Yesterday, we spoke about how (some) Millennials (may) want to hang up their hashtags following the enshittification of the interwebs. Today, we introduce you to the folks who think they have a way of making it better.

Dreamers among us are envisioning a better online world — one where we could have social media that is decentralized, open, and interoperable through a protocol called ActivityPub, David Pierce writes for The Verge.

We all know social media now is broken. The platforms we use every day are riddled with misinformation, hate speech, harassment, and polarization. They are also centralized, controlled by a few powerful corporations that dictate the rules and algorithms that shape our online interactions. And they are addictive, designed to keep us hooked and scrolling for hours, at the expense of our mental health and well-being.

No wonder: They were built for advertisers, not consumers.

What if we could choose who we follow and what we see, without being manipulated by opaque algorithms? What if we could own our own data and switch platforms easily, without losing our connections and content? That’s the vision of ActivityPub, a new protocol that aims to create a federated social web.

The name is, frankly, dumb but once you can look past it, things can start to look a bit brighter. It is not particularly new, either. ActivityPub’s first version was released in 2018. In recent months, however, “a number of tech companies have thrown their resources into ActivityPub and what’s now known as ‘ the Fediverse.’”

Think of it as email for social media: ActivityPub isn’t a platform, but a set of rules that allow different platforms to communicate with each other. Think of it as a common language that lets you send and receive messages across different apps and services, just like email.

ActivityPub is now used by a few mn people globally — mainly your nerd friends on platforms like Mastodon (which, for the uninitiated, is kind of like Twitter), where most of the action in the “Fediverse” is happening. The platforms are diverse and independent, but they can interact with each other seamlessly, forming a network of networks. Users can follow, like, comment, and share content across different platforms, without having to create multiple accounts or give up their privacy.

Think of it this way, all snark aside: You post something important to you on Instagram. Your mom or dad can catch it on Facebook — and if they like or comment, the like and the comment shows up in your IG feed, attached to your original post. Just like email, it doesn’t matter what app you use.

ActivityPub is also a standard, meaning that anyone can implement it and join the “network.” It is based on open source software and open web technologies, and it is endorsed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the same organization that sets the standards for the web. ActivityPub is not owned or controlled by any single entity, but by a community of developers, users, and advocates who collaborate and innovate together.

But look, there’s no immediate panacea in ActivityPub — it faces challenges and limitations. It is still a young and evolving protocol, and it needs more adoption, support, and funding to grow and improve. And it’s not going to solve all of social media’s problems by itself — things like moderation, governance, and discovery. It does, however, offer a promising alternative to the status quo, and a way to reclaim users’ agency and autonomy online.

Not everyone will be too happy with ActivityPub, however. Social media giants will probably have to adapt and change or lose their business entirely if the standard is adopted. One other potential segment of losers: Ad-reliant publishers, whose content would then have the ability to be followed by any number of people not on their own platforms. This is already happening as Tech Crunch reported WordPress blogs can now be followed in the fediverse, including on Mastodon.

And the Fediverse got a big boost from Meta, which a few days ago made posts from a limited number of Threads users (all of them working on building out the Twitter-alternative) interoperable on Mastodon and other platforms.

Is ActivityPub the future of social media? It could be — if enough people want it to be. It is still complex and is nowhere near universal adoption, but ActivityPub promises to be a way to create a more diverse, democratic, and decentralized web, where people can connect with each other on their own terms.

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