Joan Westenberg: “For years, the internet has been shrinking. Not in size, not in data, but in ownership. A vast, decentralized network of personal blogs, forums, and independent communities has been corralled into a handful of paved prison yards controlled by a few massive corporations. Every post, every “friend,” every creative work—locked behind closed doors, and you don’t have the keys. The fediverse is a jailbreak. It’s not a product, not a single platform, it’s not something you can buy stock in or use to enrich yourself at the cost of our shared humanity. It’s a network of independent, interconnected social platforms, all running on open protocols like ActivityPub. It’s an ecosystem where you – not some incellionaire obsessed with eugenics – own your digital identity. Where your social graph belongs to you, not an algorithm’s shifting fucking whims. Where moving from one service to another doesn’t mean losing everything you’ve built and everything you’ve ever said. We’ve been trained to believe that the way things are is the way they have to be. That Meta, Google, and whatever the hell Twitter is calling itself today are the price of admission to digital society. That you can’t have discovery without algorithmic engineering. That the internet was supposed to become a shopping mall where every interaction is measured in ad revenue. But none of this was inevitable. It was built this way—on purpose. And the fediverse offers something else: freedom. This isn’t a utopian fantasy. It’s not a pipe dream, like web3’s non-existent decentralization. It already exists. Mastodon, Pixelfed, Lemmy, PeerTube, BookWyrm—these are real platforms, these are real people, these are real conversations. The problem isn’t that the fediverse isn’t viable. The problem isn’t that it’s “too complicated.” The problem is that the giants of Silicon Valley have spent 20 years convincing us that anything outside their control isn’t worth our time…”