If you're new here, you may be wondering what the Fediverse is.
The Fediverse is a collection of alternative social networks which share a common technical standard called ActivityPub.
The importance of this is that it lets people on one network interact with people on another network. For example, if you're on Mastodon you can follow and interact with people on PixelFed and vice versa.
This is a very powerful concept in social media, and something you cannot do on commercial centralised networks like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.
The reason this is possible is because the Fediverse uses co-operative free open standards instead of trying to trap people in "walled gardens".
This collaboration means that whenever one Fediverse network gets more users, it also increases the audience for all the other Fediverse networks too.
This allows tiny community-based servers run by volunteers to reach millions of people around the world. It's giving us back control.
@feditips can I find the history of this design somewhere? It's a brilliant idea and I'd love to know how it came about.
ActivityPub was drawn up by a number of people, including @cwebber who is currently working on a next gen replacement, @spritelyproject
On a more general level, federation is how all communication used to work before Facebook, Twitter etc took over.
Email is federated, telephones are federated, the world's postal services are federated... It used to be standard that different networks talked to each other, because it benefits the users so much.
It would be ridiculous if you had to be on the same phone network as someone in order to call them.
But Facebook, Twitter etc aren't about benefitting users though, and there are currently no regulations forcing them to benefit users.
A general-purpose Mastodon server with a 1000 character limit.
