Fediverse and Indieweb

The terms Fediverse and Indieweb both refer to movements that try to steer away from large-scale, monolithic ownership of infrastructure and content. The core idea is to decentralise, to let communities and individuals communicate and collaborate in spaces under their own control, where they can set their own rules around content, behaviour, and sharing with other communities and individuals.

Fediverse

What is the Fediverse?

A shorter version of Wikipedia: The Fediverse is a collection of social networking services that can communicate with each other. Users of different services can send and receive status updates, multimedia files and other data across the network.

Most users start exploring the Fediverse as an alternative for monolithic silos like Twitter/X and Facebook.

The technical focus is on technical protocols to make services work together. This is also where it gets confusing quickly, as multiple sub communities exist. To mention two of such communities:

• BlueSky is becoming well-known now as "the new Twitter". It uses the AT protocol, but (end 2025) there don't seem to be any other service providers, so I would technically not call it a federated network yet.
• Mastodon also gained popularity when Twitter was taken over. It is based on the ActivityPub protocol. There are many service providers, and (end 2025) several European public institutions and governments running their own instances.

Each protocol has its own design choices (for instance around identity portability: how easy is it to use a different service provider while keeping your "username"; and around network architecture).

Indieweb

What is the Indieweb?

The IndieWeb is a people-focused alternative to the “corporate web”.

We are a community of independent and personal websites based on the principles of: owning your domain and using it as your primary online identity, publishing on your own site first (optionally elsewhere), and owning your content.

The focus here is more on self-hosting and direct control over your own web content. The central term is POSSE: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere: your push content to other platforms, but host it yourself first.

This also makes it more of a tech-minded community for people comfortable with organising their own web hosting. The community focuses on technical standards like Webmention and microformats, to facilitate discovery and communication between the online presences of people.

Combining the two: a historical perspective

The early days of blogging form the cradle of the Indieweb movement, working on methods to have more long-form content-and-comment discussions across websites.

Then, new services emerged that made it easier to share short updates and events, with a stronger focus on discovering like-minded people. This became "micro blogging": short messages and quick responses.

A new movement arose, focused on federating these networks to allow users to talk to each other. The movement included messaging apps.

Twitter started out as a platform in that community. Once running at scale and looking for revenue, Twitter, Facebook, and others turned into walled gardens with advertising to generate income. Their focus shifted to the "network effect" (the value of your product for advertisers depends on the number of users locked in).

Messaging apps became their own category, with more a focus on private conversations rather than (semi)public interaction.

What conversations go where?

I would like to distinguish between more ephemeral social interactions, and more permanent exchanges of ideas.

I see my website as the public part of my Personal Knowledge Management system. It would benefit from the webmention-style of social discovery and linking to and from other website. It is also nice to make comments on the social web visible on my website, as methods to get an exchange of ideas going.

I also want to have conversations on the social web that don't end up on my own website. This is where the ephemeral nature of the social web meets the more private or semi-public nature of messaging platforms.

It leads to a rather complicated system for my part of the social web .