So You Want To Join The Social Web

July 16, 2026

So, you've been hearing more and more lately about a free and better alternative to commercial social media, called "the Open Social Web", "the Social Web" or sometimes just "the Fediverse". You want to join this better, less terrible social network, and see if it's any good. This blog post is a guide for you.

I'll cover the basics of what the Social Web is and how it works, where to make an account, and what kind of stuff is even on this Social Web. I'll also provide links to various resources along the way.

What the heck is it, and why is it different from Facebook or Instagram?

A lot of people like to give a technical answer to this question, but I don't think that's very helpful to do, so I'll explain why it's different for a regular user like you, not a computer programmer.

Unlike Facebook, the Social Web is owned by the community, not just one group, organization, or billionaire. Moderation rules are set and enforced by the community. Each website on the social web (also called an "instance" or "node") can decide on it's own rules, and anyone is free to start their own website if they don't like what the current offerings are.

The Social Web is made up of many different websites, such as mastodon.social, or lgbtqia.space. Even though there's a lot of different sites, you don't really need to think about it, since you only need to make an account on just one site, and you can talk and interact with people who made account on any other site on the Social Web. It's like how you have an iPhone and I have an Android, but we can still text each other even though they're different phones. You have an account on one site, I have an account on another, but we can still follow each other and reply to stuff.

From your perspective, it won't feel like there's multiple sites at all, it will all behave just the same as on Facebook or Instagram where everyone uses the same website or app. The only difference being that the community has control over it, not a corporation with bad moderation.

What does it look like?

You might be wondering what the format is, does it emulate the feel of Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, or something else entirely? Well, as is often the case online, it depends which website you use on the Social Web. There's many different "types" of sites. The most popular type is Mastodon sites, which look a lot like Bluesky or Twitter. But there's other options too. Lemmy is a forum site type that is very similar to how Reddit works. There's also Pixelfed, which is meant to be similar to Instagram. Finally, Friendica acts a lot like Facebook, although it's got some fancy features that allows it connect your account to more places than just the Social Web, so that might be confusing if you're a beginner user.

Again, even though there are a lot of different types of sites on the social web, you can usually interact with users who signed up on a different site type than you did. In fact, plenty of people do this without even realizing it. You just hit follow and you look at their posts. Everything behaves very intuitively.

Why's it better than commercial social media?

The Social Web isn't designed to make somebody rich. It's designed to work. It's understood to be infrastructure, like roads and telephone poles, but for online communication.

There are no exploitative algorithms. It shows you everything that your friends posted in the order they posted it, and it doesn't show you things you didn't ask to see. There are explore features on most sites, but they're not designed to maximize engagement like the ones on most other apps.

You repost or "boost" things that you think are important so that your friends can see them, rather than relying on an algorithm to deliver content.

How do I get started?

The quickest and easiest way to get on the Social Web is to just make an account on Mastodon. You can either pick the default site here to sign up, or if you'd like to sign up with a specific community oriented around a hobby, identity, culture, or whatever else, you can check out this page to see if something appeals to you.

There's also fedi.tips, which is a very helpful resource for answering any kind of questions you might have while getting started on the Social Web (fedi.tips refers to the Social Web as "the fediverse").

What's the culture like?

It really does depend on who you follow, but it tends to have a lot of nerds right now, although you don't have to be one to join! Most people on the Social Web tend to value creativity, human expression, and social acceptance. The more people who get online, the more sub-communitities can form online, so the best thing you can do is just get started and go looking for things that interest you.