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What is the Fediverse?

The clue is in the name! It's a portmanteau of "Federated Universe".

It's not a platform nor is it an ecosystem, it's an entire
universe of stuff!

Now think about what's in our
literal universe: galaxies, black holes, comets, cosmic dust, planets, an unfathomable amount of stuff.

This is not unlike the Fediverse which also has lots of stuff
🌌

#LearnFediverse

But what do we mean by "federation"? Before I go further, let me talk about my favourite science fiction: Star Trek!

In the 1960s, Star Trek introduced an interesting idea. It was called the United Federation of Planets (UFoP).

The idea was that a whole lot of planets came together to build an organization greater than themselves.

Humanity got together with other alien species to
cooperate. Rather than going to war, we humans created diplomatic ties with Vulcans, Andorians, and Tellarites to build something greater than ourselves.

Seeing the power of cooperation, even more alien species joined the United Federation of Planets, pooling resources together, to build prosperity.

This is not so different from the Fediverse. In fact, the fictional UFoP works a lot the Fediverse!

#LearnFediverse

The fictional United Federation of Planets works because they're a network of diplomatically connected to planets.

In Star Trek, there are hundreds of planets that make the sum of the Federation. What's core to making the organization work isn't military. It is communication.

Check out this map of Star Trek's fictional Federation.

#LearnFediverse

Like Star Trek's fictional Federation, the Fediverse has "planets". But we have another term for this.

We call them
nodes.

Each node communicates and cooperates to build something greater than the sum of its parts.

When one node cooperates with another, and there's a tacit agreement with other nodes that they will continue to talk to each other, this is called
federation.

#LearnFediverse

Interestingly, the concept of a Fediverse is as old as Star Trek itself. It's not a new idea. Just like Star Trek, the idea started in the 1960s.

In the 1960s, United States Department of Defense launched Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET).

ARPANET was a network of
federated nodes that communicate with each other over vast distances.

Amusingly, in early memoranda, ARPANET was described as the "Intergalactic Computer Network".

The idea was simple. If you have three computers, rather than having three separate sets of commands, have one set of commands that would enable conversation across the three computers.

And as more computers join the network, each which would have access to the same set of commands, the usefulness of the shared connectivity would increase.

Here's an early map of what ARPANET looked like.

#LearnFediverse

What you're seeing here is one of the first nodes on ARPANET. It's known as an Interface Message Processor (IMP).

Note the word "Message" in "Interface Message Processor" because
messaging was core to its use.

These nodes were used to connect participants of ARPANET, and they were the precursors to today's modern routers.

An IMP's job was to be a middleman node that would literally store and forward a message from one originating node towards its ultimate destination.

Why do I mention IMPs? Because right out of the gate, the goal of
federating nodes was about creating the infrastructure for sharing messages. And what enabled this unique form of cooperation were IMPs.

The terminology has changed, but the idea remains the same.

What the Fediverse is about is sending messages from one node to another. And when there cannot be a direct connection, middleman nodes can send messages from one originating node to its ultimate destination.

#LearnFediverse

Tracy Hall

@atomicpoet
I hope you're familiar with @lauren - who operated / maintained that very machine?

@video_manager @atomicpoet That doesn't look like our UCLA one exactly. Ours (IMP #1) had four big bolts on the top (the joke was for lowering into submarines). Also, the last time I saw a recent photo of it the DYMO label that I glued down above some switches (when it kept popping up) was still there.