I just read an a post on Mastodon with some welcome illustrations to promote the Global Switch Day on the first of Februrary 2025.

There are a lot of Fediverse based alternatives for services that are by now heavily affected by enshittification.

Here is a list of the replacable commercial platforms with their Fediverse alternative and (if you are interested), where I live on them.


PlaformFediverse AlternativeMy Home
X/twitter/bsky/threadsMastodon@maub@23.social
instagramPixelfed@maub@pixey.org (barely used)
redditLemmy@maub@slrpnk.net
FacebookDiasporajakap@nerdpol.ch
WhatsAppSignal/Element(*)maub.23 / @maub:ccc-ffm.de

(*) neither of those is officialy part of the Fediverse, but both offer reasonably secure e2e encrypted communication with no corporate interference to your privacy.


Now, admittelty entering the Fediverse is a very different Expierience compared to any commercial social media platform.

Here are some of the key differences:

  • Decentral Servers: You are not entering the server of a centralized company, you need to select a server/instance typically run by an organisation or individual.
  • Almost no algorithmic optimization: Other than to view posts by popularity or following bots reposting popular posts, there is nothing going on, that tries to keep your focus on the app.
  • Multiple Apps: For most mobile operating systems there’s a big selection of applications, some of them have very niche use-cases.
  • Zero programmatic ads: If you ever come across something vaguely resembling an ad, it is usually a post manually made by a person asking for something or showing off something they made.

I have ordered this list by how much they affected my experience compared to the commercial platforms. I don’t believe anybody would mind less ads, so I’ll just skip this one entirely.

The mere fact that there’s an extra step on the onboarding on most of these apps is selecting an instance/server might turn off a lot of users. Admittelty to me - a person running a few private servers and rather fluid in techno- and marketing- babble - the first one wasn’t much of a hurdle, but when we’re talking about the average user of one of the mainstream platforms this might be overwhelming and lead to that particular user to cancel their journey on the Fediverse before it begins.

So if you wan’t to help your peers to make the move to any Fediverse platform, be sure to recommend them an instance/server and explain them that they can move instances if they don’t like the server any more.

The second one is a more layered thing. Commercial platforms have a high interest to keep you emotionally engaged and frequently fill the void in your personal timeline with ’engaging’ content or targeted ads based upon whatever private information they have on you. Users might perceive this as “recommendations” and might miss them on the Fediverse. In truth, this is just a dark pattern to keep you scrolling. It might also lead to the Fediverse feeling empty or slow. It might help to clearly communicate the different views you have on the Fediverse and that at least on the “everything, everywhere” view, there will always be something going on.

The amount of Apps on both Android and iOS can be overwhelming as well. The apps I’ve come to enjoy most are Tusky for Mastodon and Thunder for Lemmy. It might help to encourage people to just try a few of them until they find one they’re comfortable with.

So, given this, please keep talking about the Fediverse to your Friends, Coworkers and Family and help them getting into it.

If you can, please support your instance or run one yourself.

Cheers.