Notes from the Fediverse
As I was looking for a clean, ad-free, online space for my writing, I kept coming across mentions of the Fediverse. The name sounds like it belongs in an 80s cyberpunk novel. Federation. Decentralised servers. An open system where separate platforms still connect through a shared protocol. It all reminded me of the early internet, or at least what we thought the internet would become.
No single company controlled the stream of information. Nothing was sorted for you by engagement or algorithms. There was no feed, no infinite scroll. Just links, pages, and whatever you went looking for.
That kind of autonomy is something I hoped to find again in an online platform.
Meanwhile, I still submit my writing to small literary journals. These are the kind that ask for first publication rights, which means you cannot share any work online until they accept or reject it. And that decision might take months. There’s an entire ecosystem built on waiting, where the more exclusive the publication, the longer the wait.
Some of these journals folded or went on hiatus when AI-generated content began to flood their submissions, with slush piles reaching new heights and becoming unmanageable. The scene has since recalibrated: AI is now banned.
In a world of instant content and constant refresh, that kind of slowness feels kind of radical again.
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That said, I was also looking for an online space where I could publish at a more regular pace than the submission queue allows. I ended up choosing ‘Ghost’ for its clean design, its features, and the promise of compatibility with said Fediverse.
What that all means in practice is still being figured out, but from what I’ve seen, it allows your writing to move with you. You remain the owner. And your work, if you choose, can be federated. That is, distributed across platforms like Mastodon or WriteFreely, without being swallowed by a single, massive feed. The system behind this is called ActivityPub, a protocol that allows different platforms to communicate. You don’t need to be on the same app to be part of the same conversation. That idea felt like something worth returning to.
Discoverability is a different story. The Fediverse isn’t widely indexed, which is why, like me, you may have heard of it but not actually seen it.
In any case, search, as we once knew it, is gone. AI can now anticipate our every query, pulling from a pool of sources that tend to favour the most ‘reputable’. What that means remains to be seen. The most influential? The largest, the loudest? And what does this mean if you’re working quietly in the margins?
You continue working quietly in the margins. I’m fine with that.
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