You don’t need to know anything technical, or how to make a website, to participate in the Website League.
In short, the Website League is a “federated” network of websites, which means it is a number of small social media websites that are all connected together to form a larger community. The technical term for this is an island network. As a user, this means you can sign up for any of these websites without it affecting who or what you see; this is because users on any League website can see posts and follow users from any other League website. Because the League is composed of multiple websites, all users have a username “address” which takes the format of
The closest analogue to what we are doing here is the Fediverse, and most of the basic functionality is identical, so let’s start there.
On regular social networks—think Facebook or Twitter—everyone uses the same, singular, centrally-operated website and that website, generally, cannot directly talk to other websites. If you post something on Twitter, it cannot losslessly be seen on Facebook (and vice versa).
This is not the case for the Fediverse, which can be called a federated social network. This is a technical way of describing a social media ecosystem made up of many smaller websites (we call them “nodes”; the Fediverse calls them “instances”) that directly talk to each other and see each other’s posts (“federate”). As the terminology implies, any collection of websites that talk to each other like this can also be termed a “federation.”
One of the big benefits of a federated social network is that anyone can make a website of their own but still connect it to a much larger community; by default, all websites in such a federated social network talk to all others.
The Website League is, in this way, basically a Fediverse, but smaller: every website in the Website League talks to every other website in the League by default. Where we diverge from the broader Fediverse is the scope of our federation. Instead of talking with every other federated website online, we only talk with other Website League websites. In other words, the Website League is its own self-contained loop, kind of like a webring. We manage this through an “allowlist,” which doubles as the list of the websites in the Website League.
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, the social network is the city and each neighborhood is a node within that social network. People in one node can interact with people in other nodes that theirs is connected to (“federated” with) by a road; you just have to know where they live.
Knowing where someone lives is easy, because every user has an address: "user@neighborhood.com," for example. This address makes it possible for your node to know that you want to talk to someone with the name "user" whose account lives in the node "neighborhood.com." (By contrast, non-federated social networks are like living in an enormous apartment building; you don't need an address like this, because everyone's name is on the directory by the elevator.)
Not all cities operate the same, however, even if they’re built from the same building blocks.
The Fediverse, for example, has no central authority or control. It is made of many different kinds of nodes, running many different kinds of software, and by default everything is connected to everything else it doesn’t explicitly block. This means—for better or worse—that people are constantly building roads to-and-fro, from every neighborhood to every other neighborhood.
Most of the time, your neighborhood also puts on a CCTV feed that anyone can watch. This CCTV feed contains 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.
Despite how hectic this sounds, most of the time the city is genuinely quiet and pleasant and you can get from most neighborhoods to most other neighborhoods without difficulty. When things get bad in the city, though, they get very bad and this rule of thumb breaks down. Sometimes, people dig up roads and sever their connection to another neighborhood because that neighborhood is sending people over to smash up windows or beat people up; other times, people dig up roads for no reason other than spite because there are few ways to resolve conflicts. And sometimes the CCTV feed leads to people watching the feed simply to find people they don’t like in order to go and yell at them in person, which is deeply unpleasant and also leads to a lot of roads being dug up.
Needless to say, if this happens to you—or you happen to live in a neighborhood that gets cut off, or if your best friend lives in one that’s cut off from you—suddenly living in this city can become significantly less appealing.
By contrast, the Website League is an experiment in doing something different. We are building a city that works cooperatively from the start: our neighborhoods are all connected to each other, like a city built on a grid. We have 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. There’s no CCTV system overlooking everything. And nobody digs up roads, because this harms everyone in the city; to solve problems when they come up, we have a collective, democratic, consensus- and consent-based 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 also means we can try new things together that the Fediverse as a whole cannot. We could potentially centralize things that might be difficult for node admins—think 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 individual in the Website League is able to perform the amount of labor that a full-time employee could, but we hope that our collective cooperation makes up for it.