Where do I begin?

A word on transitioning away from addictive, corporate-owned services

Most apps and websites use dark patterns to keep you hooked. Consider these tips to make moving away easier:

• Block notifications on all non-messaging apps on your phone, including social media. This avoids the "In case you missed"-style notifications that aim to keep your attention for longer. You should control how much you use the apps yourself, not the app.

Social media

Social media in Web4 is a collection of decentralized sites that can talk to each other using the same language, allowing you to view posts even if they weren't posted in the same instance. They work very similarly to email, in that you can send an e-mail to someone with a Hotmail address even if you use Gmail.

The fediverse

The fediverse is probably the most popular and mature example of a federated social media. It is powered by the ActivityPub protocol^[1], a W3C^[2] recommendation. There are many types of software that can speak ActivityPub and therefore are part of the fediverse. In general, the fediverse consists of thousands of separate servers running these softwares, owned by volunteers. It is common that technical people buy vanity domains and run software themselves, such that they and/or their friends/communities can have cool and/or interesting usernames.

Note that while the software speaks ActivityPub, they often do not fully support each other. You may experience a reduced feature set when watching and interacting with people on sites with other software, especially across software that does vastly different things. For example, Mastodon does not (currently) support "reactions" (think Discord, Slack etc.), a feature which Firefish has added first-class support for.

Get started here: https://fediverse.info/

You need to find a site running ActivityPub software in order to join. The following is a list of the most popular alternatives:

Photo posting

• Pixelfed - Instagram replacement

Microblogging

• Mastodon - microblogging (twitter/threads/etc.)
• Firefish - a Mastodon alternative with many interesting features

Forum/reddit replacements

• Kbin
• Lemmy

Video posting

• PeerTube

Farcaster

Farcaster is another decentralized social media replacement that seems to have gotten some traction with the Web3 bunch due to many clients allowing for integration with the blockchain.

Farcaster website: https://www.farcaster.xyz/

Bluesky

Bluesky is an infamous social media technology originally developed by Twitter. It uses a protocol that in theory supports federation, but Bluesky's official instance has disabled federation for now claiming they want to wait until their own protocol has matured further. While this isn't necessarily a bad move, it currently makes the claims of federation moot for all intents and purposes. At their current pace, it seems like they may have missed out on becoming the new de facto Twitter replacement due to being closed, going so far as to even request that world leaders and other influential people should not be given invites ^[3].

Bluesky recently announced their intent to let anyone view content posted on their platform, but it may already be too late.

Chatting

Web4-style chatting avoids systems where the content you provide (chat messages) is siloed (i.e you need an account with this one service in order to reach you, and you cannot reach people outside the service). Companies that exist to monetize communities are inherently against the Web4 mindset, which makes services like Discord unwanted.

However, there aren't many good alternatives. The one alternative worth mentioning right now is Element, a secure and decentralized chat platform built on Matrix, an open standard for secure communication. However, it is not perfect, and there exists some valid critique against the underlying protocol that powers it.

Blogging

Run your own blog site, or make it Fediverse-accessible by using software like WriteFreely. Blogging in web4 is about moving away from Medium/Substack and other corporately owned sites that use dark patterns^[4] in an attempt to convert readers to paying customers. Tumblr is still a surprisingly good option for running a blog.

The goal of a Web4 blog is to provide the reader with the information as quickly and easily as possible without unnecessary distractions. Visual interaction reminders (like, subscribe, newsletters), upselling ("You have read your weekly free articles", "Read this community in our app"), and unnecessary cookie prompts, are all things that do not belong on the web. Something most people don't know is that you only need the cookie prompt if you need to collect additional consent for unnecessary cookies not needed for the site to operate. A cookie prompt is therefore the result of either incompetence or greed.

Knowledge

Google has become worse over the years due to the SEO industry, which exists to optimize a site to be at the top of as many search results as possible, regardless of their actual value. For example, when you search for a recipe, you will find that most results are utterly useless and have paragraphs on paragraphs of useless filler before the actual recipe shows up. In fact, when GPT showed up, an early use case was found in generating recipes without the useless filler of modern sites. Whether or not the recipes worked is another question.

There is no clear solution to knowledge searching in a post-information-war internet era yet, but one possibility is Kagi — a search engine you pay for.

It provides several tools that let you tailor it to your needs, including allowing you to down-prioritize websites you find often useless in your searches. It also allows you to create "lenses", which lets you create topical search options by tailoring which websites are relevant. Kagi essentially gives you the tools to target your searches, without involving the invasive machinery of the Google recommendation algorithm.

With current search engine noise, we might be at a point where we seriously have to consider if a modern take on link graphs/webrings is the best way to move forward.