The Website League is a new social media project, built with the goals of providing its users a safe, healthy, and resilient place to share their thoughts, ideas, and art. With avoidance of dark patterns we believe drive unhealthy engagement of social media, a centralized decisionmaking body, and a shared set of community guidelines, our core aim is to provide a system that is enjoyable to use, and free of discrimination, bigotry, and harrassment of all kinds.
We are inspired by the user-friendly, anti-capitalist approach of Cohost, and we are borrowing the underlying technology behind Mastodon. The Website League is an experiment in creating something new from these starting points; we are not trying to build the next Cohost, nor are we trying to build another Mastodon.
We are working hard to adapt existing software to fit our needs, and we are writing new software where it's necessary to do so. Unlike Mastodon, we have no need to interact with a large, decentralized network; this allows us to fix problems, to build centralized infrastructure where it's needed, and to focus our efforts. Our development goal is to create a resilient, friendly system that is enjoyable and intuitive, and which places the needs of its users first. We believe this will help us achieve our ultimate aim of fostering a healthy and diverse online community.
If you'd like to keep up with what we're doing, and the growth of our network, you can subscribe to our newsletter via email or RSS:
The Website League, as a "federated" system, is a collection of small social media sites that are connected together (as compared to being one big one, like Twitter or Cohost). You can sign up for any of those websites; users on any website can see posts and follow users from any website in the League. Instead of a username, users have an address that works like an email address: "@username@website.org." You don't need to know anything technical, or how to make a website, to participate.
Folks have been asking questions on Cohost and in our Discord server, about how our system works, and how it's different from Mastodon; this is a primer.
The Website League is a bunch of smallish websites that talk to each other. You can go on the one you've chosen and post, and see posts by the people you follow. You will be able to follow people on other websites that are members of the League, and they can follow you, no matter where you are; every League website is connected to every other League website. The people making these websites will work together to, first, make sure everyone has a good time, and second, keep things running smoothly.
Both Mastodon and the Website League are "federated social networks." A federated social network is one large social media system made up of many smaller websites ("instances") that talk to each other. This differs from places like Cohost, where everyone uses the same centrally operated website.
The main federated social network in existence right now, and the one most people think of, is the Fediverse. Some people call it Mastodon, because that's the main kind of software it uses. Anyone can make a website that's part of the Fediverse and connect it; all the websites talk to each other by default.
The Website League works via allowlists: everyone operating a website has to intentionally make it talk to all the others in the League. Websites that haven't become part of the League can't participate, in general.
Imagine a city with different neighborhoods: you can talk to your friends on the same street, or take the bus to see someone across town. In this analogy, each neighborhood is an instance. People in an instance can interact with people in other instances that theirs federates with (imagine a road or mass transit connecting neighborhoods); you just have to know where they live.
In federated social media, you view and follow people with something like an email address: "@user@neighborhood.com," for example. This tells the software that you want to talk to someone with the name "user" whose account lives in the instance "neighborhood.com"
(By contrast, Cohost and most other social media sites are like living in an enormous apartment building; you don't need an address, because everyone's name is on the directory by the elevator.)
The Fediverse is made of many different kinds of websites, running many different kinds of software, Mastodon being foremost among them. Most of them talk to each other, and most of that software is designed to talk to the Fediverse as a whole. Fediverse software runs in denylist mode: everything talks to everything else, but instance operators can choose to block other instances.
This enormous system has no central control; there is a significant amount of conflict between neighborhoods. In this analogy, in the Fediverse, people are building roads to and from all sorts of different neighborhoods, digging up roads because the next neighborhood over is sending people over to smash up your windows or beat people up, digging up roads because of personal grudges, and so on.
This description of the worst of the Fediverse's problems makes the Fediverse sound like hell, which it generally isn't. It functions, and much of it is quiet and pleasant; you can get to most neighborhoods from most other neighborhoods most of the time. When things get bad, though, they get very bad. If you happen to live in a neighborhood that gets its roads cut, or if your best friend lives down a road that got cut, the city starts to seem less and less appealing.
All of this is on public CCTV: most places have a "federated feed," a stream of what every single person within reach of your neighborhood is seeing, with their name and address on the screen. You can choose not to show up on the cameras, but most people prefer to be seen. Sometimes this leads to people watching TV and looking for people they don't like, to go and yell at them in person. This has led to a lot of roads being dug up.
The shifting nature of the landscape, lack of any sort of unified cooperative system, and the fact that neighborhoods can get in fights with other neighborhoods can make it very difficult for users to navigate, or for people who become embroiled in the worst conflicts, traumatizing.
The Website League is an "island network," where our software runs in allowlist mode. Websites will only talk to other websites they have placed in their allowlists. That list of websites will be cooperatively managed; a website that is a member of the League will be able to talk to all other websites in the League. It's either in, or it's out.
The League is an experiment in doing something different. We are building a town that works cooperatively from the start: our neighborhoods are all connected to each other, like a city built on a grid. We are starting with an agreement on what we want our city to look like, how people in it should be able to get around, and how to keep people safe. Nobody digs up roads, because this harms everyone in the city; to solve problems, we have a centralized, democratic, consensus- and consent-based system of governance.
This is why we've been calling ourselves a confederation: it's a term used to describe a system of governance composed of independent communities cooperating, as described by the concept of democratic confederalism, a libertarian socialist theory intended to provide a framework in which "minorities, religious communities, cultural groups, gender-specific groups and other societal groups" can organize themselves autonomously. It's also non-statist and, for our purposes, a way to ensure all of our instances have a seat at the governance table and a say in what their city looks like. Every instance and its staff will have a right (if they want to exercise it) to be represented in our system of governance.
People who want to construct a neighborhood will have to agree to keep their residents safe (in the same way everyone else is), agree to do their part to keep the city running well, and receive assent from the others helping run the city, so we can all build transit lines to the new place.
The fact that we are cooperating in running the city means we can try new things together. The Fediverse has to largely work together, but we have advantages they cannot; we could potentially centralize things that might be difficult for instance admins, like media hosting, or coordinate efforts to improve our federation protocols.
One final difference in this analogy: a city is a much more durable structure than an apartment building. None of us are being paid for this, but there are a lot of us, and the federated system means that hosting costs for each website are low. No one of us is able to perform the amount of labor that a full-time employee could, but we hope that our cooperation makes up for it.
The overall technical user experience is similar to Mastodon, but more cohesive; most information and guides written about Mastodon will apply to the League. The biggest differences are for people who want to run their own websites.
For a user, the experience is like this: first, you'll choose a neighborhood you'd like to live in. (We will have a list of instances, with information about each; some folks are planning to make instances for just themselves, some for them and their friends, and some for larger groups of people.) There's no CCTV system. (Federation feeds are disabled.) Some neighborhoods will have parks their residents can hang out at. ("Local feeds," a stream of all the posts on an single instance, are up to the people operating that instance.)
To talk to your friends, you'll need their name and address. The primary address for our central announcement system is "@league@websiteleague.org." You will post, and people following you will see it.
The fact that different neighborhoods can have different kinds of software means that your experience can differ depending on where you choose to settle. The software we're focusing our efforts on first, GoToSocial, works roughly like Twitter or Mastodon; it is not quite the same as Cohost, but you will have very high character limits for longform writing, will be able to upload high-quality media, and you will be able to use Markdown formatting. (We have skilled software developers onboard and are hopeful about the idea of supporting a limited subset of HTML and CSS (sandboxed in posts) in the future.)
Eventually, you may be able to join an instance that is designed for photography and works like Instagram, requiring a photo with each post. Some people might choose to run instances for themselves that work like a traditional blog site, but with posts that can be shared and commented on by people in the Website League. There are many, many possibilities.
If you choose to join a photography-focused instance, your interface might look like Instagram, and require you to post a photo. Some people may run their own instances as a blog, but with posts that can be shared and commented on by others in the League.
The Website League is a union of websites, working toward a common goal: we all want this to be a nice place to post, one that's enjoyable by all and welcoming to everyone. Each website can be its own community; you can make a place for you and your friends, and be able to talk to other people down the road and see what they're up to; you can find a place with a good vibe, settle down, and find a home there. You can take the bus to the art gallery down the road to show people what you've done in a setting built to highlight your work.
Individual instances are run by volunteers, and their rules are based on a single core set of rules, derived from the community guidelines of Cohost, a social network many of our users used.
Moderators, instance administrators, and other users with expertise or valuable perspectives are part of a central decision-making body, the Stewards. This group works to find consensus on larger-scale issues, assist each other with moderation and administration workloads, maintain the allowlist, resolve issues raised by users, and anything else it makes sense for us to do. League planning, rulemaking, and operation is by consensus, and individual instance moderators and administrators will manage their own small communities.
Instances wishing to join the League will be reviewed and voted on by this governing body.
Website League member sites must, as much as possible, disable any visibility of post metrics, the federated timeline, and the ability for users to access each others' lists of following and followed users.
We will, as best we can, work according to the Zapatista principles of good governance. These are:
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The Website League is preparing for launch. If you wish to be a part of our efforts, join Coordination, our chat platform where we conduct the bulk of our everyday development and operations. Signup is open to everyone through Authentication, our unified account management system for all central infrastructure in the League.
We also have a Discord server. Initially, we chose Discord as it has the lowest barrier to entry for a chat platform. We've since moved most of our focused work to Coordination, but the Discord server still exists as a touchpoint for user support and communication.
Some nodes are already available to join pre-launch; you can find out about these in Coordination and the Discord. We will announce general availability in Coordination, the Discord, and in the newsletter.
We also have three other user-accessible systems: