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Fediverse

A brief overview

by littlesmith
Mastodon: littlesmith[at]chaos.social
Pixelfed: littlesmith[at]pixelfed.de
Friendica: littlesmith[at]loma.ml

The Fediverse Is A Network of Social Networks

What does that mean?

There are a lot of social networks, microblogging services and other kinds of software to publish information and connect with other users, which use the ActivityPub protocol.

This protocol is standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium/W3C and allows the services to exchange data between each other

There is no owner of the social network services or the Fediverse as a whole. Basically the social network services are being hosted by different organisations or individuals on different servers.

You can think of the different servers in the same way as with e-mail: Usually you choose a provider (e.g example.com) and register yourself with that provider. You provide a username and you will get the e-mail address 'username@example.com'. You can exchange mails with users of your provider as well as with users of any other provider, because they use the same protocol that allows the different mail servers to exchange the messages.

With the networks on the Fediverse it works in a very similar way:

You choose your social network type (see below for a list), a server that may fit yourself and then you register with your username. Usually there awe generic servers or servers created for purposes, like talking about specific topics. If you are not sure what to choose, use one of the bigger generic servers. You can move your account to another server later, if you like (while keeping all your followers etc.).

If you are prolific with such stuff, you can also setup and host your own server, but that is out of the scope of this document.

How To Do It

For each server and service you need to register individually, just like you also have separate Facebook, Instagram and Youtube accounts.

The nice thing: All the servers in the Fediverse are... federated. That means, they can exchange data. You can for example use your Mastodon account to follow another (or your own) Pixelfed account.

The other nice thing: There is no algorithm. Your feed will only contain stuff from people you follow. There is usually also a feed for your server, where your account is located, as well as a global feed containing posts from other servers. Usually these are servers were you and other users on your server are following users.

The fact that there is no algorithm flushing more or less random stuff into your feed means, that you need to be a little bit more active: To receive meaningful content, you need to follow others.

Example

Lisa P. wants to to some microblogging and share pictures with her friends. She chooses Mastodon for the first and Pixelfed for the latter.

First she goes to https://joinmastodon.org/servers and chooses a server. As she knows she can move to another server later, she chooses examplemastodon.social for no particular reason. So she goes to https://examplemastodon.social and registers with the username lisapopisa, which gives here the handle lisapopisa@examplemastodon.social.

Then she can login to mastodon.social and create posts. She can follow any Fediverse user by entering the username into the search box.

Then she browses to https://pixelfed.org/servers. There she chooses the server examplepixelfed.social, as Lisa happens to exist in an example and she thinks that's good for a start. Also here she knows that she can switch servers anytime.

After registering as lisapopisa@examplepixelfed.social she logs in to examplepixelfed.social and enters lisapopisa@examplemastodon.social. She clicks on the search result and follows her Mastodon account from Pixelfed. She does the same the other way around on Mastodon, and now she can see her own posts from each network in the respective other. So she can share images she posted on Pixelfed easily also on Mastodon.

This so called cross posting needs to be done manually. There are also tools for automatic cross posting - but again, this is out of scope of the document.

General Info

Mastodon (micro blogging like eX Twitter)

Friendica (social network like Facebook)

Pixelfed (Picture sharing network like Instagram)

Peertube (Video sharing network like Youtube)

Fediverse - a brief introduction by Stefan Kleinschmidt is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0