In a dark concert venue in Montréal on Tuesday, dozens of passionate people on the fringes of mainstream tech gathered to plot an exodus from Big Tech platforms.
The Fediverse provides Canadian users with choice, instead of being subject to the whims of a “distant big tech company in Silicon Valley.”
It was the first annual FediMTL conference, an in-person gathering of the programmers and creatives building the decentralized digital world known as the Fediverse. Organized by The Social Web Foundation, FediHost, and Qlub, the event focused on how digital spaces free from US billionaires are more important than ever for sovereignty, privacy, and user dignity. But the challenges—from funding the platforms to widespread user adoption—loomed large.
The “Fediverse,” also known as the social web, refers to interconnected, decentralized social networks built on top of open-source software, in contrast to existing for-profit social media apps. Its ecosystem of servers, which include Mastodon and PeerTube, run on a protocol called ActivityPub. (Bluesky is one of the better-known examples of a decentralized platform, but it runs on a different technology called the AT Protocol.)
Though the Fediverse has been around for years, alternatives to dominant social media have seen a wave of renewed interest in Canada as tensions with the US have grown. All of the leading social media apps in Canada are American (Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram) and have become increasingly enshittified—a process by which a platform’s quality degrades as the company seeks to maximize profit over user experience. Some, like X (formerly Twitter), have taken this to extremes and increasingly provide a home for harmful content, like Grok’s AI-generated non-consensual “nudifying” images. In response, homegrown social media app initiatives such as Gander Social (built on the AT Protocol), Eh!, and Tribela, are beginning to crop up as alternatives.
Two of the creators of the ActivityPub protocol were in attendance at FediMTL: Christine Lemmer-Webber, a computer programmer who led its creation and who recently moved to Canada from the US, and Evan Prodromou, a Montréal-based entrepreneur who made the first-ever decentralized web post in 2008 (It read “This is my first post”).
Prodromou explained how building software for the Fediverse provides Canadian users with choice, instead of being subject to the whims of a “distant big tech company in Silicon Valley.”
“That is one of the most powerful parts for digital sovereignty, that we can have systems here,” Prodromou said. “We can have systems that work in the way we want them to.”
Solutions presented by speakers ran the gamut—from sneakily allowing users to take their data and transfer it to new platforms, to creating incentives to make the Fediverse a more appealing alternative to the US-owned, endless scroll of dominant social media.
Cory Doctorow, an activist and author of Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, argued in a keynote speech that US tech companies’ financial leverage makes it near impossible for Canada to win negotiations (Microsoft’s market cap being larger than Canada’s GDP, for example).
Evacuating the dominant social media platforms, therefore, is not enough, he said; instead, Canadian technologists could jailbreak existing social media tech and sell it as a service.
“We get our fire axes and we just hack emergency exits into those social media dumpster fires,” Doctorow said.
However, Doctorow said, Canada’s Copyright Act is a big barrier to this because it heavily restricts this kind of reverse engineering, or breaking “digital locks.”
Paige Saunders, FediMTL organizer and co-founder of FediHost, has more faith in approaches that incentivize the use of decentralized social media by individuals and institutions. For example, he told BetaKit it would be more realistic to ask for a $1-million government grant for municipalities to move communications onto the Fediverse than mess with US tech companies (and potentially spark another trade war).
Platforms like Qlub, which launched this month, are one example of how this type of community could be built. The Québec-based social network—which is also built on ActivityPub—has no algorithm, no ads, and promotes media content. The platform has more than 3,500 users so far, with posts discussing local politics and sharing news links.
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Philippe Larose Cadieux, co-founder of Qlub, said in French remarks that the platform is sovereign, meaning that the data is hosted here in Québec and can’t be used against users by foreign tech companies.
The Fediverse itself isn’t perfect, attendees acknowledged, and it faces the same challenges in monetizing content, moderating hate speech, and technical glitches as the dominant private platforms.
However, the main hurdle in growing the Fediverse is getting people onto it. Julian Lam, co-founder of Fediverse forum NodeBB, said 90 percent of internet communities don’t make it past their first month because they can’t find users. At the same time, monetizing content is difficult because most Fediverse platforms stay away from advertising on principle.
But to Lemmer-Webber, who is also the executive director of the Spritely Institute, the Fediverse is part of a larger fight to open-source software and empower users. They argued that builders should focus on creating the best possible platform alternatives for when users need them.
“When you’re talking about the future, you need two things to happen,” Lemmer-Webber said. “You need an approach people can experience, so they can understand it. And you need to have a threat that makes the problem sit in people’s minds so they are searching for where that answer is.”
“If you are ready for that moment, you can win.”
Feature image courtesy FediMTL.