The Fediverse: Passing Fad Or A Real Alternative To Big Tech?

Some of the most popular new destinations include "federated" services like Mastodon and Pixelfed , as well as the quasi-federated Bluesky . Federated means decentralised - rather than one central service, like X, federated systems have tens of thousands of servers. They also tend to be nonprofit and community run.

Federated services, otherwise known as " the fediverse ", have been hailed as a network for public communication, dialogue and debate, where ordinary people, not corporations, shape their social spaces, and where advertisers, hate speech and intrusive algorithms are much easier to avoid. News organisations, nonprofits, universities and even governments have experimented with the fediverse and Bluesky, partially or even completely shifting their social media presence away from X.