The Website League is a new social media project, built with the goals of provide 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.
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 is an "island network:" a set of small social media websites, connected to each other, and as a whole disconnected from other islands.
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. This group works to find consensus on larger-scale issues, assist each other with moderation and administration workloads, maintain the allowlist, and resolve issues raised by users. League planning, rulemaking, and operation will be 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.
The software used to run a League instance is anything that is both compatible with the ActivityPub federation protocol, and supports allowlist mode federation, which federates only with an approved list of websites. (Currently, this does not include Mastodon, as it does not function correctly for League use in allowlist mode; this is likely to change in the future.)
Anyone can set up an instance, whether it's for themselves, their friends, a subject-specific audience, or general use. Admission to the League will result in this instance be added to the centrally managed allowlist, to link it to all other instances.
The Website League is structured to function completely independently of the Fediverse, the largest collection of federated social media sites (which is mostly made up of Mastodon instances).
Single instances may choose to federate with both networks, but we only recommend this for single-user or private instances; users on such an instance must be aware that their posts will be seen by two separate bodies of people, with different cultures.
Many of our users were or are users of the Fediverse; some had unpleasant experiences there in the past and would prefer to avoid it. The Website League is meant to provide a separate federated space with a cohesive, central set of community guidelines shared by all instances, which is something impossible in the Fediverse.
In addition, all League member sites must, as much as possible, disable features out of their sites that drive unhealthy engagement with social media, and which cause conflicts to escalate out of control and embroil entire instances or the network as a whole. This means no federated timelines and no metrics shown on posts.
We will, as best we can, work according to the Zapatista principles of good governance. These are:
No.
The Website League is currently in its initial planning stages. If you wish to be a part of our efforts, join our Discord server. (We chose Discord as it has the lowest initial barrier to entry, and plan to eventually switch away from it.)