Notes from #FediMTL 2026
I joined Mastodon in 2016. Ten years later, it does tend to hold true that the platform's biggest conversations are still about... Mastodon 😅
I've been a Mastodon user since at least 2016 and even dabbled in the fine mess that is solo-instancing (or micro-instancing, since without Leif's help it would have been a much less fine mess) between 2022 and 2026. On top of being really interested in the creation of non-corporate social networks (see my community bookwyrm project, Millefeuilles), I'm also really interested in the concept of data autonomy.
So when I saw the speaker lineup for this February's one-day Digital Sovereignty conference dubbed "FediMTL", a new joint production by local (to me) and relative newcomers Qlub and Fedihost as well as the Social Web Foundation, I decided I needed to be there.
As friends and readers of the blog know, my health has been a bit of a roller coaster. When it became clear that I wasn't going to make it in person this morning, some buddies reached out to Evan Prodromou, one of the early creators of the ActivityPub Protocol and organizers of the conference, and he generously sorted it all out so that I could attend the conference virtually instead:
"Digital sovereignty"?
Depending on what corners of the world you inhabit, "digital sovereignty" may or may not be on your radar. The term gets used in a lot of different ways, but these are a few principles that I think are usually implied by the term digital sovereignty at both a personal and a broader, legalistic or societal level:
- Ownership of private and relational data at both the software & hardware level
- Full transparency on how and where data flows; as well as how's it's being used and transformed
- The ability to use various technological or legal levers to control what data is collected, where it is stored, and how it is transformed
The Talks (Very Briefly!)
While I thought the talks would be a little more technical, each speaker still gave some really interesting insight into the technical and social aspects of getting regular people, who have never heard of the eternal flame war of vim versus emacs, into non-FAANG social web. One of the key architects of the ActivityPub Protocol (in layman's term, the structure the fediverse is built on) Christine Lemmer-Webber spoke to what is currently being done well and what still needs improvement. Julian Lam spoke about how getting back into forums has driven nodebb's success (forums!!! my beloved!!!). Paige Saunders and Saskia Welch spoke to fediverse success stories for communities and media companies in Canada and the UK. I found Chloé-Anne Touma's dive into the Québec media landscape, how to realistically get people interested in news from many different sources, and how that relates to the fediverse really, really thought-provoking. If Evan Prodromou spoke to the origins of the fediverse, then Philippe Larose Cadieux closed the day with a discussion of one-year-old Qlub and his goals to get Québecois.es into the federated, non-algorithmic social web.
One important takeaway from Chloé-Anne Touma's talk: "Algorithms have a political agenda." Love seeing that described explicitly, especially by a journalist.
Where I found the cover image for this blog post! Screenshot taken from Saskia Welch's very funny slides on surveys done while trying to encourage various community groups to adopt open source social media like Mastodon. Essentially, while "federated" is the technical term to describe how the various instances of the fediverse communicate with each other, according to a survey done in the UK, a whole pile of "normal people" thought fediverse had to do with "federal" law enforcement.
Update: I found the slide containing all the other funny responses to that British community survey of "have you ever heard of the fediverse?" from Saskia Welch's talk, which I share with you in all its glory:
A handful of the software and strategies shared during the conference
There were definitely so many more than this, but this is a start:
- You deserve a little forums, as a treat, with nodeBB.
- Looking for a local-to-Québec microblogging platform? Qub is so very excited to see you!
- An Edmonton-based developper already created the non-algorithmic and non corporate Instagram-ish app called Pixelfed and is currently working on a TikTok-ish app called Loops.
- Freaking out because Substack is openly funding white supremacists? Ghost + Stripe has you covered. (And Ghost is experimenting with other payment processors than Stripe because, well, if you're Canadian, Stripe is a bit of a fees nightmare.)
- Okay, say you're sold on the idea of the fediverse. You want to self-host a small instance for you and all your friends! But you've never spun up a server before and the idea of dealing with critical security updates and Docker at 2AM on a weeknight makes you break into hives? Don't panic: FediHost is a Montréal-based company that takes the technical burden off your hands.
Posts by other attendees:
And one more embed for the road:
Thank you to all the organizers and speakers at FediMTL today. I also want to especially thank Evan Prodromou for making sure I was able to be there.
