Spend January 2026 on the Fediverse:
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Create an account (on our Mastodon server, or another one near you).
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Then, bring your friends.
We can grow something better!
Why
We invest too much of our culture in centralized, for-profit, corporate social media platforms. These platforms enrich billionaires, expand surveillance, and fund the cult of capitalist war, all while trapping us with addictive algorithms that feed us mindless content. It feels necessary to be on these platforms to "stay connected", yet paradoxically they increase our isolation. Their purpose is to extract profit, not to help us connect.
Read more in The Manifesto for The Counterforce
Depending on where you are in the world, Meta's Instagram, Facebook, or WhatsApp may be the preferred social media for punks. Or it may be Telegram or Twitter or Discord.
As the evils of a given corporate platform become more and more apparent, punks have a tendency to jump to another app en masse. We don't want to see another jump from one billionaire-investor-owned centralized corporate platform to another.
Meta, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok, Twitter, Telegram, Discord, Substack, Google's YouTube, Reddit, and even Bluesky - these corporate platforms are all built on the same twisted dream of monopolizing our attention to extract profit. There is nothing truly liberatory, DIY, or punk about any of them.
Simply put, it's embarrassing how much punk culture gets shared on these apps and only on these apps.
The Fediverse ⁂
Instead of jumping between online capitalist corporate platforms, we propose a radical alternative that's actually aligned with punk values: the Fediverse, a network for open, autonomous, decentralized, not-for-profit, and DIY social media.
The Fediverse is an interconnected network of social media platforms that are:
- Inherently anti-corporate (it's built by autonomous individuals, collectives, non-profits, open-source weirdos and it can't be owned by any person or company).
- DIY (anyone can host a server or build a part of the network).
- Won't keep leaving us (we can invest in something we build for ourselves).
- A healthier scroll (no profit motive = no addictive doomscroll).
- Not a walled garden (you don't need to sign up and sell out to stay connected).
Learn more about the Fediverse in our Guide to Mastodon and The Fediverse (for punks!).
Baby steps
You don't have make a grand gesture and delete your Instagram account or shut down your Discord. I mean, you could. That would be really cool!
But you don't have to go cold turkey. Radical change is hard. Fediverse Punk Month is about spending January giving the Fediverse an honest try. You can still keep your Instagram account, but maybe at the end of the month you'll realize you don't need it anymore?
Our experiences
We know this can work. We've been running a Fediverse-connected punk show calendar and Mastodon server for punks in Montreal since 2021. As it's slowly grown, it's given a lot of punks here an off-ramp to ditch Instagram. We've created a place where local punks can share upcoming shows, announce new releases, make new friends, and start bands - without needing to rely on a platform like Instagram.
And it's more than just us on there! We are connected to other punks worldwide, thanks to the Fediverse. But it would be nice if there were more!
And it's not just a few constellations of punks. The Fediverse attracts a lot of punk-adjacent communities because of the values it embodies. There are a lot of anarchists and other leftists, queer and trans people, off-grid weirdos, artists, archivists, radio enthusiasts, urban explorers, - anyone who's escaped from corporate social media but still sees some value in connecting with others online.
