A little excursion into the anarchic internet

Have you ever heard of the Fediverse? Not me. At least until a few days ago, when @hagengraf told me about his Instagram alternative Pixelfed on Twitter and in a blog post.

Mastodon has been known to me as a Twitter alternative for quite some time. I haven't tried it out yet. Until now. Since recently, I now have my own Mastodon account and I am thrilled. What makes Mastodon more interesting than Twitter is the lack of advertising. And where advertising is missing, mainstream is usually missing as well. And without mainstream, no influencers. Without influencers, no pseudo-discussions.

No: Mastodon is not automatically a perfect world. But Mastodon is exciting: I immediately remembered my first days on the Internet, when I still dialed mailboxes directly with a 56K modem. In the turmoil of the net, you encountered all sorts of characters back then, and somehow Mastodon feels similar.

But back to the Fediverse to which Mastodon also belongs. The Fediverse - short for Federated Universe - is a federation of several decentralized social networks that all communicate via a common protocol. So it is possible to follow a Pixelfed account (Instagram alternative) from Mastodon (the Twitter alternative) and exchange messages. There are more services that all belong to the Fediverse. You can find a nice overview at: fediverse.party

The Fediverse is anarchic: in just the few days I've been on it, I've already made a few interesting acquaintances. The exchange with people there is more genuine because it's not about followers. It's about real exchange for most of the people there. And that makes it interesting.

I'm still there and if you feel like it, create an account on mastodon.social or on my own Pixelfed instance pixel.guerrilla.earth.