If you are in a terminal online environment like most of the modern world, you are witnessing the slow-burning dumpster fire that is Mask's Twitter. From the dust of the blue bird's ashes, a digital migration has begun as users scramble to find alternatives to encrypted social media platforms.

Lagging behind is Meta's latest Twitter competitor, Instagram's adjacent threaded network, which has promised users access to what it calls the "Fediverse" and that "they are never going to manage their shit properly." This concern has led to a growing anti-Meta "pact" that has attracted a lot of hate.

But before we get into the controversy, we need to understand more about the Fediverse and how it works.

If you are looking for an alternative social media platform to Twitter, especially a mastodon social network, you may have heard of the term Fediverse, a simple generic term for "the web where mastodon posts exist." It's easy to pass it off as something more than that.

The Fediverse is a "federated universe" of social media networks. Like real-world federations, it is a collection of spaces consolidated under one banner, but allowed to retain a degree of independence in terms of how they implement their rules and codes.

This is similar to how game servers work, where you can play with only North Americans or only your friends in a game instance. With your own server, you can activate any mods or console commands you want without interrupting other people's games.

More importantly, you can keep certain people out.

To be really metaphorical, the Fediverse is like a series of houses in a town. Thus, Twitter is a seedy Neolithic settlement where the bathrooms are separated by paper-thin curtains and anyone can enter your lair as an uninvited guest. As is the case with many centralized social networks, everyone is tied to the same instance, so there is little autonomy for interest groups to manage their content in smaller groups. [On the other hand, when it comes to Mastodon's Fediverse, you have the option to join a group of like-minded people in your area of interest and speak (post) about what matters most to you. However, if an instance clashes with another instance and offends the collective sensibilities of the users, they have the option to "leave" that undesirable instance.

In other words, administrators can block bad actors from interacting with their users' content and vice versa.

If you start in one house but find that you get along better with users on the other side of the fence, you can also switch your profile and feed to a different network.

The idea of a federated universe is not exclusive to Mastodon. Other social media platforms can function in this same decentralized way by using one of Mastodon's main protocols, such as ActivityPub. Because the code is open source, anyone has the freedom to make content available through ActivityPub and can incorporate or push content.

This includes companies like Meta, for example, who created Threads with integration with other distributed platforms that use ActivityPub in mind. While it may sound like the creation of a positive social melting pot, Mastodon users are very unhappy with the idea that Meta's lack of moderation will ruin a corner of the web that is ad-free and unsafe for marginalized communities.

As a result, many Mastodon administrators began vowing to completely block Meta content from their instances, and a movement known as the Fedipact emerged. This group, also known as Project92, attempts to counter Threads' movement into the fediverse.

On fedipact's why page, fedipact leader vantablack explains his anger at Project92.

"Aside from genocide, behavioral experiments, and rigged elections, why give them special privileges just because they are a giant tech company?

One of the advantages of a distributed solution like Fediverse is autonomy over privacy. Each instance employs what is called "transport layer encryption," and server administrators are free to set their own policies, allowing them to decide which servers to entrust their content and personal data to. What such encryption does not protect against is access to your personal messages by the server administrator or mods of your particular instance, or mods of other users' networks that you have contacted. [But with no end-to-end encryption, it is much easier to keep your users safe if your mods are good. Also, instances can keep users' data from being collected by large companies; with so many privacy concerns about how Threads collects user data, Mastodon users are rallying to keep the big tech companies out of their sights and rallying to keep them away.

When you sign up for Threads, a privacy statement reveals that information such as sexual orientation, race, union membership, biometrics, religion, and pregnancy status is collected. Meta then reserves the right to send this personal data to "service providers" and "analytics partners," which likely refers to advertising and marketing companies.

So when Meta intervened in the Fediverse and threatened to access user data through users' interactions with threaded posts, there was no doubt an uproar.

The frenzied clamor is expected to continue over the next few months, but let's close with FediPact's concluding words. 'But if it is true, I think there are worse things in this world than being wrong.'