What is the Fediverse and why does it matter?

#fediverse #eldiara

It is a common name for related social networks running on free open source software on a huge number of servers around the world. Historically, this term has only included micro-blogging platforms that support a set of protocols called OStatus. This did not correspond to the large number of projects that were mixed, shared the same values, and quite popular.

Where Mastodon messages are limited to 500 characters, Diaspora Social Network offers much longer messages that can be shared publicly, in certain social circles chosen by the user, or tagged according to the topic. Although the Diaspora is very concerned about the turn of events, it is powerless to take any action, as control over any of the Diaspora servers (or “under”) belongs to the administrator of that server, who can be anyone.

The new guardians of democracy?

None of the federative services are likely to cause much excitement in Silicon Valley boardrooms, but their collective potential may become greater than the sum of their parts, encouraging interaction between services, which is really exciting, and this is a prospect that is very possible (and indeed already happening) thanks to standard protocols common to federative services.

Probably the leading role in this respect belongs to ActivityPub, a standard published in January this year as an official World Wide Web Consortium Recommendation. Since it speaks the same language as Mastodon, a Mastodon user can follow a PeerTube user.

He correctly notes that Facebook and Twitter also contain hate speech and threats of violence. Mastodon is organized in Fediverse, which means that users in one case can follow and interact with users from another.

This helps Mastodon feel like a single community, but by default, it can make users from one instance vulnerable to trolls from another. Mastodon is a “federated” social network that works like Twitter. It transfers control over data into the user's hands, not into a single corporation. Mastodon us...

Mastodon is a “federative” social network that works like Twitter. However, platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have also faced a lot of contradictions, and without going into details, I want to highlight only one of them in this video: centralization. So, if you subscribe to one instance, you can still interact with users on the other.

Any platform or application that implements ActivityPub becomes part of a huge social network. In general, Mastodon needs to find ways to reduce social friction.

Keep an eye on your friends and discover new ones among more than 4.4 million people. The thousands of independent communities running Mastodon form a single network where, although each planet is different, being part of one is part of the whole. Using a set of standard protocols, Mastodon servers can share information with each other, allowing users to interact seamlessly.