(Notes: This is a permanent version of my Fediverse Overview. More version control information in the footer.)
Fediverse: collection of interoperable social networks built on Open Web standards. ActivityPub standard, for example, is used by (inter alia) Twitter-lookalike Mastodon and YouTube-lookalike PeerTube, and sometime in 2024 newcomers Bluesky and Threads (tbc!).
Unlike Twitter and YouTube, however:
This would be like if my Twitter account followed someone's Facebook page, yet we could still interact seamlessly from our platform of preference. That’s impossible as Twitter & Facebook are walled gardens. Fediverse platforms like Mastodon and PeerTube are not – this is the Open Web on social.
See also: Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid, providing social media users with control over their data through personal knowledge graphs.
While each Fediverse server is a community with its own rules, they're not walled gardens. This helps solve the vicious circle problem facing new platforms (why join a network where there are so few people on it? Hence noone joins it, so numbers stay low. So noone joins it): people don’t need to join the same social network, they just have to join any Fediverse network.
Reality check: Servers must be bidirectionally linked manually? Mastodon apparently suffers from "the singleton problem... [as it's] difficult to convince ... a major server to [federate] ... with a minor one... three Mastodon servers contain almost 60% of the known Mastodon population" - Peer-to-Peer Network Models and their Implications.
See also: adversarial interoperability - another part of the solution to this problem.
If progressives decamp, they should decamp to Fediverse alternatives.
The EU Institutions could help: by simply joining and posting to Fediverse platforms in addition to Facebook/Twitter, they could:
Nevertheless, wide Fediverse adoption still requires a 'mass decamp'. There have already been a couple of false dawns.
Cue the US2020 elections, following which "US conservative leaders may have triggered the sort an en masse decamp that Facebook/Twitter alternatives require to take off".
However they're not moving to Fediverse platforms, so this may simply return us to the #splinternet (pre-platform social media), but with even more political polarisation.
Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter triggered a huge uptick of interest in Mastodon, leading me to finally take the plunge after 2 years of faffing about. I was optimistic (my first post was literally Welcome to the Fediverse, starry-eyed noob), but within a few months I'd discovered an unhappy truth: the current infrasructure simply doesn't deliver content properly reliably.
I'd point you to the mid-2022 toot where I pointed this out, but (as if to illustrate my point) it's gone: in November my server simply disappeared, taking all my content and connections with it, without warning. I managed to dig out a screenshot of that toot from my phone and include it in All my toots gone.
As can be seen from that post, by then I'd created a Bluesky account and was promptly followed by Satan. I haven't bothered since.
Also in 2022: just as I was writing a Fediverse strategy report for another EC department, the EU's Data Protection Supervisor and the EC's IT department launched social.network.europa.eu, the EU's own Mastodon server. The result was underwhelming to say the least, with accounts limited to the institutions, rather than the people working in them. Someone clearly never read Euan Semple's "Organisations don't tweet, people do", missing a huge opportunity that news organisations started embracing in 2022: setting up a Fediverse server for their journalists to prove that they are their journalists, not an imposter.
Soon afterwards the EU Bubble's own server - https://eupolicy.social/ - was launched. As I pointed out at the time, this had real potential:
it should be very easy for eupolicy.social to avoid creating a Brussels Bubble within the Fediverse. In the past I spent a lot of time exploring how us denizens of the Brussels Bubble could outreach to national conversations online. In the Fediverse, that’s upside down: rather than building bridges outwards, we can pull national conversations into the Bubble, simply by following the right people.
-Am I on the right Mastodon instance? (November 2022)
Back then they had 720 active accounts. 13 months later that had shrunk to 330. The EU's social.network.europa.eu has 18. It wasn't a good year.
Literally one month after my Mastodon server disappeared, Instagram's "Twitter-killer" Threads arrived in Europe, announcing their intention - like Bluesky - to join the Fediverse, so I dug out my never-used Instagram account to kick the tyres.
As discussed during a ZNLive chat one week before, this should make 2024 at least potentially interesting:
Highlighted Resources tagged OR(#fediverse, #open web, #bluesky, #mastodon, #threads, #nostr) follow below:
I manage my Fediverse Overview using the permanent versions pattern described in Two wiki authors and a blogger walk into a bar…