Do you know about "The Federation", or perhaps more commonly known as "The Fediverse"? The word is a contraction of the words "Federated" and "Universe". Until very recently, I didn't know what it was, but I've come to realise that it could very well be a stepping stone towards a more open and diverse internet.

The Fediverse consists of several independent servers known as instances. They communicate with each other via several open protocols, such as OStatus and the more recent W3C ActivityPub protocol. Trying to grasp the official W3C documents on the subject can be a bit hard despite the great use of illustrations, so I dug up a more brief explanation on the Go-Fed page: Activity Pub at a Glance

The ActivityPub protocol allow the services to publish and consume data from other instances, so even though the instances operate independently, they know about the existence of the others, working much like a DNS server.

If you take a look at the Wikipedia page about the Fediverse, you'll find that there are already a great number of Fediverse software platforms. You might already know some of them like Diaspora, Mastodon, NextCloud and Peertube. The software powering these platforms are free and open source, so without too much of a hassle and if you have a server at hand, you can become a social media owner, if you so desire.

So what is it like from the user side?

I've tried visiting some of the homes of the platforms, and while I've been greatly impressed by the Fediverse idea as a whole, the software and the numbers of online instances, I've been somewhat underwhelmed by the way the instances present themselves

As an example I visited Friendica and Mastodon, which both have nice listings of public instances (there's also FOSStodon for FOSS - Free and/or Open Source topics). The problem is, you have no idea about what's going on inside an instance, apart from the description.

Instead they should give people a taste of what to expect, like showing the public messages from a group of select (randomized) users. A minor tweak, but more welcoming to a potential user. Another nice thing would be, if you could choose to push your user to other instances, removing the need to create an account on each instance.

But overall, I think this is so cool! I want to "Fediverse all the things!" (at least until I start worrying about server costs, heh).

Nevertheless, can't wait to dig deeper in the ActivityPub protocol once I have taken a better look at it, stay tuned :)

Links:
ActivityPub.rocks
ActivityPub @ W3C