communicating open social networks to normies

every once in a while, i poke around at the idea of migrating more of my digital life towards independent, open-source software. bluesky, and ergo the AT protocol, has been one of my greatest success stories to date. it's all well and good if i can migrate something that only i use and care about, but it's another feat entirely to jump aboard along with all of my friends, across a wide spectrum of tech savvy. i have a lot to thank the atproto ecosystem for (even if bluesky PBC has been severely testing my patience lately, but i digress).

the other day, i dusted off my matrix instance for yet another viability test in migrating the "community chat" category of my digital life to this paradigm. i've been beholden to discord since late 2015, and as i watch that company stumble ahead of many other social media monoliths already succumbing to nuclear fallout, i've been regularly peering towards an exit door.

a moment for matrix

for the uninitiated, matrix markets itself as "An open network for secure, decentralised communication". the first page of its documentation likens matrix to email, "but instantaneous and secure". i really like the "it's like email" approach they employ here. it's a few small extensions to a familiar analogy for most people that's served me quite well in explaining these kinds of federated social networks to newcomers. if you left it at that, i think most would be happy with this explanation.

my matrix server of choice is continuwuity. it's hands-down the most advanced, well-maintained, and performant matrix server i've seen yet. the maintainers seem a kind group of folks too, so that helps. though i'd be remiss to not highlight the name. it's a funny play on the project's lineage: a continuation of the now archived conduwuit project, which itself is a fork of the still-maintained conduit. that aside, even i have some difficulty pronouncing the name at times, and the more blunt of my peers will ask if i'm being serious when i discuss the software. i can't necessarily blame them- best i can do is remind them of the value of whimsy, and move on.

i would never wish to discuss matrix servers with a less tech-obsessed audience, though. not to say i haven't tried, though you quickly learn how awkward and uncomfortable that conversation can get. you would never explain an email server to the average person, but you may recommend an app to them.

discussing matrix apps can be simple or complicated, depending on who you talk to. if you take the atproto approach, the simple recommendation would be the "first-party", flagship application. "Just use Element!" or uh, is it "Element X" now? only on mobile? sure, okay.

element carries some deal-breakers for discord migration though, most notably a lack of custom emoji support (this was requested a decade ago, but this feature still shows no signs of life). it's also never really marketed itself to discord users, and we shouldn't expect that to change. their primary focus has been european digital sovereignty, which is a cause i respect, but not particularly helpful for my darling oomfies who want to post neocats.

enter cinny. a matrix app so blatantly inspired by discord they even pilfered the "Imagine a place" tagline from that one, questionable marketing era. i have very few notes on cinny! it was my matrix app of choice for quite a while, supporting many of the features that pinned discord to the map for a decade (especially custom emoji). though feature development on the project appears to be stalled at the moment while they work on replacing the underlying javascript matrix SDK, to accommodate new features like threads.

finally, there's sable. forked from cinny, this app supports a couple more features which further fill out the complete chat app experience, such as personas (the ability to send messages under different profiles on one account- pluralkit users will be famliar with this), profile bios, and location sharing! the app certainly stands out, but no more than its very exciting rewrite in rust and svelte, sable next. it's got all the above features, a whole lotta sauce, and remarkably stable nightly builds for every major desktop and mobile platform!

...i spent much longer on that subject than i'd anticipated. you could imagine if i were recommending these apps as and when they arrived to all my friends, it would get pretty frustrating hopping between all of them. all this to say that the matrix ecosystem is still very much in its early days, but more importantly, to highlight one particularly glaring issue i've seen with open social networks today:

all these names are really confusing

matrix is far from the only culprit here. on the fediverse (or should i say activitypub?), we have a plethora of servers you can join and host (iceshrimp, sharkey, mastodon, gotosocial, akkoma, just to name a few), and the choices of apps aren't any less generous. these aren't just names that you pick-and-choose based off vibes, though. in many cases, picking one over the other can dictate how you communicate with the rest of the network. mastodon critically lacks support for custom emoji reactions (there's that emoji-shaped thorn again), and despite adding support for quote posts in 2025, they opted to implement it in their own special way, disregarding the rest of the ecosystem who had already mostly made up their mind on an (admittedly flawed) implementation. despite that, the ubiquity of mastodon in the ecosystem still makes me question what word to use when speaking with outsiders: "fediverse", or "mastodon"?

atproto (where you, dear reader, are likely reading this article from) has some fragmentation of its own. for example, i would recommend witchsky any day over the flagship bluesky app. it's packed full of quality-of-life and customisation features, including tumblr-like post tags, square profile pictures, and displaying pronouns on your profile, which i've basically lost hope in bluesky ever implementing (you'd think they could do that in an hour with all the AI they're so proudly using ¯\_(ツ)_/¯).

at a certain point, recommending the right app to use feels a lot like recommending a linux distribution. and if that sentence made you feel emotions, yeah. you and me both.

we don't all have "that one linux friend" who can give you a solid recommendation to start out with. said "linux friend" can also misunderstand your needs and recommend a distro that's too difficult for you to work with, or doesn't support your particular use-case. for all of what i've discussed in this section, the most popular option tends to be silently, unofficially, placed on the "flagship" pedestal, for better or worse.

but maybe this isn't a bad thing

open-source software is beautiful in much the same way that nature is beautiful. it's a thriving ecosystem full of diverse life. branching off each other, learning from each other, and ultimately co-existing in their own pockets of the world. we can pick as we like from this vast pool of options, like taste-testing off berry bushes. we write reviews for the flavours we liked the most, and learn from those who ate poison berries.

if you were curious about my berry preferences, i run fedora linux as my daily-driver operating system, continuwuity and sable to chat on matrix, iceshrimp and moshidon (on android) to chat on activitypub, and tranquil and witchsky to chat on atproto. note that i've included the servers i use here, for completeness' sake. unless you're keen on server hosting, you really don't need to care about all that. seriously.

everything i've just said just now sounds insane, and somewhere out there a small victorian child has just exploded. this is a laundry list of stuff to dump on anyone not keenly familiar with the ecosystem already- most people do not taste berries for a living, and most people don't want to.

when i started writing this, i was fired up to dig into ways we could somehow improve the ecosystem for newcomers. but then i looked back through everything i wrote, and i thought again: perhaps i've been wildly overthinking this.

the linux community did not start growing users at an unprecedented rate because the ecosystem started naming things better, and it certainly didn't get there through mass-consolidation. the growth of the linux community over the past few years has been fuelled by a long, arduous push to make the ecosystem better for everyone. the reality is we have a lot of options that are better at different things, and worse at others. in a moment of clarity, i reminded myself that the abundance of choice is a feature, not a bug.

so what do we do?

none of this changes that there's a lot of information to digest, which makes communicating things like this quite difficult. but that's exactly where we come in. it's up to us to inform. it's up to us to break things down. it's up to us to guide those just coming in the door. a rising tide lifts all boats!

when you put aside all the clutter, it's actually quite easy to parse these details for others. surely you have your favourite tools and software (you're reading this article, after all), so recommend those! and if you know that the options available have pros and cons, prompt your invitees with some questions about their use-case. carve out their space, optimise to their usage, make it theirs. i often recommend fedora KDE plasma for its overall stability and familiar feel, but may direct a heavy PC gamer towards bazzite. mac users should try out GNOME!

so, get out there! be a guiding voice for those who'd be lost without it. spread the joys of your software choices and how it's worked well for you. depending on who you're talking to, it might help to explain why this is important. in a bizarre twist of fate, world governments seem to be catching on faster than their citizens that sovereignty (or rather, taking control away from massive central powers) is so incredibly important. you won't win everyone on politics of course, so even just talking about how much greener the grass is would be enough.

and i cannot stress this enough: don't be weird and pushy. nothing pushes someone away more than constantly dogging them for how they live their life. the last thing we need is more arrogant keyboard warriors making fun of windows users because they didn't feel comfortable switching to linux back when it was clearly in a far worse state. we certainly don't need it in the social networking space, either. as much as i'm sure it's difficult for some to admit, not every remaining windows or discord user is lazy, and not every remaining twitter user is a nazi. moving is hard. moving is scary. the path of least resistance, while not ideal, does yield some semblance of comfort. i've already heard story after story of would-be atproto users who fled back to twitter because they were generalised and ridiculed before they even got to the door.

like it or loathe it, we are the face of the ecosystem we care about. it's up to us to act like it and make this a place where people can feel welcome and have fun sharing the human experience together.

be patient. be helpful. be kind 💚