Decentralisation, Silence, and the Fediverse
Towards autumn last year, I found myself rediscovering Quakerism. Perhaps that sounds slightly odd, because it’s not something I ever fully “lost”, but like many things in life, it had simply slipped quietly into the background for a while.
My first encounter with the Religious Society of Friends was during my (post-)university years in London, when I attended meetings for worship at Friends House in Euston. I was drawn to the quiet, the lack of hierarchy, and the sense that truth was something discovered together rather than declared from above.
After university, life moved on. Family, careers, countries, projects, and the usual busyness took over. Even so, the memory of those meetings - the silence, the shared responsibility for the space, the idea that authority is distributed rather than centralised - stayed with me. Reconnecting with that tradition felt a bit like "coming home".
My journey back to Quakerism happened alongside something else that began a few years earlier: my gradual move away from mainstream social media and my immersion in the Fediverse.
For many years, Twitter had been my online home and I had carved out a small, but lively niche there - a global mix of people, ideas, and conversations that I genuinely enjoyed. When Elon "Muskler" bought the platform, something shifted. The tone changed, the atmosphere felt different, and it stopped feeling like a place where I wanted to spend my time.
Eventually, I left and began exploring Mastodon and, through it, the wider Fediverse.
Like many newcomers, I initially found it a little confusing. The idea of “instances”, the absence of a single company running everything, and the different culture of conversation took some getting used to.
Confusion and technical challenges notwithstanding, I stayed.
Slowly, the network began to make sense. Conversations felt less performative. Communities formed around shared interests rather than algorithms. The decentralised structure - independent servers connected to one another - started to feel strangely familiar.
Along the way I’m meeting many thoughtful and interesting people. One of them is Wess Daniels, a Quaker theologian and academic at Guilford College with a shared penchant for coffee, silence, and digital minimalism, whom I met on Mastodon earlier this year.
A month ago he posted a simple line that immediately caught my attention:
“The Quaker tradition is the #fediverse of Christianity.”
It was one of those sentences that feels obvious the moment you read it.
Quakerism has always been decentralised. Meetings are autonomous yet connected. Authority is shared rather than concentrated. Communities govern themselves while remaining in relationship with one another. In other words, the structure looks remarkably similar to the Fediverse.
That short post sparked a back and forth of DMs between Wess and me about whether Friends might find the Fediverse a natural place to gather online. The more we talked about it, the clearer it became that while many Friends might feel comfortable in such spaces or are looking for alternatives to corporate social media platforms, the barrier to entry can still feel quite high. The technology is unfamiliar and the ecosystem can appear confusing at first glance.
That is how the idea for “The Fediverse for Friends” came about.
Together we created a short guide for Friends who are curious about the Fediverse, but unsure where to begin. It explains what the Fediverse is, why its decentralised structure resonates with Quaker traditions of shared governance, and - most importantly - how to get started in practical terms.
It's not a manifesto or a campaign, but simply a practical introduction, offered in the hope that it might help a few more Friends find their way into these spaces.
For me, working on the guide has felt like a meeting point between two journeys: rediscovering a spiritual tradition that values quiet discernment and community, and participating in a digital network that - at its best - reflects some of those same principles.
Both, as it turns out, reward patience, and both - in their own way - invite us to proceed as the way opens.
If you are a Friend or simply someone curious about the Fediverse you might enjoy taking a look at the guide. It’s a short, practical introduction designed to make the first steps a little easier. You can download “The Fediverse for Friends” HERE and explore it at your own pace.
Perhaps the next step is simply to see where the way opens.