I joined the Fediverse via Mastodon five years ago and it has been a really good experience. So I guess this is a love letter to human connections on the internet in the face of bots, trackers, and ad-tech.
I have been on the internet since the Netscape days. I am not a everything was great and eternal September ruins everything person, because that is gate-keepy, I’m an usher. However, the internet then was different, it was about people making weird stuff. I was never much into the internet chat scene but I did have an Angelcity website and learned to like computers by making crappy HTML websites with awesome under-construction gifs. I then lived through the era of blogs and forums and enjoyed discovering, my friend often quotes me saying “the internet is a big place”. But I never really established a community of sorts, that happened for me offline. But as early social media came into vogue and my offline communities moved online, there was a small period of “living in the future” and being connected with real people from all over. Well, I don’t need to go into how that is going… gestures vaguely at corporate social media.
So, what’s any of that got to do with the Fediverse!? Well, the Fediverse is what I wish I had all along. I adore that I can interact with various communities from a single place (Reddit was like that, but again…) and still learn of things that are not on my radar (through boosts). I have always been a fairly aware and broadly read person but the aperture of my awareness is greatly increased here on the Fedi. Sure it helps that most people that I personally come across have been great but I am nonetheless painfully aware of unsavory ones and willfully ignorant ones. But the ability to form your own community, run your own server but join in with the larger conversation is excellent. While it is not without flaw and I am keenly aware of my privilege to be able to run my own instance, I do think that it is incredible.
But more than anything, I think the Fedi has exposed me to a different side of the internet a much more human side of the internet. It is truly remarkable to be able to share in the humanity of the people, from their joys to sorrow, from triumphs to stumbles, from hope to despair and while it is sometimes overwhelming, I am encouraged by people living their authentic lives. I am truly inspired by the people freely sharing their lives, their passions, their knowledge and building connections with strangers and reaching out with friendship. In the real world, that is how I am, but I never imagined that could be true of people that I have never met online, and yes this is naive and optimistic but that’s the future I imagined when I first saw ’the internet’. So I am inspired to live more authentically online and tell random strangers that their website is cool, their pets are cute, to offer silent companionship in hard times, to cheer their successes and petty revenges against the machine, to learn about their special interests; but also to receive encouragement as I struggle in my pursuits and to whisper into the void only to learn the void listens and can relate. The world is full of challenges so I’m happy to have a place where I can share my photography, art, jokes, and learn courage and defiant joy.
So, thank you Fediverse; the people who make the human-centric platforms, the kind souls and collectives who host it, and the fascinating people that fill its corridors!