What Is Federation

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The Technopedia definition of Federation

In a fannish context, what Federation means is that individuals within fandom host servers that run one of the Federated Platforms, which allows us to interact without relying on a centralized platform like Tumblr, Twitter, or Facebook.

This means that when someone like Tumblr changes their TOS, it won't affect us. If the instance you're on changes their policies, you can move to another instance and still follow the same people (unlike if you went to Twitter and tried to follow someone on Tumblr).

Because these platforms are open source, we can also change things that we don't like about them directly, instead of waiting for a corporation to listen to us when it might not benefit their bottom line.


Many of us are used to centralized social media platforms like Facebook, Tumblr, or Dreamwidth. Users on a centralized platform share the same servers and follow the same rules. Moderation is often automated outside of user-created communities. The service is usually paid for by advertising or by selling user data.

Federation is different. Private individuals can host their own server (called an 'instance') and set their own rules, which means users have lots of options to choose from. Different servers can all talk to each other through the shared ActivityPub protocol, so people can interact between servers and even between platforms! If you like microblogging on Mastodon but your friend would rather be posting their photos on Pixelfed, federation means you can follow and interact with each other.

Since federated social networks originated in the open source community, user control over their own experience is a big deal! Instance mods can block or mute other instances, which affects everyone on their instance. Users can also block or mute individual users or instances.

Volunteer developers on the distributed-fandom Discord server are currently focusing their efforts on a fork of Hubzilla called Fanzilla.