The other secret way to follow Secret Breakfast

Use the fediverse, the most beautiful part of the internet many don't know yet.

There's a way to follow this newsletter that most of you don't know exists. It doesn't require a new inbox. It doesn't require another subscription. And it puts you in control of what you read, for once.

It's called the fediverse. And you already understand it.

Think about email for a second. You have a Gmail address. Your friend uses iCloud. Your colleague is on a company server somewhere in Frankfurt. Different services, different apps, different providers. And yet, you write to each other without thinking about it.

Nobody asks: "are you on Gmail too?" You just send the email.

The fediverse works the same way.

A network of networks

The fediverse is a collection of social platforms that can talk to each other. Mastodon, Pixelfed, Flipboard, PeerTube: they all speak the same underlying language, called ActivityPub.

Your account lives on one platform. Someone else's lives on another. You follow each other anyway.

Just like email.

The address looks a bit different: instead of [email protected] you get @[email protected]. Two @ signs. The first part is your username, the second is where your account lives.

Why it matters

Every social network you've used in the last fifteen years was built on the same assumption: you come here, you stay here, and we own the relationship.

Twitter decided what you saw. Facebook decided who you could reach. Instagram decided whether a post was worth showing. The platform was the product, and you were inside it.

The fediverse breaks that assumption. Your account is yours. If the platform you chose closes down or turns hostile, you move elsewhere. Your followers come with you. The content stays yours.

No algorithm deciding your reach. No company selling your attention.

It's not perfect

The fediverse is decentralized, which means it's also a little rough around the edges. Onboarding is less smooth. Features vary by platform. Choosing a server when you sign up feels unnecessarily complicated at first.

But these are early-internet problems, not fundamental ones. The protocol works. The community is real. The content is good.

And unlike every social network that promised to be different, the fediverse's independence isn't a feature they can take away. It's the architecture.

How to follow Secret Breakfast this way

Mastodon is the simplest entry point. Go to joinmastodon.org, pick a server, sign up in five minutes.

Then search for @[email protected] and follow it. Each new issue lands directly in your feed. No extra inbox. No algorithm in the way.

I built this because I wanted to give you a way to read that nobody owns. If you've been here for a while, it's worth trying. It feels like the internet used to feel, before everything became a platform.

Secret Breakfast is a weekly newsletter on food, cooking, and the culture around eating. You can now follow it for free via this website, by email, on the fediverse (at @[email protected]) and via RSS.