Participating in any social media community traditionally means joining a platform, like Facebook, X, LinkedIn, YouTube etc. You join a platform that belongs to the owner, of course, who decides about the applicable policies and you need to comply with the rules as set by the owner. And only the owner can open or close the platform. In fact, every platform stands on its own, these platforms are not open to other networks. Try posting to someone on X from a Facebook account.

As you guessed, you have to follow the rules. And if you don't, bad luck, you will not be able to participate. Not even from a different platform or network.

Then the fediverse happened. Not all of a sudden, but it's a mature social networking environment. And you can participate in the fediverse buy joining a fediverse server, but, and that's the beauty, you can become your own host on the fediverse, run your own services and platforms and communicate with all other platforms, servers and services on the fediverse. And that's what I do, I am running multiple servers on my 'own' servers. We come to that later. And that brings me freedom and I can create my own policy, my own rules. And thus far I have added no rules whatsoever, that's my freedom.

But freedom is not without boudaries. My server is part of the fediverse, a networked to all other fediverse servers via the activitypub protocol. The beauty of this is that you can connect to all these servers. But every server has an owner who enforces the policy of his own server. And if your freedom conflicts with the policy of another owner, this owner may decide to block your instance. That is not censorship, it it policy enforcement. So while on my server I have no restrictions for my postings, I too will restrict federation with servers I don't like.

In the past I was an avid tweep. But at the same time I was intrigued by autonomy, being my own boss. So started using multiple federated and distributed networks.

• Identi.Ca
• status.net
• diaspora*
• mastodon

Did that make me happy? Well, yes and no. Yes, I could do what I wanted, participate, join and leave. And no, I made quite a mess of things. There may be traces of a few dozen of accounts on different servers, that may of may not exist anymore. But I don't care :)

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