The Fediverse: What It Is

Hello Everyone, and happy new year!

Sorry for not posting for a long time (since my last), I am recovering so I felt like doing a post today.

I have been exploring some stuff over the holidays and I looked at the fediverse, now tell me, what is the fediverse?, well like I always do, I will explain.

The easiest way to explain it a bit is thinking about it as email, yes, email, because it doesn’t matter if you use Outlook or Gmail, you can still send and receive email from each other, no matter what (well, the reason for that is email is an open-standard, but it’s not what we are talking about today).

However, this is not the same with social media (Instagram, X/Twitter etc…), for example, if you really wanted to follow a person on X, but you only use facebook, you will be forced to sign up for that platform and then following that person, which leads to juggling multiple identities on each platform, remembering many logins and more.

The problem was solved thanks to ActivityPub, a W3C-standardized protocol, that allowed interoperability between platforms that supported it (Mastodon, diaspora, Frendica), it also allowed you to keep one identity across the ActivityPub platforms, no more remembering many logins now.

But due to the problems of Account Porting, Bluesky PBC (which used to be an internal research group at Twitter Inc) formed a new protocol called ATProto, which if implemented, gives an Immutable DID and a linked domain (this also allows for verifying people, by supplying a DNS Query of a resource record, or requesting a text file from the web service), It works the same as ActivityPub but one difference is that you can use one identity (one login) for many ATProto services, this also contributes to “Not having too much logins”.

I am already using fedi socials like Mastodon and Bluesky but i have been trying some other ones like frendica, diaspora and lemmy, and so far, it’s good, i can follow myself on different ActivityPub Platform (eg, i can follow myself from Mastodon, on frendica).

Now, if you decided that you would like to try, you would notice that you would need to pick a server. Servers are like councils (or states) that you host your account on (either public ones, or you can self-host your own!), just pick the server, create an account there and done!, of course, they are fediverse, which means that people can see your posts and you can see posts from other servers, and if you don’t like the way your server works, just switch!

It wasn’t much to explain about the fediverse, i am only making a comeback after such long, but if you are interested in the fediverse, you can visit this site to check out the alternatives they have on there, you can use both non-fedi and fedi, or you can choose to switch to the fediverse altogether, you can also check out this site to look for servers for fediverse services like Mastodon or Misskey.

Anyways, I will see you in the next post!