Why Org Social is the ethical Fediverse alternative | Andros Fenollosa
The Fediverse has 3 structural problems: concentration, human cost, and complexity. For example, Mastodon advertises itself as decentralized, but in practice almost 40% of Mastodon's registered accounts live on mastodon.social. Meanwhile, smaller instances depend on volunteers who can burn out or be forced to shut down for not receiving enough donations to keep the servers running. And if you decide to run your own instance, madness awaits. ActivityPub is a complex protocol with a dense specification. Very few people have the technical skills to set up and manage their own instance, and far fewer to incorporate the protocol into their own projects.
Before going any further, it is time to be transparent: I created Org Social, so this article is a partisan defense. That is why every criticism of the Fediverse is backed by sources (you will find them at the end) and Org Social's limitations are listed below, with none of them hidden.
What is Org Social?
Org Social boils down to a text file called social.org that looks like this:
#+TITLE: My journal<br>#+NICK: YourNick<br>#+DESCRIPTION: A brief description about yourself<br>#+AVATAR: https://example.com/avatar.jpg<br>#+LINK: https://my-awesome-website.com<br>#+FOLLOW: https://jane.com/social.org
* Posts<br>** 2025-04-28T12:00:00+0100<br>:PROPERTIES:<br>:LANG: en<br>:TAGS: emacs org-social<br>:MOOD: ❤️<br>:END:
This is my first post on Org Social.
** 2025-04-29T09:30:00+0100<br>:PROPERTIES:<br>:LANG: en<br>:TAGS: welcome decentralized<br>:MOOD: 🚀<br>:END:
Loving how my data stays in a plain text file that I fully own.
** 2025-04-29T18:15:00+0100<br>:PROPERTIES:<br>:REPLY_TO: https://jane.com/social.org#2025-04-29T17:00:00+0100<br>:LANG: en<br>:END:
Good point, Jane! A reply is just a post with a REPLY_TO property.<br>Your presence and your posts are one and the same file. The specification can be learned in minutes.
You can host it on GitHub Pages, Codeberg, a €5/month server, your own machine, or host.org-social.org, a free hosting service specific to Org Social that gives you a public URL in a minute (quick tutorial to get started on Org Social). You can read it with cat, back it up or migrate it to another server with cp, and edit it with any editor.
And how does a social network without a server work? You add the URL of other people's social.org files to your #+FOLLOW. It is a network of files interlinking with each other. You use a client, or you compose a rudimentary timeline by chaining Unix commands:
grep '^#+FOLLOW:' social.org | awk '{print $NF}' | xargs curl -s | grep '^\*\* ' | sort -r | head<br>For everything else, like finding out about mentions, replies, and threads from people you don't follow, there are Relays: volunteer nodes that index public feeds and notify your client. They are optional and interchangeable: if a Relay disappears, your file and your followers remain intact.
Why it is more ethical than the Fediverse
Org Social is more ethical than the Fediverse because it fixes the problems by design:
Simplicity : Org Social is a simple text file you can edit with Emacs, Vim, or any other editor you like. If not, there are also visual clients. Compare that with ActivityPub, where implementing the protocol means dealing with fragmented HTTP signatures, JSON-LD variants, and incompatibilities between platforms... In contrast, the complete Org Social specification fits in a README.
Accessibility : the feed can be read by humans and machines. No APIs, no JavaScript, no visibility limited by the instance.
Decentralization : you are a node in the network. The feed is hosted on any web server and anyone can access it; there is no central instance to depend on. In the Fediverse, decentralization is held up by volunteer admins who may burn out and shut down their servers (as happened with mastodon.technology, mozilla.social, and dozens more), taking their users' accounts with them. Here there is no instance that can close; each node costs whatever serving a static file costs.
Richer format : native Org Mode features are used to enrich the social experience, such as tables, code blocks, and links. On top of them, the specification builds threads, mentions, polls, and reactions. And with no character limit: a post can be a single sentence or an entire article.
Your information belongs to you : your social.org is yours in the most literal sense. Your posts, who you follow, and your interactions with the community are recorded in your file, under your control, not on an instance's server. There is no third-party database (your own file already is one). And migrating is not a process.
Real censorship resistance : nobody can deplatform you, except your hosting provider, and in that case it is enough to move the file to another server or provider. No instance, or third party, can defederate you or silence your content without your knowledge.
Human sustainability : no social network is free; in the Fediverse the bill is paid by...