUARE" since around 2013.

Elon Musk grandly proclaimed Twitter would become a "Super Town Square."

None framed their platforms as revived coffeehouses.
On the other hand, instances in the Fediverse are much more like small, privately run cafés, each with its own distinct vibe.
(And the drinks are free!)

Here, people talk to themselves, document their lives, whisper to close friends.

When people lament that social media lacks “real humans,”
They may be forgetting:

A square naturally attracts vendors, performers, madmen, and preachers.

If you're not there to sell something,
You don’t need to shout.

In the square, CIDES (Conflicts, Influencers, Drama, Extremes, Scams) are unavoidable.
So regular folks must watch their bags, not bare their souls.

The world needs town squares,
But it also needs cafés.
Many treat Mastodon and other Fediverse microblog platforms as “Twitter alternatives.”

But instead of seeing them as replacements or rivals to Facebook or Twitter,
Perhaps it's better to understand them as complements to the current social ecosystem—
Or even as a new kind of social media altogether.

From that perspective, many things start to make sense.

Mastodon Users Don't Engage-They Just Boost

Zhang Xiaolong (WeChat's creator) is said to believe in Dunbar's Number. WeChat groups still cap at 200 members.

Regarding group chats, I've long observed (not necessarily accurately):

Except for professionally managed groups or those constantly adding new members, most large groups inevitably splinter into smaller ones, with the original group falling silent.

But exceptions exist.

Years ago, an artist friend immersed in various subculture WeChat groups witnessed countless communities rise and fall. One day, enlightenment struck:

The essence of human interaction is soliloquy.

He created a "monologue group" of strangers with one rule: members could only speak their own thoughts-no replies or interactions allowed.

Nearly full at 500 members (surpassing Dunbar's Number), requiring minimal moderation beyond removing rule-breakers.

For nearly a decade, daily messages hit 999+.

This might be an outlier-imitators quickly failed-but it reveals how expression without expectation of response can foster relaxed sharing.

A now-widely accepted social ethic:

I don't care if you share my views. Don't start debates here-I'll block you.
Want to criticize me? Post it on your own space (don't comment here).

Many high-profile Twitter accounts enable "no comments" or "approved followers only" settings. This reminds us:

The essence of microblogging remains blogging

Mastodon's design intentionally weakens social features, returning microblogging to its roots as personal space. Examples include limited search functionality: even if your instance enables full-text search, you can only search your own posts and those you've interacted with (boosts, favorites, bookmarks).

The Fediverse often resembles a massive monologue group. Most users interact via boosts, favorites, or emoji reactions-unsolicited comments may be deemed impolite.

Extreme statements gain little traction here, quickly drowned in others' musings.

Thus, many Twitter refugees visit the Fediverse, post Twitter-style hot takes, find no engagement, declare it a "ghost town," and return to the "digital cesspool."

Forward Four， Toward the sea of stars

So almost certainly there is enough land in the sky to give every member of the human species, back to the first ape-man, his own private, world-sized heaven - or hell.

The previous chapter might be considered an answer to "Why did many people come to the Fediverse but didn’t stay?"

Here are some of my thoughts on other doubts raised:

The Fediverse is just fake decentralization because over 97% of users are concentrated on the top few instances.

That was data from 2022.

By 2025, the degree of decentralization in the Fediverse has significantly improved — even the top 30 instances only accommodate about 85% of users:
An image to describe post

There are no obvious problems now because it hasn’t reached scale. History has seen many instances crash due to user surges. If it has to carry more users in the future, its architecture’s scalability is questionable.

If you view it through the café model, there's no need to act like a town square where one person shouts and the whole world listens.
Without this as a goal, the technical requirements are much lower. A decentralized architecture is inherently more scalable.
The Fediverse has already weathered wave after wave of "refugee" migrations, proving its capabilities.
As user numbers increase, issues like harassment, toxic speech, and spam will naturally arise.
But I believe the Fediverse’s instance-based autonomous management is superior to a single central authority.

No profit, and still costs money to maintain

Thanks to Moore’s Law, cloud service costs are decreasing, and home server setups have become cheaper and more common in recent years.
In an age where "everyone has a NAS," spinning up a small instance for yourself and a few friends isn't that difficult anymore.
More and more open-source organizations, NGOs, and community-embracing companies are choosing to run their own instances.
As an investment in a brand’s image, there’s no initial expectation of profit, nor any pressure to monetize — which might be better for user privacy and the overall social ecosystem.

Most nodes are hosted on a few cloud providers. If those providers have issues, the impact on the Fediverse could be like Thanos snapping his fingers.

That’s not a flaw in the Fediverse’s architecture design.
On the contrary, it fully supports and encourages running your own small instance from a home server.
Even in the so-called fully decentralized blockchain space, similar concerns exist:

  • POS chains are just “data center chains”
  • POW chain hash power is controlled by a few major mining farms
    Questioning like this can go on forever — you could make countless meme images like the one below:
    The internet as a whole always has some weak links.
    An image to describe post

Influence of big players

I’m relatively optimistic on this point.

Search engines haven't reached an endgame yet. Whether it’s newer commercial companies like DuckDuckGo and Kagi, or self-hosted solutions like SearXNG — they all have potential.

Personal blogs and RSS are also experiencing a kind of “renaissance” in recent years.

The history of a centralized internet is much shorter than most people imagine — and perhaps much more fragile than we think.

Aside from social networks drifting away from centralization,

the blockchain world — which promotes personal sovereignty and full decentralization — often starts with individual atoms that form into communities, resembling a kind of “federated” multi-central model (e.g. BTC mining, POS chains).

From centralized to distributed — both ends of the spectrum seem to be gravitating toward the federated middle ground.

I originally wanted to end with some exciting news, because I remembered many companies and services announcing plans to join the Fediverse.
Turns out, they mostly just jumped on the Fediverse hype back in 2022 when Elon Musk was messing with Twitter:

  • Tumblr announced plans to join the Fediverse in 2022, but by 2025 there’s still no real progress.
  • Gitea also integrated the go-fed library in its 1.17 release in 2022, claiming major progress was imminent. Another 3 years have passed.
  • WordPress has a plugin that connects to the Fediverse, and it has been consistently maintained.

The various thresholds and characteristics of the Fediverse mean it won’t easily gather and attract users like centralized services do.
In the end, it might never achieve secular success — but let me quote a tweet to end:

The original intent behind creating something is not for fame or money.

Sure, internet products are naturally prone to bringing fame and money as a result of their creation.

But the product itself is more like a declaration — a substitute for voice and a trace left behind. It expresses:

  • This is who I am
  • This is what I chose in this world
  • This is the kind of world I long for

Of course, this isn’t as direct (not like money, fame, or desire), but it’s undoubtedly a kind of resistance against boredom (or death) — a much more fun game.

After God died, we still have to invent games to play.

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