Overview: Fediverse

What?

Strictly speaking, the Fediverse is a collection of interoperable social networks built on the open Web standard ActivityPub, including Twitter-lookalike Mastodon and YouTube-lookalike PeerTube, as well as Meta's Threads, which "federated" in 2024.

Unlike Twitter and YouTube, however:

• Mastodon/PeerTube are not owned and controlled by corporations. Anyone can launch and operate a Mastodon or PeerTube server, just like anyone can set up an email server and exchange emails with others using the email standard.
• The person who creates a server sets its rules (privacy, hate speech, etc).
• Users on any Mastodon/PeerTube server can not only interact with users on other Mastodon/PeerTube servers, they can interact across Fediverse platforms. For example:
  • if Mastodon user A follows PeerTube user B, B’s PeerTube videos will appear in A’s Mastodon feed,
  • user A can even comment on the video from within Mastodon, without visiting PeerTube or having a PeerTube account.

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.

So what?

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. 

And that, in theory, changes everything. Instead of everyone being trapped in a few platforms owned by billionaires who impose the algorithm which maximises their profits (ie optimising for enragement), "The Fediverse thus promises a landscape of interconnected gardens of all shapes and sizes, each managed according to its inhabitant’s needs. People can roam everywhere, talk to anyone and change “home garden” at will" - Welcome to the Fediverse, starry-eyed noob.

Challenges

The ActivityPub approach, however, has some flaws - see:

• the singleton problem: 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.
• "Federated networks become oligopolies at scale" due to forces seen everywhere ("airline routes, power grids, trains, banks, Bitcoin mining, protein interactions, ecological food webs, neural networks"), so the fediverse evolves to become something only a little better to the centralised apps it was trying to replace - see Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

Other approaches to building alternative decentralised ecosystems therefore exist.

What about...?

Bluesky

By late 2024 I had opted for Bluesky as more promising for building decentralised collective intelligence, because:

• like Fedizens, Bluesky users own their data, but they can also move it wherever they like without changing their identity (unlike in the Fediverse).
• anyone can build on Bluesky, without asking permission, so any Bluesky user can subscribe to custom feeds and moderation tools developed by 3rd parties.

Derived from this Bluesky thread by @danabra.mov

Nostr & Farcaster

These both venture into blockchain territory. I'll be investigating these soon.

See also

• Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid, providing social media users with control over their data through personal knowledge graphs.
• adversarial interoperability - another part of the solution to this problem.

Personal state of play

ActivityPub

I was an early convert to ActivityPub as a theoretical idea, and in 2022 found myself writing a Fediverse strategy report for another EC department as the EU's Data Protection Supervisor and the EC's IT department launched social.network.europa.eu, the EU's own Mastodon server. The same year saw the EU Bubble's own server - https://eupolicy.social/ - 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... 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?).

At about the same time I took the plunge as part of the #TwitterMigration triggered by Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter. 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 infrastructure simply doesn't deliver content properly reliably.

I'd point you to the mid-2023 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.

Well before then the EU's experiments had become clearly underwhelming, 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. In April 2024 it was closed.

Meanwhile https://eupolicy.social/ was shrinking, from 720 active accounts soon after launch to 225 by late 2024.

From Threads to Bluesky...

Literally one month after my Mastodon server disappeared, Instagram's "Twitter-killer" Threads arrived in Europe, announcing their intention to join the Fediverse. I dug out my never-used Instagram account, and also launched a Bluesky account to kick both networks' tyres in parallel.

Currently I'm feeling confident about Bluesky, as set out in my November 2024 newsletter.

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Version control

I develop this Fediverse Overview using the permanent versions pattern described in  Two wiki authors and a blogger walk into a bar….

• changes in this version:
  • updated to reflect what I learnt about Bluesky, and generally shortened
• version control
  • this is version: 4
  • previous versions available on my experimental wiki

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More reading: resources tagged OR(#fediverse, #open web, #bluesky, #mastodon, #threads, #nostr) follow below: