Fediverse - the social network of the future

Hornbeam

5 min

View Original

Over the past ten years, I have had fifty accounts on Facebook, Vkontakte, Twitter, Instagram, Telegram, WhatsApp, Viber, Discord, ICQ, Skype, Zoom... I can’t remember all the variety at once. To this day, I periodically have to deal with new social networks and instant messengers that evoke one unpleasant thought: “Another account. Again". Slack - for work, Signal - for chatting about interests, YouTube - for videos, Odnoklassniki - for communicating with elderly relatives.

Surely you are familiar with e-mail, where subscribers write letters to each other despite the fact that they are on different servers. I love email because I don't have to use the same server as the other person - the common protocol means I don't even have to think about it. However, free protocols are not in trend now, because decentralization is unprofitable for commercial structures that are fighting to keep each person in their isolated ecosystem: Facebook and VKontakte users use virtually similar services, but cannot communicate with each other. It seems that we are used to this, but this is absurd!

Is it important for me or you to scroll through the YouTube feed in a separate application, and not in the same place, for example, where photos of friends or funny pictures are? Probably not important, but we are accustomed to the model of services isolated from each other and cannot present all our social networks in one window.

Do you think this is a collage of unrelated services? You are wrong. It may seem that all the sites shown are even less related to each other than VKontakte and Facebook, because these are fundamentally different concepts: video and photo hosting, a microblogging service and something similar to Twitter. However, they are all part of one global social network.

For an end user using a familiar microblogging system, it is equally possible to subscribe to all services, posts from which he will see in his feed: add to favorites, repost and comment. All actions will be fully displayed on the original page with the post. This also applies to PeerTube, a free analogue of the famous video hosting site, and Pixelfed, the free brother of Instagram.

Fediverse (from the English “Federation” and “Universe” - “Federation” and “Universe”) is a federated and fully distributed social network, mainly united by the ActivityPub protocol: any interested craftsman can familiarize himself with the protocol and implement federation support in his product, which will turn his small community into part of a global social network with mutual subscriptions, likes and other delights. There is no connection to the protocol developers: ActivityPub is free not nominally, but absolutely, like the same email protocol.

Who among the young enthusiasts has not at least once in their life thought about their social network or at least some similar platform? ActivityPub makes such a dream more real than ever: write your own backend , change the frontend , experiment with the application on your smartphone, without burdening your friends with the need to constantly move to new ecosystems.

Fediverse does not have any centralization in the form of starting nodes: nodes learn about each other when their users contact each other. When the server first interacts with a previously unknown node, it subscribes to it and henceforth they begin to federate, i.e. share the activity of your users with each other.

There are three standard types of news feed:

1. Subscriptions – posts of those the user has subscribed to.

2. Local – posts of all server users. This is especially true for thematic instances (lovers of online games, geeks, musicians, politicians, etc.).

3. Global – all posts from all known servers that the node on which the user opened this feed knows.

When we hear the name of a service, we immediately understand where to find it and how to register, but with registration in Fediverse everything is different, our eyes run wild: several different platforms and hundreds of servers. To get acquainted with Fediverse, it is good to start with microblogging services (for example, Pleroma, Mastodon, Friendica, Misskey), which have the most familiar appearance. You can get acquainted with some of the public servers on this page .

For Russian-speaking users, the bot @rf@mastodon.ml is supported by an enthusiast . If you mention him in your message, he will automatically repost the post and all the bot’s subscribers will see it. This allows you to send broadcasts to a Russian-speaking audience and keep abreast of current community events.

I've been a Mastodon user for about a year. In fact, this is the first popular service of the modern Fediverse, which is why the Mastodon mascot (elephant, mammoth) is used on the cover of the article. Also, the mention of “Mastodon” is very often found in the sense of the entire Fediverse constellation.

Mastodon for Twitter lovers is just that, it even looks very similar. Despite the fact that all Mastodon nodes are configured individually, in general the trend remains for a very small number of characters that can be contained in one post. I am a fan of long posts, so “brevity is the sister of talent” is not for me.

Now I have been actively using Pleroma for several months. As an ordinary Pleroma user, I like the large number of design themes that change the interface almost beyond recognition. For example, a screenshot with a design theme for old Windows.

The Friendica platform is best suited for blogging with full text formatting, so pay attention to it if you like to write and read in detail.

When changing servers, the user can redirect his old subscribers to a new account. Some functionality on the sites of the new social network has bugs (which are good to report), but in general Fediverse is actively developing. I can clearly see this on the scale of one and a half years of personal use.

As a person who has long abandoned traditional social networks and despises all commercial messengers, it is important for me to know in whose hands my personal data is. I'm communicating with my instance admin and some other node holders. In this, one feels a sense of belonging to the entire Social Network: not only the feed is full of people, but also the composition of the administrators.

To immerse yourself in the history and ideology of the Fediverse, I recommend a two-hour podcast .

After the publication of the article, many comments appeared about the inadequate coverage of various platforms that support the ActivityPub protocol. This is a large amount of information, which, in my opinion, will be superfluous in a compact note for a beginner and, moreover, will quite likely become the reason for new complaints about low information content: imagine that your home Internet provider should tell you not only how to access Internet, but describe in detail all possible Internet services. So I'll just say: start researching. Fediverse is not just another social network, but a conceptually new approach to Internet media, where every website, blog, audio streaming service and video hosting is part of a single ecosystem.