As I often do, I made a poll on the fediverse about two concepts I am interested in: Big Fedi versus Small Fedi. Although I think these are interesting topics, I couldn’t come up with exact summations of what the “Big Fedi” and “Small Fedi” positions are. So, I wanted to write down what I could here.
The fediverse, in this case, is an internetwork of social networks. It works a lot like email; you can have an account on one network and follow, message, and react to people (or bots) on other networks. The biggest software tool for making fediverse networks is Mastodon; there are a lot of other Open Source servers for setting up nodes. There are also some proprietary nodes — Meta Threads and Flipboard are two of the biggest.
The following are some clusters of ideas that I think coalesce into “Big Fedi” and “Small Fedi”. I haven’t been able to tie them all back to some fundamental principle on either side.
Big Fedi
The “Big Fedi” position is a set of ideas that roughly cluster together. Not everyone who agrees with one or a few of these agrees with them all, but I think they tend to be related.
- The fediverse should be big. Real big. Like, everyone on the planet should have an account on the fediverse. It will make the internet better and the world better.
- We should make choices that help bring the fediverse to new people. Because the fediverse should be big, we should be doing things to make it bigger; in particular, to bring it to more people.
- There should be a lot of different account servers. (I’m using “account servers” instead of “instances” or “servers”.) It’s good to have a lot of choice, with a lot of different parameters: software interfaces, financial structure, what have you.
- Commercial account servers are welcome. This variety includes commercial services. If they provide the right mix of features and trade-offs that certain people want, it’s good to have them, especially if they have a lot of users.
- Moderation can be automated. Shared blocklists, machine learning, and other tools can be used to catch most of the problematic interactions on the fediverse.
- Account servers can be big. It doesn’t matter how big they are: 1M, 10M, 100M, 1B people is fine.
- The fediverse should have secondary services. In order to grow, we need secondary services, like people-finders, onboarding tools, global search, bridges, and so on.
- The individual is central. People should be able to set up their environment how they like, including their social environment. They have the tools to do that. The account server may set some parameters around content or software usage, but otherwise it’s mostly a dumb pipe.
- Connections should be person-to-person. The main social connection is through following someone. Building up this follow graph is important.
- People I care about should be on the fediverse. I have a life outside the fediverse — friends, family, colleagues, neighbours. My governments, media, celebrities, sports figures, leaders in my industry. It would be good to have more of those people on the fediverse, so I can connect to them.
- People should get to make choices about their account server. Everybody has different priorities: privacy, open source, moderation, cost, stability, features. We can all make our own choices about the account server we prefer.
- It should be possible to have ad-free account servers. Technically and culturally, we should be able to set these up.
- It should be possible to have Open Source account servers. People who prefer free network services should be able to run them and use them.
- It should be possible to have algorithm-free account servers. You should be able to just follow things reverse chronologically.
- It should be possible to have individually-run account servers. A normal technically-minded person should be able to run their own account server for themself, friends, their household, or even for a larger communty.
- Harms that are mostly kept to account servers are up to people on those servers to solve. Good fences make good neighbours. If things become unbearable, people can move servers somewhat frictionlessly.
- Affinity groups should stretch beyond account server boundaries. Groups, lists, and other social network features are important and should be fully federated. They should provide a lot of features.
- There may be some harm that comes with growth; we can fix it later. We’re going to find problems as we go along. We can deal with them as we come to them.
- The fediverse is going to look very different over time. The way things work now are not how they’re going to be 1, 3, 5, 10 years from now. Especially as the fediverse grows, different structures and ways of working are going to develop.
- Open standards are important. By having public, open standards available through big standards organizations, we gain the buy-in from different account network operators to join the network. We definitely don’t have time to negotiate bilateral agreements; we need solid standards.
- Variety in types of account server operators is good. Different people have different needs and tolerances. If we want to have more people, we need to cater to those different needs with different account servers.
- Existing organizations can and should provide account servers. Not just existing tech companies; also businesses providing servers for their employees, universities for students, cities or other governments for their citizens.
- Existing services, even if they’re bad, will become somewhat better if they have fediverse features. People on those services will get to connect with a variety of new people. They’ll find out about the fediverse, and might move to another account server, or try something else new.
- It’s more important to bring good people to the fediverse than keep bad people off it. More people is good, and the people I care about on other networks are also good. There may be some bad people, too, but we’ll manage them.
Small Fedi
Here is a rough cluster of ideas that I’d call “Small Fedi”. Again, not everyone who agrees with one or two of these agrees with all of them.
- The fediverse should be safe. Safe from harassment, safe from privacy violations.
- Growth is not important. We’ve gotten along this long with a small fediverse. It’s OK how it is, so growth is not important. Growth is a capitalist mindset.
- People who aren’t on the fediverse don’t matter as much as people who are. Their needs, at least. When discussing the future of the fediverse, we don’t need to talk about people on other networks much at all.
- If people want to get on the fediverse, they can join an existing account server. We don’t need to bring new account servers to the fediverse; there are a lot already. People who really care about getting on the fediverse can join an existing account server, or set up their own. If they’re not willing to do this, they’re probably not that interested in the fediverse, so why should we bother trying to connect to them?
- If growth could cause harm, we either should fix the problem before growing, or we shouldn’t grow. We should examine opportunities carefully, but by default we should say no.
- Commercial account servers are discouraged. Most commercial services do harm. Even if they’re on the fediverse, they’re going to try to do harm to make more money. So, they should be avoided as much as possible.
- Secondary services can cause harm and should be severely limited if allowed at all. People search and content search can be used for privacy invasion or harassment. Shared blocklists can be manipulated to cause echo chambers. Machine learning can be biased. Onboarding services favour big account servers. They should be discouraged or, preferably, closed.
- The account server is central. Moderation decisions, cultural decisions, account decisions, most social decisions should happen at the account server level.
- Account servers are the primary affinity group. You should find an account server that feels like home. Any other groups are less important.
- Feeds like “fediverse” and “local” are important. There is a public community of account servers that your account server connects to, and the public feed from that community is important. You might use it more often than your home feed. Your local feed is also important, because your account server is a group you belong to.
- Moderation should be primarily by hand. The courage and wisdom necessary to make most moderation decisions can only be managed by hand. Automated tools can be manipulated.
- Account servers must be small. Human moderators can only do so much work, so the account servers they moderate can only be so big.
- The fediverse works just about right right now, and shouldn’t change. There’s a good reason for how everything works, and it’s fine. People who want to change the way things work just don’t get it.
- It’s not important that people from my real life are on the fediverse, and it’s kind of discouraged. The account server is the most important affinity group, then the larger “fediverse”. That’s enough; other people are needed or welcome. People who I know who aren’t on the fediverse don’t care about fediverse stuff, so they’d get bored here, anyway.
- It is highly discouraged to have ad-supported account servers. Even if they only show ads to their own users, they are causing harm. In particular, they’re showing our content next to ads, or using our content to develop ad algorithms. Either way, harm goes beyond the server border.
- It is highly discouraged to have proprietary account servers. They just can’t be trusted with their own users’ data. Also, they’re going to get some of our data, just through federation, and who knows what they’ll do with it.
- It is highly discouraged to have algorithmic timelines. Anyone having these causes problems. If you want one, you just don’t get it.
- Open standards are less important than making things work the way we want them. In particular, fiddling with standards to keep people safe, and to discourage particular account server structure, is an OK thing to do.
- Most existing institutions have proved themselves untrustworthy and should not provide account servers. Name any particular part of civil society, and I can come up with an example of at least one bad practice they have.
- Harms that happen on one account server are a problem for every account server. Server blocks, personal blocks, and protocol boundaries aren’t enough to isolate problems to their account server of origin. Secondary or tertiary effects can happen and cause harm.
- Existing services, if they’re bad, will make the fediverse worse. Bad practices, bad content, bad members will cause problems for everyone on the fediverse.
- It’s more important to keep bad people off the fediverse than to bring good people to it. Bad people can be really horrible. There aren’t actually that many good people on bad services, and if they really wanted to connect with us, they’d find another way.
Where do I land?
I’m mostly a Big Fedi person; I did the work on the fediverse that I’ve done in order to bring it to everyone on the planet. I don’t think people should have to pass a test to be allowed on the fediverse.
That said, I respect that harm can come from new technical decisions and new network connections. As someone deeply involved in the standards around ActivityPub and the fediverse, I’d like to make sure that we give people the tools they need to avoid harm — and stay out of the way when they use them. I very much like the Small Fedi suspicion of new services and account servers, and careful consideration of the possibilities.
I’d like to find ways to mitigate the problems of so many people on proprietary social networks being unconnected to the fediverse, but still centre the safety of existing fedizens. I don’t have an easy answer to how this can work, though.
Anyway, thanks for reading this far. Also, an acknowledgment: I borrowed the term “Small Fedi” without permission from Erin Kissane’s great piece on Untangling Threads. I’m also using it differently, stretching it out, which admittedly is an ingrateful thing with something you borrow. I hope it is not ruined by the time I return it.
Another acknowledgment: this framing is loosely based on the worse is better series of essays by Richard Gabriel. His lists of ideas are much shorter, more cohesive, and more algorithmic.
Evan Prodromou's Blog 
@evanprodromou @evan I think both big fedi and small fedi are inevitable and the real question isn't either/or but how to safely connect the two in a way that respects consent and autonomy.
That is, I think a lot more work needs to be done to create connections that are a more effective compromise than are available in Mastodon's three options for federation (that is: full, weird/limited, and de-) or things will fracture.
I want to be able to follow a handful of famous people or my city's transit feed. But I want to otherwise be on small fedi and not bring unhealthy connections to my friends here. Right now that's not really possible, but I think if it can be cracked then things can be a lot better.
@megmac @evanprodromou @evan Is there a way to make defederation the default and only federate to individual servers/accounts?
@wenzel @evanprodromou @evan like Brook said yes, but this is the road to a fractured network where your server admin is much more in your business than they are now (ie. To follow someone you need your admin's active approval). People trying to follow you would just be black holed and neither of you would know it.
The ideal would be more like "limited by default," but the experience of interacting with a limited server/user is really confusing and weird right now. If it was all your interactions it would be very awkward.
So imo what's needed is something with more progressive degrees of quarantining.
@megmac @evanprodromou @evan yeah I don't like admins doing it either I thought more about users being able to do this and then maybe have some curated list you can subscribe to that would still connect you to large parts of the Fediverse just erring on the side of safety vs openness.
Also some form of limiting especially when it comes to Threads makes a lot more sense to me than blocking for the people who are more concerned with bad moderation instead of privacy.
@evanprodromou Given this description, I'm strongly big fedi.I suspect the small fedi folks may not be as accepting of your desc of small fedi as I am of your desc of big fedi
@colo_lee @evanprodromou "Small fedi" is an *extremely* generous name for "the HOA".
@colo_lee @evanprodromou With that said, I think Evan has done something of a disservice in this characterization, collapsing something that's 2- or more dimensional to a one dimensional dichotomy. A lot of us absolutely reject most of the shit that "small fedi"/the HOA is about, but still believe strongly in human moderation, distrusting proprietary/commercial/ad-infested/behavior-manipulating nodea, etc.
@dalias @evanprodromou the moderation question seemed like one where the distinction wasn't as clear cut, although I guess once you accept Meta in the fedi, then they have to automate moderation. Which means most moderation will be automated.I have a hard time accepting the idea that any useful service must be non-commercial. As a starting point, my instance regularly asks people for funds, which I give. No one is getting rich, but that's certainly a commercial situation.
@colo_lee @evanprodromou Threads is smaller than the existing fedi. There is no reason their presence would necessitate "most moderation be automated". Instances overwhelmed by an undermoderated instance (whether FB's ir anyone else, even the flagship 😂) could choose to apply automation only to reports against users on those instances, and otherwise remain all-human.
@colo_lee @evanprodromou As for "commercial", asking for donations is ABSOLUTELY NOT COMMERCIAL activity. The threshold for "commercial is at least the *exchange* of goods or services for payment (denial of goods or service to those who don't pay), and probably also involves profits (vs just paying for materials & labor).
@dalias @evanprodromou the HOA vibes and actions are very very irritating. And offputting. I've watched multiple newbies get scolded and then disappear.
@evanprodromou The problem I have with the small fedi crowd is that they have plenty of tools to make it as small as they want (as they should) but I can't just press a button to bring the people I care about here. I also think there is a bit of self selection going on that the people who join a (currently) small network like this are the ones who tend to prefer it that way.
@evanprodromou
I'm big fedi too but I'd like smaller servers, and definitely no ads or algorithms. I think that would require lots of locality based servers ala NextDoor, which would in turn require more group functionality etc. I'm primarily here for what the fedi can do for the world. Our biggest roadblock right now is the lack of decentralized donations.
@evanprodromou I love getting comments from the fediverse.
@evan @evanprodromou
I'm for a large fedi composed of many medium sized federations within the greater Fedi whole. Like the swiss cantons or hanseatic league within the larger holy roman empire.
This is colored by coming from the PeerTube side of the fediverse where this is a much more obvious delineation between creator and consumer. Thousands of individual and small group instances by creators, which can then federate content to the viewers on medium to large account based servers.
@evan @evanprodromou I notice that comments made on WordPress are not visible from my Mastodon instance, even when they are made by your WordPress account (which has associated an agent). For example, https://evanp.me/2023/12/26/big-fedi-small-fedi/#comment-774 is not visible as a post.
@daniel @evanprodromou yes, I believe that's an open task, but maybe report it?
@evan @evanprodromou I think it is worth reporting it. However, to report it, I need a WordPress.org account. I tried to create it, but it is still pending to be approved.
@evanprodromou @evan Bookmarking this – an important post in an important discussion. Thinking more before taking part in it.
Did you ever think and then respond? Your thoughts and opinion are one’s I look forward to reading
@evanprodromou I tend to be a "small fedi" guy, but I land in the same conclusion as you: as much as I dislike the idea of a big commercial player and all the harm it brings, I must respect that not everyone has the same priorities as mines, and still want to connect with them.
That's why I'm not totally against Threads or Flipboard here, but I will connect with them on my own terms.
@evanprodromou@evanp.me I like the idea that the Fediverse can bring back the days of the old internet, when there wasn't one massive public square, but rather individual forums centered around different topics.
While I agree that we could end up going either direction, we should prioritize keeping communities healthy rather than bloating them up with more users than they can realistically handle.
@evanprodromou Thank you for the explanation of the concepts!
@evanprodromou filing this away to ponder more about it. Definitely think there is a lot here to consider. I think I tend to fall into the Big Fedi camp as well. But need to read this all in more depth.
(Might also if you don’t mind take a stab at reformatting it for legibility – feels like there is a lot here to pull out and consider)
@evanprodromou this is interesting! I think I agree with many of the points on both the "Big Fedi" and "Small Fedi" sides. It would be interesting to list them as a sort of multiple-select quiz (maybe without the big/small fedi headings) and see which combinations of points people end up selecting.
What I really hope is that there's some way for people from both clusters (and those stuck in between) to coexist. Can the Big Fedi people connect with everyone they want to, while the Small Fedi folk keep their comfortable distance and protect their safe spaces?
@Evan Prodromou While your description of Big Fedi has its drawbacks, your description of Small Fedi reads like a non-technical Twitter-to-Mastodon convert’s wet dream.
Only federate with trusted instances and discourage launching new ones. That’d mean bye-bye, self-hosted personal instances. That’d also mean that new Fediverse projects would be rendered impossible because they couldn’t get even one instance running.
Small Fedi reeks of reducing the Fediverse to vanilla Mastodon and forcing the post-2022 Mastodon culture upon everything else, even six-years-older Friendica that works entirely different from Mastodon. But I know from personal experience that not exactly few Mastodon users want exactly that.
@evanprodromou
Well, I think I detect a bit of bias in the different wording you use to describe #BigFedi and #SmallFedi 😉
FWIW, I voted "Entirely Big" on the poll, and I agree with most of what you wrote in the #BigFedi section.
1/2
That said, I want to run my own microblog for family (once I've cleaned up a decade of technical debt), and I really want many more small instances with their own rules so people in those communities can participate (and are safe doing so), but I also want large instances to maximize the number of people to join with the least friction.
I'm already running several blogs with the #ActivityPubPlugin activated, doing my part to expand the #BigFedi with #SmallFedi instances…
@evanprodromou
2/2
@evanprodromou Very interesting read. I like the way you summarize things even if I feel some points are a bit of misrepresentations in favor of “Big fedi”. I hope to find the time to blog my view on this to contribute to the debate.
I don’t really see it as big vs. small. I see it more as a continuum with intimate and/or personal conversations at one end and a global party at the other. A fediverse that is going to last should support the entire range.
@evanprodromou@evanp.me This is very unfortunately divisive and untrue, saying with the respect for your work. The principles you divide and formulate as opposition in fact do work together. You should think if this division and formulation is not abusive of some fediverse people work to gain some advantage for others.
This is not untrue. Can you point to what’s untrue? Provide examples?
Hey there, I’m the author of AodeRelay, an activitypub relay server implemented in Rust, and I run my own mastodon server on which i’m the only active user. I’m also part of the Furry internet culture, which is a predominantly queer space. The reason I’m staunchly in the Small Fedi camp, based on your descriptions, is that I actively do not want to talk to my relatives on fedi. I don’t want them to see what I’m posting. I don’t want them to look at my bio. I don’t want them to know I exist. My default post privacy on mastodon is followers-only, but I do make the occasional public post.
What outed me as queer to my parents wasn’t an intentional choice on my part, it was me making a joke on Facebook with the intended audience of a few friends, and a relative saw the post and talked to my parents about it. That sort of situation is not something I ever want to have happen again.
This was the primary reason why Tumblr became my social network of choice for so long. It was because my parents and relatives weren’t on it. When I first joined fedi in 2017 (simplification of events) I stayed for a few reasons:
– There were no ads, and therefore no machines harvesting my every post to serve me ads. This was my primary motivation for leaving tumblr, as the monetization there strategy was “throw more ads everywhere you can.” It made tumblr horrible.
– My parents and relatives weren’t on Fedi. I could freely talk and joke without worrying that something I said online would make it back to my family.
– It was open source. I felt safe knowing that there was no major implementation of the software that was doing unsavory things with my posts
As fedi grows and more players join in (tumblr, threads, etc), I feel less comfortable making public posts. This is the sort of thing that, if it becomes more common, might drive me off the platform entirely. As it stands, there’s nowhere else I could reasonably feel comfortable going to, which is why I care so much about fedi. If I don’t feel comfortable on Fedi in a couple years, I won’t be on social media anymore. I won’t be joining any hot new social platform, I’ll just be gone
This is a really great story. Thanks for sharing it.
@evanprodromou I'm very pro-big-Fedi, but it's important to keep in mind that smallFedi and bigFedi ain't mutually exclusive. That's the whole point of the enterprise, I think you would agree.
Fedi is supposed to be what *you* make it. You are not beholden to bigFedi, if you want a small local community. You are, in fact, not beholden to anyone or anything.
I agree with this so much “ I’d like to make sure that we give people the tools they need to avoid harm — and stay out of the way when they use them. I very much like the Small Fedi suspicion of new services and account servers, and careful consideration of the possibilities.
I’d like to find ways to mitigate the problems of so many people on proprietary social networks being unconnected to the fediverse, but still centre the safety of existing fedizens“
I believe we must build the tools for both Big Fedi and Small Fedi and allow users to form their own journey. I have some ideas how to get there, that would be better served to be discussed personally
@evanprodromou
@jerry
Big Fedi or Small Fedi? 🙂🤷♂️
Personally I tend towards Big Fedi.
@simonzerafa its sort of like having to pick between republican and democrat here in the US. Some of each? Probably more on the big side than small side. @evanprodromou
@evanprodromou I think the concept of"big fedi" vs "small fedi" is a bit over-simplified. I wonder how many of your characterizations of "small fedi" are at least partly derived from the Meta/Threads controversy. There has been a tendency to try and generalize that particular case into this kind of framework (opposition to Meta = opposition to growing the Fediverse), but I think they are two separate issues.
Being opposed to federation with Meta, a known bad actor in the social media space, is not necessarily the same as being opposed to many of the "big fedi" characteristics you've listed, including federation with commercial entities in general.
My point is that your model would force many of us who are opposed to federating with Meta into the "small fedi" side of the dichotomy where we may not belong. Although there is indeed a faction opposed to federation with any commercial entities at all, for many others the problem is specifically Meta, whose transgressions are well-known and too numerous to list here. Notice that you don't see the same kind of controversy regarding Flipboard, WordPress, etc. (at least I haven't).
I think it's because Meta is so huge that so many people who want to grow the fediverse are willing to overlook Meta's serious issues, when most of those same people would agree to blocking Gab and similar smaller "account servers" without hesitation.
Maybe there's room in your model for a "medium fedi"?
If the model isn’t interesting or helpful to you, don’t use it.
@evanprodromou sir, we not reading all that, cliff notes
Some people want the fediverse to be big, and others want it to be safe.
@evanprodromou Your article reminded me of a Tim Berners-Lee’s lecture, which was inspiring to me (https://www.w3.org/2002/04/Japan/Lecture.html).
He said, “The most important thing about the World Wide Web is that it is universal. By exploring this idea along its many axes we find a framework for considering its history, its role today, and guidance for future developments.”
He summarized the particular disjunctive you described as an axe, and proposed that the Web should have independence of scale.
“The Web is described as a global phenomenon, and it is, but we must remember that personal information systems, and family and group information systems are part of it too. There should be no information boundary which would prevent a link from my personal diary to a public meeting. We know we need harmony on a global scale for peace, but that peace will only be stable so long as social groups of all sizes are respected. Starting at the individual, a group of one, one can think of institutions and ad-hoc groups of all sizes. The Web must support all of those, allowing privacy of personal information to be negotiated, and groups to feel safe in controlling access to their spaces. Only in such a balanced environment can we develop a sufficiently complex a many-layered fractal structure which will respect the rights of every human being, and allow all the billions of us to live in peace.”
#BigFedi #Fediverse #SmallFedi
I’m inclined to big fedi and not too inclined for “safe” because that usually means “controlled by a few elites”. I’m interested in completely open discourse.
@evanprodromou BTW, the more I've seen the reaction to the #BlueSkyBridge the more apt the "Big Fedi vs Small Fedi" framing appears to me to the two camps relating to that bridge also.
@tchambers @evanprodromou The Miniverse and the Maxiverse.