Fediverse

The Fediverse (commonly shortened to Fedi)[1][2][3] is a collection of social networking services that can communicate with each other (formally known as federation) using a common protocol. Users of different websites can send and receive status updates, multimedia files and other data across the network. The term Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".[4]

5 nodes in pentagon shape with all diagonals, multicoloured similarly to a rainbow.
A widely used symbol for the Fediverse

The majority of Fediverse platforms are free and open-source software, and create connections between servers using the ActivityPub protocol. Some software still supports older federation protocols as well, such as OStatus, the Diaspora protocol and Zot. Diaspora* is the only actively developed software project classified under the original definition of Fediverse that does not support ActivityPub.[5][6]

Design

While a traditional social networking service will host all its content on servers managed by the owner of the website, the decentralized servers that make up the Fediverse allow any individual or organization to host their own servers (referred to as an "instance").

Every instance is independent, and can set its own rules and expectations. Even so, much like how users of one email service such as Gmail can still send emails to users of another service such as Outlook, users may still view content and interact with users on any other instance in the Fediverse. A user on one Mastodon instance, for example, may still view and interact with posts made by a user on a different Mastodon instance.[7]

Instances hosted by different social networking services may communicate with one another as well. A user on the microblogging platform Misskey, for example, may view and interact with posts made by users on Mastodon. Some Fediverse networks even allow users to interact with different social networking formats from the same platform. For example, a user on a social news instance running Lemmy can interact with another post from a mbin instance, a similar service as well as microblog statuses from Mastodon.[8][9]

History

Historical protocols

Excerpt of common protocols and platforms in the fediverse (2024)

The concept and the functionality of the Fediverse has existed before the ActivityPub protocol and the term itself. One of the first projects that included support for a decentralized social networking service was Laconica, a microblogging platform which implemented the OpenMicroBlogging protocol for communicating between different installations of the software. The software was later renamed to StatusNet in 2009,[10] before being merged into the GNU social project in 2013 along with Free Social, with the two latter servers being a fork of StatusNet.[11][12]

Over time, the limitations of the OpenMicroBlogging protocol became more apparent, being designed as a one-way text messaging system.[13] To replace the aging protocol, OStatus was devised as an open standard for microblogging, combining various other technologies like Salmon, Atom, WebSub and ActivityStreams into a single protocol used for communicating between instances. StatusNet first implemented the protocol on March 3, 2010, with version 0.9.0, and quickly became the most popular federated protocol in usage.

Around the same time as OStatus was gaining popularity, the diaspora* social network was formed, using its own federated protocol. To illustrate the differences between the two protocols, the terms of the Fediverse and the federation began to enter common usage, mainly after 2017. The term "the Fediverse" was used to describe the network formed by software using the OStatus protocol, such as GNU Social, Mastodon, and Friendica, in contrast to the competing diaspora* protocol under "the federation".[14]

ActivityPub

Main article: ActivityPub

In December 2012, the flagship StatusNet instance at the time, identi.ca, transitioned away to a new software named pump.io, with a new federation protocol to replace OStatus. The new protocol was designed to be useful for general activity streams and not just status updates, and replaced many of OStatus' external dependencies with JSON-LD and a REST API for its messaging and inbox systems, as well as making more use of ActivityStreams. While not as utilized as its OStatus predecessor, it would end up becoming influential in the development of the ActivityPub standard.

The various platforms of the Fediverse, as well as other federated networks, visualized as a tree

In January 2018, the W3C presented the ActivityPub protocol as a recommended standard.[15] The standard aimed to improve the interoperability between different software packages running on a wide network of servers and to succeed both the OStatus protocol and Pump.io.[16] By 2019, almost all software that was using OStatus had added support for ActivityPub. While Mastodon began to remove OStatus support, other projects maintained it in their code, such as Friendica (which also maintained diaspora* support along with ActivityPub),[17][18] and the term Fediverse has since come to mainly refer to the ActivityPub protocol and its supporting server software.[citation needed]

Adoption

Users have been slow to embrace the Fediverse due to poor user experience and excessive complexity.[19][20]

Following the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk in November 2022, certain major social networks, including Threads,[21][22] Tumblr and Flipboard expressed interest in supporting the ActivityPub protocol, as a large number of users began to migrate to Mastodon, a server that supported the Fediverse and was also the most popular alternative to Twitter at the time. Flickr also expressed support in supporting ActivityPub. As of November 2022, no information had been released by the company after the initial tweets by the CEO, with support for ActivityPub suspected to be on hold or cancelled.[23][24]

In 2024, the local government of the Stary Sącz municipality in Poland launched their own PeerTube instance[25] in order to de facto abolish its presence on YouTube. According to the government, they stopped using YouTube for official communications "in order to adhere to the appropriate regulations".[26]

Content management systems

WordPress has an officially supported plugin that integrates WordPress blogs into the Fediverse, allowing for comments to be exchanged between the comment section of a blog post and a Fediverse instance's reply function. The plugin was acquired by Automattic in March 2023,[27] and became available for all WordPress.com users in October of that same year.[28][29]

Ghost, a blogging platform and content management system announced in April 2024 that they would be implementing Fediverse support via ActivityPub.[30][31][32] The feature had been highly requested on its forums.[33] In July 2024, Ghost started federating its development newsletter for the feature.[34]

Microblogging

Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg tweeted on November 22, 2022, that Tumblr was adding support for ActivityPub interoperability, in response to a user's complaints about Mastodon's complexity.[35] However, no further information was revealed for over a year, and was expected to be cancelled after a leaked reorganization that moved most of Tumblr's staff to other Automattic projects. However, in an AMA[clarification needed] following the leak, he revealed that the interoperability feature was not cancelled and that there was a small team working on studying the potential of implementing the protocol.[36]

The release of Threads by Meta in July 2023 had included in its press release that it planned to support interoperability with the ActivityPub protocol.[37][38] In December 2023, select Meta employees began to federate with ActivityPub.[39] A roadmap was revealed in January 2024 that detailed the integration of ActivityPub in Threads.[40]

In March 2024, Threads implemented a beta version of Fediverse support, allowing Threads users to view the number of Fediverse users that liked their post, and allowing Fediverse users to view posts from Threads on their own instances.[41][42][43] On April 2, the official Threads account for President Joe Biden enabled federation on its profile, making Biden the first President of the United States to have a presence on the Fediverse.[44] The ability to view replies from the Fediverse within Threads was added in August.[45]

News aggregators

In December 2023, Flipboard announced that it started federating selected profiles and magazines with the Fediverse. It had previously run its own Mastodon instance, flipboard.social, as a test of the Fediverse.[46]

Alternatives

While the Fediverse has traditionally been the network most commonly referred to and used as an example regarding the subject of decentralized social networks, alternatives to it and the accompanying ActivityPub have been developed and deployed. A major protocol in competition with the Fediverse is the AT Protocol, which powers the Bluesky social network and has formed its own separate network dubbed by developers as the Atmosphere,[47] while smaller competitors such as Nostr and Farcaster have become popular within the cryptocurrency community. These protocols have compared themselves to ActivityPub to showcase their differences. These newer protocols use a different federation model based on uploading content to relays for distribution rather than ActivityPub's server-centric model. Despite their differences, software exists that permit the bridging of user content between these protocols, including "double-bridges" that span multiple protocols for the purpose of distributing the same content.[48][49]

Software

Further information: ActivityPub § Software using ActivityPub

ActivityPub is the most widely used protocol in the Fediverse and a W3C standard. Some popular Fediverse software includes:[50][51]

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Fediverse.

References

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Further reading

Statistics and software overview

ActivityPub specification