The internet was supposed to be a place where everyone was an internet LandChad. Everyone had their own website and email and own services. Obviously, this site is all about getting back to that ideal.

That's why it's important to understand the concept of Federation in technology. It's the idea that instead of one central "node" or site that everyone uses, like Facebook, Twitter, Insta, R*ddit, people can run their own sites that can nonetheless interact with othersites as easily as if they were the same.

You already know one federated technology: email. There is no one site for email, but many sites, and all people on all those sites can use email to talk to one another. You can get censored on Facebook. You can't get censored on "email." You could have a Gmail account deleted, but you are not blocked out of the system, as you can go to any number of sites and get a new account or make your own server and you can still talk to all your friends via email.

## "Federated" Social Media

The idea of Federated Social Media is using that principle used in email, but for other things, like chatting or social media.

Here's an example. There is some software you can install on your server called Pleroma. It can be installed on your site just like a web or email server, but what it does is creates a Twitter-like microblogging site. You can then have your friends join and use it just like you use Twitter, with you as the admin and deciding policy and you can even format and decorate the site how you want.

### It gets even better...

But here is the clincher. Federated social media like Pleroma can interact with other Pleroma servers on the internet in the same way that Gmail's servers can send messages to any other email server. So you might have 2 people on your Pleroma site, but you can interact with the many thousands of other Pleroma sites.

There is seamless interaction. You can view, like, share and respond to their posts as if they were part of your own site.

### And it gets even betterer...

Pleroma is based on a protocol called Activity Pub. This is also used by other software like PeerTube (which is a self-hosted YouTube-equivalent), Friendica (Facebook equivalent)