Sunday 23 August 2026
5.33pm
Spend enough time poking around Mastodon instances, looking at who runs the bigger ActivityPub servers, or reading about governments experimenting with decentralized social media, and a pattern starts to show up. A surprising amount of the interesting activity has happened outside the United States.
Japan, Germany, India, and even China come up again and again in the history of the fediverse. American institutions, meanwhile, have mostly watched from the sidelines while Silicon Valley platforms grew larger and more centralized.
I went looking for academic research to see whether that impression holds up. The answer is: maybe, but the research I found does not really answer the question I was asking.
Two studies from Arizona State University looked closely at migration away from Twitter. One focused on the Twitter-to-Mastodon exodus after Musk’s takeover. A later study looked at migration to Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads at the same time. Both examined who left Twitter, why they left, what made them stay on another platform, and how the different platforms shaped user behavior.
Neither study breaks the data down by country.
The researchers were interested in behavior, not geography. So if you’re hoping for a clean chart showing “Mastodon users by nation,” you’re going to be disappointed. I was.
That missing data is worth mentioning because a lot of what gets said about international fediverse adoption, including what I’m about to say, comes from scattered reporting and institutional history rather than good comparative survey data.
Still, the scattered evidence is interesting.
Mastodon was reportedly much bigger in Japan than in most other countries for years before many Americans had heard of it. A big part of that came from Pixiv, which launched a Mastodon-based server called Pawoo not long after Mastodon itself appeared in 2016. Pawoo quickly became one of the largest individual servers on the network.
Germany’s role looks different. Its influence is less about one giant server and more about the institutional side of the project. Mastodon is developed by a German nonprofit. The German state of Schleswig-Holstein runs its own instance through the project. Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund has also provided more than half a million euros for infrastructure work.
The European Union went a step further with EU Voice, an official Mastodon instance intended to give EU institutions an alternative to American-owned social networks. The experiment lasted a couple of years before being wound down.
India has its own chapter in the story. In 2019, nearly 20,000 Indian Twitter users temporarily moved to Mastodon during a dispute over moderation. Homegrown Mastodon-derived services such as Tooter also appeared, although Tooter became controversial over changes it had made to the underlying code.
China is a very different case. Mastodon has been used there as a way around domestic censorship. That’s not really the same phenomenon as Americans leaving Twitter because they dislike a new owner or recommendation algorithm. For some Chinese users, decentralized social media has been about access to open communication in the first place.
Australia had another kind of example. Switter was a Mastodon instance built specifically for sex workers. It eventually shut down in 2022 after legal and regulatory changes in Australia and the United States made operating it increasingly difficult.
None of this proves that the United States lags behind the rest of the world in fediverse adoption. I don’t think the available evidence supports a claim that strong.
What it does suggest is that institutions and communities outside the US have sometimes treated decentralized social media as something worth building deliberately.
In Japan, the motivation was partly cultural and community-driven. In Germany and the EU, digital sovereignty played a role. In China, censorship circumvention mattered. In India and Australia, particular communities had reasons to create alternatives that served needs mainstream platforms were not meeting.
The American experience has looked different. Mastodon tends to get attention here when something goes wrong somewhere else. Twitter changes ownership. A moderation policy changes. Another platform does something users hate. People rush toward Mastodon, create accounts, look around, and some of them stay.
That is not the same thing as deciding ahead of time that decentralized communication infrastructure is worth having.
That distinction between reactive migration and deliberate infrastructure-building may be the more interesting question. I just haven’t found the dataset that would let me prove it.
The broader small web is even harder to pin down. I’m thinking here of Gemini, old Gopher servers, personal HTML sites, webrings, and the various little corners of the internet that never quite accepted that five giant websites should become the internet.
I have no solid numbers on where those people live.
My own experience gives me the impression that Germany, the Netherlands, and the Nordic countries are overrepresented in those spaces too. That would make some sense given how often those countries appear in open-source and digital-rights communities more generally.
But that’s a hunch. I can’t point to a study that demonstrates it, and I’d rather call it a hunch than dress it up as data.
If anyone knows of research that actually maps fediverse or small-web adoption by country, with real numbers behind it, I’d like to read it.
Until then, this is an observation built from scattered evidence rather than a documented trend. And when it comes to the small web, that may be about as much certainty as the available data allows.
Sunday 16 August 2026
3.21pm
I’ve actually been thinking about this for a while… a couple of years probably. But I ran across a post on mastodon.social that made me stop and pause and think, “OK, what is really the status of things right now, in mid-2026?” The post read:
As attempts to lock down “the #internet” grow, alongside it will grow the rebirth of an age of #zines, #BBS, #mixtapes, #burnedCDs, and other hand-to-hand media. People will bypass restrictions, even if it’s by paper and #sneakernet or #CB radios in the wild. (original link)
So, the web. Yeah, it is a hot fucking mess. I remember when it began dethroning BBS systems in the very early 1990s. It was cool; it offered a LOT of things that DOS-based systems were never designed to do.
It enhanced technology. Yeah, that right there is where things started going horribly wrong wrapped in something magnificently wonderful.
The ability to do things easily, efficiently, and, for lack of a better term, “plug and play” was the byproduct. The easier computers and the web became to use, the less ordinary users needed to understand what was underneath them. That was mostly a good thing, but it also made it easier for ownership to shift away from the user. Eventually we stopped running things and started opening accounts on things other people ran for us.
I read another post that kind of feeds off that thought. It said,
It’s easy to feel secure when a platform is in its golden era. But we’ve watched the downfalls of Twitter, the policy shifts of Reddit, and the changing tides of algorithmic networks. Relying blindly on a centralized portal not owned by you means your life’s work can alter overnight based entirely on a corporate boardroom decision.
The modern web is no longer a place of wonder and discovery. It’s the other side of the tracks. The part of town you probably shouldn’t be in. The “nothing good happens after midnight” underbelly that separates people into four camps: those who don’t care, those who are too complacent to change, those who check out completely, and those who care and try to be mindful and find safe alternatives or practices.
The first camp is those who basically shrug their shoulders and say, “It is what it is.” They literally don’t care and let the chips fall where they may.
The second camp knows things are not right, and might even make a half-hearted attempt to change their habits, but ends up back where they were before because changing is hard, complicated at times, and takes them out of their comfort zone.
The third group has largely checked out. They minimize their online presence as much as modern life permits, although banking, government services, communication, and commerce make completely opting out increasingly difficult.
Then there is the last group. This group is actually more like two factions: one, the small web, and two, federation. They share some of the same basic ethos, but, honestly, they are two very distinct animals.
So, the small web in a nutshell is the human-scaled, independently controlled part of the internet: personal sites, blogs, digital gardens, small communities, independent publications, and creative projects built primarily to publish, communicate, and share rather than maximize growth or engagement. It favors individual ownership, privacy, open standards, hyperlinks, RSS, human curation, and deliberate discovery over corporate platforms, tracking, advertising, and algorithmic feeds. It is not defined by a particular technology, aesthetic, or total rejection of commerce. A site can be modern, multimedia, or commercial and still belong to the small web if it remains independently operated, human-scaled, and oriented toward people rather than metrics, surveillance, and platform control.
That sounds great. It fits into the post I started with: people digging back into what the original internet was and still could be. The BBS, Gopher, IRC, RSS, terminal, etc. The Gemini protocol has made it simple yet more accessible. The small web ethos values independence, human expression, privacy, open standards, and meaningful connection over platforms, surveillance, algorithms, and growth at all costs.
The other alternative is sites that are “federated.” A federated site or instance is an independently operated server that can communicate and interact with other compatible servers through a shared protocol, while retaining its own users, rules, moderation, and administration.
Fairly close to the small web. But not really.
The small web and the federated web share a strong distrust of centralized platforms, but they approach independence differently. The small web emphasizes personal ownership, individuality, human-scale publishing, direct links, and intentional discovery. Federated sites emphasize interoperability: independent servers and communities can communicate with one another through shared protocols such as ActivityPub while remaining separately operated.
Their ethos overlaps around decentralization, user control, privacy, open standards, and resistance to corporate gatekeeping. The key distinction is that the small web does not need to form a network at all; a personal website can simply exist on its own, while federation deliberately connects independent sites into a larger social system. In that sense, the small web favors independence; the federated web tries to preserve that independence while still providing networked community.
So, now understanding basically the three states of the online world, and the four facets of human participation, what is the point?
Good question. I personally find myself torn between all three positions.
Yeah, the modern internet is an enshittified wasteland that is quickly becoming hostile to any sort of real human interaction. Everything is analytics-driven. Likes, karma, upvotes, shares, views, blah blah blah. There is real content on the web, but it is completely buried under the pile of shit we have allowed it to become. The small web is refreshing, but only for that fourth camp I mentioned. Anyone else, at best, will try it and then think, “This is too hard,” “This doesn’t make sense,” and basically give up and go back to their “safe and easy” web.
Federation, on the other hand, presents an interesting position. It basically says, “The small web asks you to build your own place on the internet. Federation gives you a neighborhood to move into. It also offers the convenience and social connection of modern platforms without requiring one corporation to own the platform, the audience, and the rules.”
But here is the conundrum: Federation is in the better position to attract large numbers of people away from the modern corporate web. The small web is better positioned to influence the culture of whatever comes next. So, which is the path to follow? That is the tough question (maybe not for some).
I’ll leave this with my feeling on that as of Sunday, August 16, 2026: The small web is and should be influential in the next phases of the culture of the future of the web. Right now, it’s fringe still. It is nowhere like the BBS scene was in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and that was still fairly niche. My question is: can they get past the (yes, this is harsh) snobbery they present? Some in that camp are so inflexible it’s crazy.
Federation decentralizes ownership, but it doesn’t necessarily change human behavior. You can distribute the servers and still recreate cliques, popularity contests, gatekeeping, pile-ons, moderation wars, and many of the social habits that made corporate social media miserable in the first place.
So, is the problem actually centralization, or is part of the problem social media itself?
That’s a much deeper issue.
The small web changes the behavioral model. Federation largely changes the ownership/network model. Mastodon still asks you to follow people, post into timelines, reply, boost, favorite, and watch notifications. A personal website/phlog/gemcapsule asks you to publish something and let someone deliberately come read it.
So, yeah, I am straddling all three right now. Hedging my bets to see which camp leads the way while keeping one iron in the existing modern web mess. Maybe we’re asking the wrong question when we ask which one will win. Federation may be the thing capable of getting people out of corporate platforms, while the small web may be the thing that reminds us why getting out mattered in the first place.
