 Hi everyone. In today's video, I want to talk about the Fediverse, the proposed alternative to modern social media services. Those who are aware of my channel may already know I've talked about it just a little bit, you know I've written just a few articles about it. So today's video is the sort of be all end all of that and none of those previous articles are required reading to understand everything here. I'm going to re-summarize everything and explain all of my points for why the Fediverse is not the solution people think it is. For those who aren't in the loop, the Fediverse is this new paradigm of social media that wants to use decentralized protocols like Activity Pub for example to allow independent servers running their own software, in many cases even different software, to create the sort of social network between servers. It's a bit like email where you can have different servers like Outlook.com and Yahoo.com but still send emails between those. But instead of sending emails, you're sending posts or images or reels or whatever you have on modern social media. This way, instead of having a single central server owned by a big bad company, you'll have lots of little servers owned by nice people. So Fediverse supporters say that this is the answer to the censorship and privacy problems on the internet. Or at least that's what they want you to believe. In today's video, I'm going to be running over how the Fediverse is actually worse for your privacy just as prone to censorship and most importantly just as bad for you as modern social media. Now before any of that, let's start with some modern context on the Fediverse. The Fediverse in the modern sense didn't really come into being until 2016 with Macedon the first major experiment in the field. It's essentially a Twitter clone. Now across its various instances, Macedon touts about 8 million known users, which is a very high number for a pretty new protocol. So these protocols by themselves may be useful for some applications. For example, bring videos across distributed servers with Peartube, a different type of Fediverse software which allows you to reduce electricity costs and bandwidth. With all that said, however, the privacy implications of these protocols are horrific. I'm going to call the dilemma of Fediverse privacy the forever box. I didn't actually come up with this term, but it's something one of my friends came up with on a stream. Imagine you're posting to the Fediverse. That means that other websites like different email providers are going to receive that post if users on those websites are reading your profile. That means if you delete a post on your instance, other servers may choose to delete it or not. Imagine having all your cringy tweets when you're a kid be completely irremovable from the internet because some random Fediverse server still keeps them. That's essentially the problem with this protocol. You can put something out there and once you put it out there, you essentially put it into a forever box. It's never going to be deleted off the internet. In fact, this very thing has even happened to me. I've had my own videos from video servers I've deleted in the past show up on other Fediverse instances with no way to actually get rid of any of that metadata. Okay, but at this point, a Fediverse supporter will say that a few privacy compromises here and there are a good price to pay for the freedom that such a protocol brings with it. Except that's not true either. There are many stories of Macedon servers being both defederated and censoring users. In fact, I'd say it's actually worse than major social media sites because Fediverse makes the administration so fragmented that users on individual websites get to choose which users to keep and which not to keep. And they can even work against specific servers to get them completely cancelled. So I don't think it's better for censorship. And I think anybody who's read any of these articles can agree with me. Finally, imagining that all these flaws could somehow magically be fixed by some technology far removed from us right now. What about our lives? The reality is that switching from one platform like Twitter to a different one like Macedon is not going to change how people actually consume the content and the effects it has on their physical and mental health. I hate to be that guy, but there's actually a great study done where students in college were given time limits on their social media like Snapchat and Instagram. And in pretty much every case, they were performing better mentally, physically and academically. What we're looking at here is a systemic addiction cutting down people's lives and changing the underlying technology to that to some decentralized alternative is not going to change any of that at all. Alright, so with that said, I hate to add down such a low note. There actually is a solution to these problems. And it's running your own website. Not only is it great for your own technical knowledge and learning, but it helps you really think about what you post. This is also how the web was designed to be and with syndication systems like RSS. Remember that there is no algorithm deciding what viewers get. They get to pick and choose themselves. This way, there is no means and no incentive to censor users. So yeah, the Fediverse isn't great, but the internet still is. There are many opportunities to get your voice out there, but they don't require a complicated protocol. Thanks for watching this video. I've been Denchie. Goodbye.