What is Decentralized Social Media?
a decentralized social media is a social media (social network) in which the users' data do not belong to only one central authority, but to various interconnected entities. For example, on Twitter, all the data in Twitter is under control of Twitter, in Twitter servers—if Twitter disappears, the whole social network disappears—thus it would be a centralized network. In contrast, in platforms such as Mastodon and Bluesky, any person can create and maintain (pay for) their own server (called an instance), and these instances communicate with each other through a protocol (ActivityPub and AT Protocol, respectively), allowing an user that created an account in one instance to interact with other instances without needing to create an account in them. Thanks to this, if [mastodon.social] disappears, for example, its many users that have an account in that instance will lose their data, but the entire network won't disappear since there are other Mastodon instances on the Internet.
Decentralized social media are also called federated social media, partially because the set of networks that communicates through the ActivityPub protocol (Mastodon, Misskey, PixelFed, Peertube, Lemmy, et all) is called the Fediverse (from federation and universe).
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