Here's what they aren't: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Peach, or anything like that. You already know about those digital places, and there are plenty of reasons to avoid them. Our short list of lesser-known social sites either mirror services you're already familiar with, or go in an entirely new direction. Many (but not all) are community-operated, decentralized, free, open-source, privacy-focused, and ad-free. All the services in this list are built on the ActivityPub protocol, which allows decentralized social networks using independent servers. They each have their own community and rules. Imagine that, instead of there being just one Twitter, there were dozens of individual websites all running Twitter's code and communicating with one another. That's a decentralized network. Some ActivityPub services can also interact with each other, forming a larger network of social platforms called the fediverse. Some fediverse services can talk with each other, even though one may be for microblogging and the other for photo sharing. By contrast, you can't follow a Twitter account from Facebook; those are two entirely separate worlds. This kind of interaction doesn't always work perfectly, but it's one of the most exciting facets of the fediverse.