THE ENDLESS VARIETY OF THE FEDIVERSE

The Fediverse is a varied place – not just in terms of users, but of server software, too. The biggest player is Mastodon, created by Eugen Rochko in 2016, and reckoned by many tech publications to be a Twitter killer. Sadly, that never happened, but Mastodon popularised the idea of a decentralised social network, and attracted hundreds of thousands of new users into the Fediverse.

Mastodon.social is run by the project developers and hosts around 600,000 users on a single server. Its size makes it unusual on the Fedverse, as most servers tend to have a few dozen or a hundred users at most.

In addition to Pleroma/Soapbox (our favourites), Misskey offers a beautiful interface and a treasure trove of fancy features. Note: all of the documentation we were able to find is in Japanese.

If you’re keen to have an old-school experience harking back to the no-frills early days of web 2.0, you could give GNU social, Hubzilla, or Friendica a go. They’re not fancy, but they work exactly as they should, and they federate with the Fediverse as you would expect.

One of the more interesting applications of ActivityPub is the ability to add federating abilities via a WordPress plugin. Your long-neglected blog can play a part in the thriving ecosystem that is the Fediverse, with users’ responses showing up directly as comments (but with fewer spammy ads).

Finally, we like Funkwhale, a Pythonbased music player similar to the streaming service Deezer; and PeerTube, a full fat video streaming platform à la YouTube. We wouldn’t expect it to support many users on a $5 VPS, though.