Why Fediverse
The federated web is an open & decentralized protocol for communities and social platforms.
Your posts, your audience
When you post on Mastodon, your followers see it. There's no algorithm deciding whether your announcement is "engaging enough" to show - which means you don't have to pay for reach or post rage-bait to get seen.
Your feed is chronological and theirs is too. Time-sensitive updates (emergency alerts, event announcements, policy statements) arrive when you send them, not when a platform decides they're relevant.
Your choice, your platform
You can join an established server like mstdn.ca or thecanadian.social and start posting in minutes. Or find a niche community that fits your work. Or run your own instance on your official domain - @you@yourorg.ca - with full control over your data and your branding.
The Fediverse works with tools you may already use. WordPress and Ghost can publish directly to the network. RSS feeds can mirror your updates automatically. Rather than starting from scratch, you're extending what you already have.
Easy to try
Just create a profile, follow a few people, and see how it feels.
If you change your mind about which server you're on, you can move your account (followers and all) to a different one. Open standards mean you're never locked into a single provider's decisions.
And if you need to maintain a presence elsewhere during the transition, bridging tools let you crosspost to multiple platforms at once.
Why now?
Over 20,000 Canadians have signed a Leadnow petition calling for action on X/Twitter. That dissatisfaction is going somewhere.
X's built-in AI, Grok, has been generating non-consensual sexual imagery - including of minors. This is now under investigation by:
Meanwhile, Meta has appointed a former Trump administration official as its president. Both platforms are tightening alignment with the current U.S. government.
Canadian news sources have already been suppressed on these platforms. There's no guarantee it won't happen again.
Why host in Canada?
When you join a Canadian instance, your data is subject to Canadian privacy law rather than American corporate policy.
Your public discourse shouldn't depend on the goodwill of foreign corporations. The same logic that keeps foreign ownership out of Canadian banks and telecom applies here: critical infrastructure should be under Canadian jurisdiction.
Canadian instances won't suppress Canadian news sources. They won't change their terms of service because a U.S. administration asked them to.