Reference Material: The Thing vs The Thing (2011) The Real Reason The Thing (1982) is Better than The Thing (2011) The thing 2011 wikipedia

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The Thing (1982) vs The Thing (2011)

The year is 1982.

A brutal snap of cold sends temperatures across the midwestern united states breaking all time record lows, The Commodore 64 launched, Michael Jackson released the best selling album of all time Thriller, and famous Youtuber Keemstar was born on March 8th. Most important to this video, 1982 saw the release of John Carpenter's magnum opus, "The Thing", a Sci-fi horror film about a research team in Antarctica being hunted by a shape-shifting alien that assumes the appearance of its victims. It's based on the 1938 novella "Who Goes There?" Written by John W. Campbell Jr. It began production in the mid 70s planned to be a more faithful adaptation of the book, following the 1951 film "The Thing From Another World", and after being bounced between many different directors and writers, was given to Carpenter and screenwriter Bill Lancaster. Filming began in August of 81, and the film was released on June 25th of 1982.

Reviews started rolling in, and to the surprise and disappointment of Carpenter, it was all negative. It was described as "instant junk", and praised the special effects for being completely and utterly repulsive, saying it's "a gross-out movie in which teenagers can dare one another to watch the screen." The film was classified as a commercial failure at the time, and the terrible reception of the film even got John Carpenter fired from the next film he was going to do with Universal Pictures, which left a stain on his career that he never fully recovered from.

But luckily enough, throughout the subsequent years, the film has gained a cult following, finally being realized for the masterpiece in science fiction and horror that it is. It's been referred to as the influence behind many other pieces of media, including television, other films, videogames, and much more. Because of this The Thing has spawned many pieces of merchandise like board games, comic books, a video game, and namely a 2011 "prequel" film.

Film producers Marc Abraham and Eric Newman were fresh off of the success of the 2004 remake of "Dawn of the Dead", and began to look through the Universal Studios library, where they found The Thing. They convinced Universal to create a prequel instead of a remake, because they felt that remaking it would be like "painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa.", suggesting that the original is already perfect. They looked at it like a challenge, making a new story with the events leading to the original film, with the suggested characters seen at the remains of the Norwegian base.

Everything building up to the production of the film seemed quite promising. The whole team was comprised of people that weren't in it for the paycheck, they were in it just because they loved the original film. The film's Director and Writer seemed passionate about and made it very clear that they were lovers of the original film, and didn't want to do anything to harm its legacy. Ronald D Moore, the original writer of the film said himself that his script was a "companion piece" and "not a remake". The practical effects were done by Amalgamated Dynamics, the VFX company that did the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy, a bunch of movies in the alien and predator franchise, the original Jumanji, and many many more.

And I truly believe that making something great was the original plan! The team seemed incredibly passionate and excited about their work, and it seemed like we were gonna get a prequel made with love to Carpenter's classic. But, when it came time for the film to release, we got something a little different. Opening weekend the film grossed 8 million 493 thousand 665 dollars, putting it off to a slow start. As the weeks progressed it fell further behind, slowing down until it inevitably came to a complete halt. By the end of its theatrical run, it grossed about 31 and a half million, 6 and a half million short of its budget. It failed even worse than the original did, and unlike the original I don't think there'll be a comeback story.

So how could this happen? Everything seemed so great about t he production, people were excited, the whole team seemed so dedicated to making sure it was a worthy piece to stand with the original, they had a stellar team handling the effects, how in the world could it flop, and why is the 2011 release of The Thing worse than the original?

Well, it depends on who you ask. Box Office Mojo was quoted as saying it was "an outright disappointment. The film was naturally at a disadvantage: a vague 'thing' doesn't give prospective audiences much to latch on to. It was therefore left up to fans of the original, who are already familiar with the concept, to turn out in strong numbers.", and they just simply didn't show up in those strong numbers. Maybe that's why.

Maybe it's because the studio delayed its release to fire Moore and hire Eric Heisserer rewrite the entire script, giving it an entirely new ending, in an effort to "add to the paranoia". Maybe it's because the studio delayed the film a second time to reshoot the whole thing, shortening or even completely cutting entire scenes of character development so that the pacing wouldn't be such a "slow boil". Maybe its because the studio decided to reshoot the entire film again to replace nearly all the practical effects with very rushed, and awful CGI, because the higher ups thought the practical effects looked too much "like an 80's movie", and as far as I can tell, they didn't delay it this time but don't quote me on that. As production continued and got closer to the end there were many many last minute decisions made that lead to it being the jumbled mess that we got. Is this what made it so much worse than the original? It's definitely part of the problem, but I think it's something bigger than that.

When reading about the production and all of these last minute changes, something that you'll see pop up pretty often is that these changes were added to help contribute to the feeling of "dread" or "paranoia". To me, this reads as them starting with the intention of doing something different, and slowly shifting closer and closer to what we got, which to me is just a bad remake that's poorly disguised as a prequel, I mean they didn't even bother to change the title, they could've at least just given it a subtitle of some kind. And again, a remake doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing, it would be very difficult, but a good remake isn't impossible. It's been done before for many other things. But unfortunately, a good remake isn't what we got. I've said it before and I'll say it again, what we got was bad prequel, an even worse remake, and a completely blatant misunderstanding of what made the original film so great.

So let's talk about what makes the original film so good. I could talk about how much I love this movie all day but I'm just gonna split it into what I feel are the three main things that make it stand out so much in my eyes.

As we go forward I just want to specify that I will try to keep this relatively spoiler free for the 1982 film, as if you have not seen it I'd highly encourage giving it a watch and don't want to ruin it for you. I can't say the same thing for the 2011 film, as it's honestly not really worth viewing unless you're a mega fan of the 1982 film like I am. With that being said, let's continue.

1. Atmosphere
   In John Carpenter's The Thing, there's a dense atmosphere where the isolation is tangible and the paranoia is as aggressive and pervasive as the cold of the Antarctic. The remote setting acts as far more than just a backdrop, it's also a catalyst to intensifying the atmosphere. The isolation that comes with being in such a place turns every moment of suspicion, distrust, and paranoia within the crew up to an 11. But these things start quite indirectly: A dog that behaves in unnatural ways, a foreign man frantically shouting in a language the crew can't understand, and an abandoned Norwegian camp that's been left completely destroyed, with strange and unexplainable signs of violence. This creates a divide between the crew and their surroundings, painting this to be a threat that is completely beyond the scope of anything they've ever faced before. Each and every detail nudges the audience and the crew's suspicions and unease more and more, creating an atmosphere that's heavy with dread and paranoia.

2. Pacing and story structure
   Carpenter's The Thing is expertly and deliberately paced, and is used as a tool to build and maintain this tension in a way that's entirely organic. Rather than diving directly into the action or horror, Carpenter instead chooses to take it slow, giving us small hints and clues to something being wrong, but prioritizing letting the audience grow familiar with the environment and the people in it, so that the tension simmers more within the audience letting them use their imagination to determine the greater terror. Any horror fan can tell you that this is what makes an excellent psychological horror film, and John Carpenter absolutely nailed it with this. Each event escalates very naturally, without feeling rushed or overly dramatized, keeping audiences invested but heightening the suspense. Carpenter's structure makes every moment feel necessary, and nothing is ever wasted or unwarranted.

3. Characters
   The characters in Carpenter's The Thing don't really conform to a typical heroic archetype of any kind. Instead, they're just a group of men with distinct personalities and traits that set them apart from one another. They're realistic. Carpenter doesn't try to give any of them a character arc of any kind, or hero's journey, which adds to the realism. They weren't sent here to deal with an alien life form and save the world, they were just sent here to do a job. And because of the slow pacing at the start I mentioned earlier, we spend time getting to know them, and we see their personalities shine through in a way that feels natural. For example, Clark is the dog handler, he's a bit quiet and introverted, and he cares very deeply for his dogs, he might even feel more comfortable around them than the actual people he lives with. Windows is the radio operator, he's a bit of a slacker, and is hot headed and tends to panic. Every character is like this, they might not be the most thoroughly written, but they're given just enough for them to be memorable, and realistically flawed. They have a group dynamic we see in the beginning, and as the story progresses we see that dynamic fall apart as feelings of distrust and isolation drive a wedge between them. This approach to characterization enhances the horror because the characters feel like real people reacting in real ways, making their fear and paranoia feel genuine and unsettling.

These three things come together to make this movie the masterpiece that it is. It's ultimately a movie about paranoia, and it's done so well that it kind of gives the reigns to the audience to decide how to interpret it. At the time of the films release there were two very relevant things that the film could've been about. During the 70s and 80s we were still in the cold war, many were paranoid of an impending nuclear war. 1982 was also a period right in the middle of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Many people believe either or both of these things to be the true intended meaning behind Carpenter's film, they might be right or they might not be, because at the end of the day what was given to us is just a sci-fi horror alien movie, and it's up to the individual viewer to interpret it however they want.

But those three things, the atmosphere of tension and paranoia, the pacing and story structure, and the characters, are the tools that deliver this film and its story to the viewer. And those three things are also where I believe the 2011 film to stumble and fall into it's mediocre grave.

Next is the atmosphere of tension and paranoia. What I love about this in the original film is how it's a constant build of tension that doesn't let you take a breath even when the movie ends. You're constantly gaining this feeling of tension and paranoia without ever really letting go of it, and it leaves you on the edge of your seat. The 2011 film however, kind of toys with you. Early in the film we have a scene of one of our characters separating from the group celebrating their discovery to go look at the specimen that they excavated by himself. It gets quiet and suspenseful, feeling like it's building to something, and it does build to something but not what you'd expect. We hear a loud "BOO" and it's revealed that some other guy snuck up on him for a simple joke. He laughs and laughs and it doesn't even really mean anything. Sure it's a complete subversion of our expectations, but I don't think it was done in a good way. While the original was a great psychological horror that put a lot of the fear in your mind, it feels more like the 2011 release is telling us that it doesn't care about that, and they just wanna surprise you with cheap jumpscares, which is what makes most of the horror aspects in this movie. Heck, by the time you get closer to the end it's almost just a straight up action movie with big explosions and slow motion.

The worst part is that I can't even tell you the names of the two character's in that scene, because the final nail in the coffin is that the characters in this film suck. In a film that stars around 17 different people, you really only get familiar with 3 of them. Those being the protagonist Kate, the antagonist Dr Halvorsen, and a guy named carter. And out of those three, Kate is really the only one that matters, these other two only serve the purpose of pointing us to the protagonist and reassuring is that she is the protagonist, which we already know because the film follows her and she makes all the important decisions. Dr Halvorsen's entire character is just being mean, and caring about his incredible scientific discovery more than anybody else. The only real purpose he serves is to make us root for Kate, and be someone that audience wants to see die. Carter really only becomes relevant in the last quarter or so of the film, acts kind of like a sidekick and kind of feels like he was built to be a love interest but the movie doesn't really explore that so much. But these two characters just feel so unnecessary, because if they didn't serve the purpose of pointing to Kate as the protagonist, which again we already know without them, they' be exactly the same as the other 14, serving the ultimate purpose of being a nameless body bag. And even Kate herself isn't too different. She doesn't really have any personality, after watching the movie a few times all I can really tell you about her is that she doesn't follow sports.

The final nail in the coffin of this is the characters. In a film that stars over 17 different people, the movie really let's you get to know and care about maybe 3 of them. Those three being the protagonist, an antagonist, and a love interest. And out of these three we only really have to care about our protagonist, the antagonist and love interest really only feel like they exist to support and reassure us that this girl is the protagonist., which we already know because the film is from her perspective, and she makes all the important decisions. Our antagonist is the scientist guy that recruited her to come here, his name is "Doctor Halvorsen", and his whole character is pretty much just being mean and caring about his discovery more than the lives of his team. The only purpose he really serves is someone to make us root for the protagonist, and to be someone we want to see get killed by the monster. The third is the aforementioned "love interest" with Carter, who kind of just acts as a sidekick for the last quarter or so of the movie and that's it. Dr Halvorsen and Carter just feel kind of unnecessary, because outside of the ways that they establish Kate as the main character, they're no different than the other 14. And even Kate herself isn't too different either. She doesn't really have any personality, after watching the movie a few times the only thing I can really tell you about her is that she doesn't follow sports.

That's what I think is the main problem that this movie has, they didn't bother to really write any characters, not at all. What they did was take the source material of the original Novella and Carpenter's film, and instead of writing believable characters, they opted to take the easier path of just giving a few of them the most basic story archetypes of "protagonist", "antagonist" and a "love interest"., and nothing more not even personalities. When you put this together with pacing that's too fast to make you care about anything the film tries to communicate, and tension that's broken so much that it's just completely replaced with bombastic action scenes by the end it all starts to become more clear. You know what this sounds like to me? The 2011 release of The Thing, is a slasher film.

When you look at it this way it all makes more sense. Slasher films often have many of these characteristics. They tend to be more about the spectacle than the substance, more about violent and dramatic death scenes than building and maintaining tension. Because of this characters in many slasher films are often written as archetypes rather than a fleshed out individual, since the emphasis is more on kills and the threat of the villain itself more than how the character's react. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with this, there's a reason why franchises like Friday the 13th, Scream, and Halloween have so many releases, because people love to watch them and they're very successful.

But the 1982 release of The Thing very much isn't a slasher film. It's more psychological, like I already said before, I and many others love this film to death because of the way that it portrays paranoia. And when you make a film that you claim you want to be a companion piece to the original, maintaining and further exploring what people loved about it so much, and you release a slasher film, it's bound to fall short. So to answer the question that I started this with, "Why is the 2011 release of The Thing worse than the original?" My answer for you is just a simple sentence. The original is a film about people, and the 2011 release is a film about a monster.

Thank you.

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Description

Have you ever seen "The Thing"? I bet you probably have if you're watching this, but have you seen the 2011 prequel? Probably not. So don't worry I watched it for you and I'm here to tell you why it's not as good, so you don't have to :)
Find me on tilvids! https://tilvids.com/c/bpt11_channel/
Follow me on letterboxd! https://letterboxd.com/bpt11/
My neocities site: https://bpt11.neocities.org/
My music blog: https://thegroovegrounds.com/
My music channel! ‪@TheGrooveGrounds‬
If you read this whole description comment your favorite videogame soundtrack

References

1. https://paulmcbride.com/posts/what-is-the-fediverse
2. Instagram Thread's explanation of the Fediverse
3. https://fediverse.party/ - useful for learning about and discovering some of the biggest platforms
4. https://fediverse.info/explore/projects - For very deep dives into all the different kinds of software and instances
5. https://fediverse.to/ useful for finding instances across many different platforms and many different categories
6. https://fediverse.info/explore/people People Directory
7. https://fedidevs.com/starter-packs/?tab=community Starter Packs

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Potential rewrite (ended up being the final rewrite)

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The Fediverse is what social media should be

Intro

How familiar are you with "dead internet theory"? You've probably heard it thrown around a bit but in case you're not aware let me give you a quick definition. According to Wikipedia, "The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that, due to a coordinated and intentional effort, the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation to control the population and minimize organic human activity. Proponents of the theory believe these social bots were created intentionally to help manipulate algorithms and boost search results in order to manipulate consumers."

I don't know if I can really say that's true or not, I do feel like it has been pretty relevant lately. I find myself scrolling through social media, mostly Instagram, and I feel like I rarely ever get content that's actually from the people I follow. Now it's mostly just for scrolling through reels and sharing them. It's for viewing hours and hours of algorithmically curated content to keep me engaged, giving me tiny hits of dopamine and wasting my time while Meta claims a bunch of ad revenue. I used to give it a pass saying "social media is good because it helps me stay connected with my friends", and while that might've been true at one point I really don't think it is any more. Every passing day
social media becomes less "social" and more so just "media".

This is something that I feel really strongly about, so I went looking for something else. Something that could bring social media back to truly being about connecting with others. Something that doesn't use my data for monetary gain or control the content I see, and puts the power back in my hands. And that's where I found "The Fediverse"

So, what exactly is the "Fediverse"?

The Federated Universe, or "Fediverse" for short, is a collection of different social media platforms and servers that interact with each other over a protocol called "ActivityPub".

I know that that sounds a little technical and confusing, so let's put it this way. Imagine that Instagram for example, is a house owned by meta where there's a big ol party going on. You can go over there and join in on the party, hanging out and chatting with all the people there, seeing all the stuff they've got going on, and it's a grand old time.

Then, let's say that your friends let you know about another party happening on Twitter, which is a house that Elon Musk owns of course. You could go, but you take a step outside of Instagram, and realize that your surroundings are pretty much empty. Sure, there's a couple other houses like Facebook or Threads, but that's about it. All of the Meta platforms are self contained in their own little neighborhood where it's just their houses.

This is what we call "Centralized" social media. Most popular social media's are like this, they're all contained in their own little space where one person or corporation is in control. If you're hangin out at Instagram's house then you only get to interact with other Instagram users, or sometimes a Facebook or Threads user. And since this is all in control of Meta, they get the final say in what you're allowed to post or talk about.

But what if social media worked a little bit differently, giving you the control, preserving your privacy, and connecting you to others regardless of what platform you use, or what house you hang your hat in? This is how Decentralized Social Media works.

Decentralized social media is like if instead of going to a house party, you went to a city-wide party, where there's different districts and different houses, that are all interconnected. No one person is in control of the party either, it's just being controlled by the community at large. This is how the Fediverse works, so let's break it down.

Let's imagine that the Fediverse is this city where the party is taking place. Within this city there's different districts, comprised of houses and buildings. We're going to define the districts as different platforms, and the buildings and houses as servers or instances.

What is a platform?

Different Fediverse platforms are pretty much exactly what they sound like. They're just different kinds of social media, like the difference between Facebook and Twitter. Sure they're both just "social media", but different platforms are used for different things. A primary benefit of the Fediverse is that it provides you with all of these different platforms while in essence being just one big platform itself. You might already be familiar with a few. For an example, we'll start with Mastodon.

Mastodon at it's core is pretty simple. It's a social media platform built for microblogging, an alternative to Twitter. Mastodon prides itself in being decentralized, open source, free of ads and algorithms, and independent. There are a few other platforms that aim to do the same thing, but Mastodon is the biggest, and it might just be the biggest platform on the entire Fediverse as well.

Users on mastodon can make posts, add polls to their posts, use hashtags, upload various files including images, videos, and audio, and the ability to add descriptions to these files for accessibility, you can add content warnings or custom emoji, and much more. They're very big on expression and creativity. Mastodon is one of the "districts" in the Fediverse city.

What is an instance?

I mentioned earlier that Mastodon is open source. In case you don't know what that means, it basically means that the code that Mastodon is made of is all public for anyone to look at or use for themselves. Anybody can use it to start their own social media website that's powered by Mastodon. This means, that unlike most social media, Mastodon is not contained on a single website, there are several of them, just short of 9 thousand actually.

We call these different websites "servers" or "instances", and these are the buildings and houses that make up the district. Mastodon, and the larger Fediverse as a whole, is comprised entirely out of these servers. But they all interact with each other seamlessly. So when you go to joinmastodon.org, they suggest joining the official one run by the mastodon team, which is located at mastodon.social. But, they also give you suggestions for plenty of others.

You can join mas.to, or mastodon.world, there's one called sunny.garden, or wehavecookies.social. Many of these servers are just for general use, but some of them are for specific things. The aforementioned sunny.garden is an instance made specifically for indie creators of all kinds. Artists, writers, musicians, whatever. It's run by a team 5 people in Canada, and has over 500 users.

Every server is run independently of each other, some are run and most are run by small teams or maybe even just one person. The people that run these servers make the rules for what kind of content is allowed and how these rules are enforced, they can be as strict or as lenient as they like because they have full ownership over that server.

If you don't like what they're doing, then you don't have to sign up on their server you can just go somewhere else. Maybe you even looked through every server all 9 thousand of them and couldn't find anything that matched what you're looking for. This is where the crazy part comes in, because it's all open source you can just go make your own. Many people across the fediverse host their own servers so that they have ultimate control over how they use it without anyone being above them.

If that sounds like something you wanna do, then you should absolutely go for it. Regardless of what server you end up on, you can still interact with any other Mastodon server that the admins of your server choose to federate with, and even nearly every server across the Fediverse, regardless of the platform. This connection between servers and platforms is called "Federation", the "Fedi" part of "Fediverse"

The many different platforms of the Fediverse

So far we've only really covered Mastodon, but pretty much everything we discussed is true for every other platform, and there are many platforms. Just to name a few, Misskey and Pleroma are also microblogging platforms like Mastodon, Lemmy, Piefed and Kbin are link aggregator and forum platforms similar to Reddit, Writefreely and Plume are blogging platforms like Blogspot or WordPress.

Pixelfed is a photo sharing platform like Instagram, BookWyrm is an alternative to goodreads, Friendica acts a lot like Facebook, and PeerTube is a YouTube alternative (link to my peertube page in the description by the way). That's really just a few of the more popular and active platforms, there are so many more that do so many things, and they all interact with each other. If you wanted to and had the know how, you could even just make your own platform.

A majority of platforms also interact with each other, meaning you can see posts from other platforms, and even like, comment or follow others outside of your own platform. But, it doesn't always work perfectly. For example, Pixelfed is a platform for sharing photos, so every Mastodon post with a photo attached can be seen and interacted with like it was a post natively made on Pixelfed. But not every Mastodon post has a photo, and the ones that don't will not be seen by Pixelfed. But that's about as bad as it gets, just little compatibility issues like that.

ActivityPub

In the Fediverse city, ActivityPub is the streets, backroads and sidewalks that connect everything together. ActivityPub is the protocol that every fediverse platform is built on. It's the language that they speak and understand, and it's what makes it all connect together. It's kind of like how email works.

Regardless if you have a gmail.com, icloud.com, outlook.com, or any other kind of email address, you can email anyone else because they use the same protocol to speak to each other. ActivityPub works in much the same way, but with social media.

The Fediverse without ActivityPub wouldn't even exist. The developers behind Mastodon probably never would've made it, and if they did it would have to be more centralized and locked in like other more popular platforms.

Without ActivityPub, if you wanted to communicate between platforms you'd have to hop some fences or dig some tunnels, or find some other weird sketchy way to access other places. But because of it and some other similar protocols, we have the decentralized social spaces that I've been talking about today.

How the Fediverse improves upon traditional social media

Now that we've figured out what the Fediverse is and how it works, let's answer the question of why you should use it and why you should care about it.

I briefly mentioned earlier the concept of centralization. Traditional social media is centralized, and controlled by one entity. Twitter is owned by Elon Musk, and I hope that I don't have to explain the negative impact that's having on the platform.

Mastodon on the other hand is owned by no one in particular, but also everyone at the same time. sunny.garden is owned by those Canadian guys, masto.nyc is owned by the Five Borough Fedi Project, a nonprofit corporation based in NYC, these people that own and operate these servers are in charge of making the rules and deciding how things run.

And if you don't like any existing servers you can just make your own, so you can make the rules and and you can control your own data. You can have as much or as little autonomy as you want.

Current social media is also largely built around algorithms.

In the digital age there's a saying that goes "if you're not paying for the product, you are the product." And on traditional social media this is 100% true.

Most social media is a free service for the userbase, which may seem great to the average user, but beneath that is algorithms designed to serve you as much content that it thinks you will like as possible, getting you completely hooked so that you'll spend several hours a day scrolling, and serving you as many ads as possible.

You might not even realize it but every day, especially on social media, you will see hundreds and hundreds of ads, and every time you see one that means the platform giving it to you is making money.

The Fediverse is an antithesis to that model. The Fediverse is free of advertisements and algorithms, even on the biggest platforms like Mastodon. Every platform puts the power in your hands, showing you only content from the accounts you follow, and usually with an option to see a live feed of the newest content across the platform as well.

There will never be data collected on you to serve advertisers, so you'll never get advertisements. The Fediverse is all about the social part of social media, and not monetary gain.

Because it's decentralized and free of any advertising data collection, it's also a great place if you're an advocate for digital privacy and controlling how your data is used.

There's no big corporation building a profile of you, and every instances manages the little data that they do have independently, and most are very transparent with how they handle it. And if you're uncomfortable with anyone having any amount of control, you can always host an instance yourself.

Challenges with the Fediverse

The Fediverse isn't without it's challenges. It's still a relatively new thing, ActivityPub, the aforementioned protocol that the whole thing is built on, was only introduced in 2018. We're still kind of figuring things out as we go, and we're still very much in the early adopters phase.

Things are always changing and improving, and nearly every platform is still receiving big feature dropping updates, as they're still pretty much in their infancy. The lack of algorithms also means it can sometimes be hard to find new people.

And given the current state of things and how early it is, admittedly most users are tech enthusiasts. This in addition to having a significantly smaller user base compared to traditional platforms, can be a lot to get used to and even a bit underwhelming to your average new user.

Federation between different platforms isn't always perfect. Some will work perfect together, viewing posts from other microblogging services such as Pleroma from your Mastodon account will work just fine, you won't even be able to tell it's from a different service. But some combinations don't work quite as well, like earlier when we were talking about posts between Pixelfed and Mastodon.

Another example, Bookwyrm supports following of users across every platform but doesn't really show any activity from them, and there's a couple other examples of these kinds of things just not translating quite as intended.

The community driven aspect can also be a double edged sword. Being largely run by volunteers, small teams, or even just hobbyists doing it in their free time, means that there's no mega corporations ensuring that things go smoothly.

Your favorite instances might struggle with outages from high traffic, or lengthy bits of downtime from maintenance, which can definitely be a bit frustrating coming from bigger platforms where things work effortlessly.

Some solutions

But many of these issues of simple solutions, that in my opinion can sometimes be even better than what you’d find on a traditional platform.

If you wanna get to know new people outside of just tech enthusiasts, many people create user directories for the public. Think of it like a phone book for the Fediverse city.

For example, fediverse.info has a directory of people where you can find people across many different categories. You can browse by accounts that talk about music, tech, photography, art, and a few other things. You can also submit your own profile to this as well to make it easier for others to find you.

Or there's a section on the website fedidevs.com called "starter packs", where users create their own "starter packs" of accounts they think are worth following for a specific thing, or you can create your own starter pack.

Koree A. Smith created a starter pack called "Funny People", containing "accounts that post funny things on the Fediverse." It even gives you an easy button to follow all of the people in that starter pack.

If you try to log in to your favorite instance to do some browsing but find that it's down, the amazing thing about the Fediverse is that you can just use a different instance for the time being until your favorite instance is back up.

Most instances will also let you donate to them, which I'd highly recommend doing if you spend a lot of time there and enjoy it. Just to reiterate, across the Fediverse nobody is making any money off of their use and they do it just because they like doing it, so a donation can go a long way to help keep the server running or just show your appreciation.

These might not be perfect solutions, and I didn't even propose a solution to every problem, but those are just the trade offs that you have to accept when you have a community driven ad free platform. I for one am fully willing to accept these struggles as the platform grows, but it definitely might not be for everyone just yet.

Getting started with the Fediverse

Regardless of the issues that are currently present, the Fediverse is a fun and exciting place to be. If you have any desire to check it out I'd encourage you to give it a try, make an account or two across different platforms and look around a bit.

Some social medias, like Facebook, will do everything in their power to lock you in to their platform, becoming an everpresent part of your life from the moment you register to the moment you die. But I promise you, the Fediverse is not like this whatsoever. It's nowhere near as big a commitment, it takes nearly no time to sign up and it's just as easy to delete your account if you decide it's not for you.

To get started all you really need to do is pick out a platform that you think looks interesting, and then pick an instance. Do some research for this, I'll leave some resources below to help you find the right platform and instance for you. Once you find an instance that looks like it's the right spot for you, all you have to do is sign up.

Many platforms will let you sign up and log in right away, but others may have admins manually review your registration requests to ensure you're not a bot or someone suspicious, which can take a few hours or a few days depending on how big or active it is, which is something to take into consideration. Platforms that have this manual review system will let you know before you finish the registration process.

After that you're all set to just do some browsing and exploring of the Fediverse! If you find a different instance where you think you'd be happier, many platforms provide easy to use tools to migrate your account elsewhere without losing your posts, followers, and other data.

If you're worried that you're missing out due to mistranslation or defederation between platforms, you can always just sign up on multiple platforms. But remember, no matter where you sign up, you can always interact with thousands of others on different instances and platforms, and you won't be missing out on too much.

Outro

And with all that being said I hope that I've made a good case for what the Fediverse is and why you should be a part of it. I want this to be a solid jumping off point for getting into the Fediverse, as there's so much to explore and you can take it as deep or as shallow as you want.

To me it really is redefining what current social media is, taking it back to the idea that it's a place to connect with people and stay up to date on what's going on in their lives, rather than it being a place to endlessly scroll through brain rotting content and endless ads.

I love that it's free from corporate control and Elon Musk using everything you post to fuel his personal AI projects, and if breaking free of that sounds good to you, and you want a better and healthier alternative, then I promise you that the Fediverse is worth at the least giving a try. It might be a bit different, but with some time I don't think you'll ever want to go back.

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Description

The Fediverse is something that you should know about!

If you want to break free of traditional social media in control of big tech companies and people you don't trust, then the Fediverse is the place to be. Hopefully this video will convince you!

Some references and things that helped me write this video:

1. https://paulmcbride.com/posts/what-is-the-fediverse
2. https://help.instagram.com/169559812696339
3. https://transfem.social/notes/a16rvjhkk34b00tf

Some sites to help you on your Fediverse journey:

1. https://fediverse.party/ - useful for learning about and discovering some of the biggest platforms
2. https://fediverse.info/explore/projects - For very deep dives into all the different kinds of software and instances
3. https://fediverse.to/ - useful for finding instances across many different platforms and many different categories
4. https://fediverse.info/explore/people - People Directory
5. https://fedidevs.com/starter-packs/?tab=community - Starter Packs

Check out my Neocities site for blog and project updates: https://bpt11.neocities.org
Soon I also plan to upload the raw scripts of every video I write if you'd rather read them.

All my different accounts (fediverse and non fediverse) can be found here:
https://bpt11.neocities.org/web

Thanks for watching!

If you read this whole description, comment what the greenest thing in your surroundings is.