In stark contrast to X yet again (and now the final straw for me) breaking API interaction with a profile, Mastodon makes it way easier to follow posts without even visiting the network. Many knew you could follow a profile’s posts via an RSS feed, but now we also find out you can even subscribe to all posts with a particular hashtag as well (again without registering or logging in, or even visiting Mastodon).
This openness combined with ActivityPub itself being declared the standard for social media by the W3C this year, is giving a strong indication of where things are headed for social media in the future. This is likely why even Meta’s Threads network has adopted the ActivityPub standard.
I’ve been testing out lots of different social media the last few years, and it is looking to me like the future will be decentralised and standards based. Centralised and walled garden networks have tended to be abused by advertisers, data mining, whims of a single billionaire owner, censorship, algorithmic feeds, and the ease of also banning a user account. On the other extreme, we have the extreme privacy of P2P networks, but they have difficulties on-boarding and also finding your friends.
Decentralised and federated networks do seem to have the attraction of easy on-boarding (once you have chosen an instance), some privacy in that you need not provide your phone number or even e-mail, extensive connectivity across servers as well as other networks (the Fediverse anyway), control over the home feed without algorithms, and easier discoverability.
The standard protocol applied across many networks means that app developers are also producing many different and useful mobile apps, where a single app can also work for different social networks on the Fediverse.
Many have become fed up also with some social networks pushing negative or alarmist posts into their feeds (despite them not following those posters). Not only for the Fediverse social networks not do such pushing, but with an RSS reader, you can follow your favourite posters or hashtags at a distance without even having to wade through a feed of posts. I certainly find using an RSS reader more relaxing and a less stressful way of consuming lots of news. So why not also for social networks?
Ever thought about why your own social network may not want you to follow posts and updates remotely? They want to be sure you have to login, and consume the feed presented to you. RSS readers also remove you from any of that pixel behaviour tracking analysis as well.