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This is your friendly reminder that contrary to the hype and marketing hullabaloo going around right now but #Mastodon is not the #fediverse! The #federation is actually a huge tapestry of thousands of servers and volunteers, and dozens if not hundreds of developers and even more volunteers, who have made this space what you see today.

Since journalists aren’t writing any articles about them, and since they aren’t getting the recognition they so very much deserve, allow me to introduce you to them instead.

Because when you either accidentally or intentionally or through ignorance or apathy spread the misinformation that Mastodon=Fediverse, you erode the very foundation of what has drawn you to this place to begin with.

You are marginalizing great projects like:

👉 Diaspora — The OG. None of this would be possible were it not for two college kids who had a dream and set up a Kickstarter to fund its development back in 2010.

👉 Friendica — The one app that lets anyone or any organization literally create their own private #facebook on the fediverse and make it accessible and federated with the rest of the World. It also has very modest hosting requirements making it accessible to more people to host without requiring a VPS or complex server setups.

👉 Misskey — Several years before Mastodon there was #Misskey. A microblogging platform what provided features not seen in other projects and allows users to customize many aspects of their feed and timeline. Misskey still has a very passionate userbase and is still being developed.

👉 Hubzilla — The successor to Friendica, #Hubzilla took what was great about Friendica and made it all the better.

👉 Peertube — Calling #PeerTube a “YouTube competitor” doesn’t do it justice. PeerTube is so much more than a competitor to YouTube. In a very real sense it’s a YouTube killer, if only more people knew about it and more people used it. PeerTube lets anybody stand up a service and then instantenously their published videos become accessible to the entire Federation (and vice versa).

👉 Mastodon — #Mastodon came on the scene in 2016 and promised a more user-friendly experience. Coupled with some fortunate timing and early publicity it quickly became the darling of the fediverse. It’s certainly the software with the most amount of users. Marketing tends to do that to brands.

👉 Pleroma — Less than a year after launch, disagreements with certain design decisions and direction with the Mastodon project gave birth to #Pleroma, a lightweight alternative to Mastodon that at the time ironically offered a more user-friendly experience than Mastodon itself and pioneered features years ago that are just now being implemented by Mastodon and other projects. Pleroma’s bug claim to fame was that you could stand up a robust instance on a single RasperryPi with little trouble.

👉 Pixelfed — #Pixelfed is the federation’s answer to Instagram. By standing up a public or private Pixelfed server you enable yourself (or the public) to post rich multimedia content (photos and videos), “stories”, and more that instantly are accessible to the rest of the federation.

And there’s others!

👉 Lemmy — #Lemmy is a federated version of Reddit (or Digg or HackerNews). It’s a federated link-aggregator. Individuals can stand up their own servers or communities of topics.

👉 Funkwhale — #Funkwhale is a federated version of Soundcloud or Bandcamp for sharing your music library with other Funkwhale users and the Federation.

👉 BookWyrm — #BookWyrm is a federated version of GoodReads. A federated instance by book lovers and for book lovers.

👉 WriteFreely — A blogging platform that is built to federate. #WriteFreely federates your words and your content as your write them, and your readers can follow and comment on your posts without having to leave their local timeline.

👉 Mobilizon — A federated alternative to Facebook Events. #Mobilizon allows activist groups and organizations of all sizes to stand up a service for organizing events and meetups right here on the Federation.

👉 Castopod — Next generation podcasting software #Castopod allows podcasters of all sizes to interact with audiences in the fediverse. Your podcast becomes a social network: your episodes can be shared, liked and commented on without depending on anyone. Podcasts can be monetized or not, you have rich audience metrics and analytics, and series can be deployed to Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, and other podcast services.

👉 Akkoma — Whereas Pleroma may have been a logical “fork” (not in the software sense) of Mastodon, #Akkoma is an actual hard fork of Pleroma. And just like Pleroma was started over misgivings in the direction Mastodon was going, so to has Akkoma given rise based on some similar misgivings with Pleroma. But as a user, the only thing you really need to know is that Akkoma is heavily centered on user expression. ‘Nuff said.

In closing let me be clear, I have nothing against Mastodon. I think it’s a fantastic project and it is an amazing piece of software. I am thankful for the level of awareness and exposure it has been giving the Fediverse as a whole.

But to continue to perpetuate the misinformation that Mastodon somehow created the fediverse or that the Federation is Mastodon is something that I can’t allow to stand.

It’s gaslighting, and it’s erasing history.

❤️🧡💛💚💙💜🤎🖤🤍 (Updated 2022-11-09)