A friendly introduction to the Fediverse. - The Doctor - Medium
▻https://drwho.virtadpt.net/entry/a-friendly-introduction-to-the-fediverse
Unless you never use it, Twitter these days is a cesspool of flame wars, hit-and-run shitposting, shoutybots, nazis, and people generally not having a good time. Facebook went full cyberpunk a few years ago and you’re fortunate if you ever see posts from people you actually live with. Tumblr recently committed brand and business seppuku by hamhandedly hunting down and removing anything that even vaguely smacks of adult content (but you’ll have no trouble finding nazis or their fellow travelers). These things have lead to a large number of people getting fed up with social networks but they still want to find people to, well, socially network with.
The Fediverse is a network of social networking applications that communicate with each other. While the history is more complex than I tell it, for our purposes it started with Mastodon, an open source microblogging server that resembles Twitter in some ways. First there was mastodon.social, the instance run by the creator of the software as a proof of concept. Then more and more people started setting up their own instances — thousands of them. So many that a project called Mastodon Network Monitoring came together to watch the evolution of this network. Some instances are more or less general purpose where you can pretty much find folks of every kind. Some instances have a particular theme associated with them, like cyberpunk (cybre.space), LGBTQ culture (lgbt.io), the furry fandom (awoo.space), Star Trek (tenforward.social), cryptocurrency (bitcoinhackers.org), Homestuck (trollian.space), or just about anything else. There is even at least one instance dedicated to running bots (botsin.space). Not that they’ll come down on you if you don’t strictly adhere to the theme but they do ask that you at least have something to do with it. This is one of the reasons why it is common for users to have multiple accounts on multiple instances, often called “aspects.” Some people prefer to only talk about certain things on certain instances.
By now you’re probably wondering what makes this different somehow from other socnets. What’s the secret sauce? The various pieces of software that comprise the Fediverse (Mastodon, Pleroma, Peertube, Pixelfed, and so forth) are all designed to have content moderation tools built in (which ostensibly the other socnets also have but so badly fail at using) and each instance has at least one person moderating the shenanagains (at the very least the person running the instance, while the bigger ones have groups of mods). Once in a while an instance that gets reported by lots of people or does something patently uncool will be de-federated — this means that other instances will reject any traffic from and will no longer send any traffic to those instances. I’ll leave the sorts of stuff that can warrant de-federation to your imagination, but if you’ve ever been dogpiled on Twitter you have a pretty good idea of what I mean. And yes, occasionally we have trouble with rogue users and instances trying to wreak havoc. We clamp down on that sort of thing hard.
Earlier, I briefly mentioned a number of other servers without any explanation or context, and I’d like to explain briefly what they are. This will become relevant in a minute, I promise.
Pixelfed — An image sharing microblogging server, kind of like Instagram.
Peertube — A video sharing server. Upload your videos and other people can watch them. Think Youtube.
WriteFreely — A blogging application which can participate in the Fediverse. Can be used as a personal blog or a sign-up-and-go community blog, kind of like Blogger. Built to encourage long-form writing.
Plume — Another federated blogging application.
Funkwhale — An audio and music sharing server that can participate in the Fediverse. Think Soundcloud or Grooveshark.
ActivityPub for Wordpress — Yes, there’s even a plugin for Wordpress.
Now, that thing I said was relevant? The neat thing about these other servers is that they all support ActivityPub, meaning that they participate in the Fediverse as first class citizens. To put it another way, a Mastodon user can follow a couple of friends’ Peertube feeds, add the plugin for Wordpress so their friends can follow their blog from their Pleroma and Mastodon accounts, and you don’t have to set up an account on each server. If I post something to my Pixelfed account (I don’t have one, but let’s pretend for a minute), you at your account on a Peertube server (again, let’s pretend) can follow me over there and look at the pictures of my mom’s cat I just posted.