User:Techpriest/Fediverse

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The Fediverse is a loose collection of federating Social media platforms. Originating as early as 2008 with a modified version of GNU Social, the fediverse has over the years managed to obtain a sizable population of users of all stripes.

Technology

What is federation?

To an outsider, the concept of federating may be difficult to understand. The closest available equivalent would be email. The only thing needed to send email to other users is a server running the relevant email software. For instance, if Alice has the email address alice@foo.com, they are able to send emails to any other server as long as they have the same email server running.

Federating software runs pretty much on the same concept, right down to account names being formatted the same way (username@domain). This means that bob@foo.com is a different person than bob@bar.com.

A site that is running federating software is typically called an instance.

The main protocol used by federating software is ActivityPub, a W3C recommendation. ActivityPub has been criticized by many developers for being overly flexible, causing numerous small inconsistencies between various implementations.

Software

The most popular software is microblogging software (software similar to Facebook and Twitter), however other software also does exist. A large amount of these have popped up over the years, with the most notable microblogging software:

• GNU Social - The first software to implement federating, it never gained much traction, but the occasional GNU Social site still pops up here and there (with the first site using GNU Social being [identi.ca], the first federating site). It is often considered complicated to set up and host and is generally considered not worth the effort, meaning it has many of the same problems that most software projects undertaken by the organization which maintains the project, the GNU Foundation.
• diaspora* - A Kickstarter crowdfunded software project, it originally aimed to provide federating software independent of GNU Socials attempts and was sold as the "Facebook killer" by tech blogs. In practice, Diaspora failed due to launching at the same time as the (later failed) network Google+ (which promised similar features to Diaspora, without being federating), being needlessly complicated on it's users (offering extremely in-depth permission systems that in practice ended up driving away users due to it being unclear who was seeing their data) and finally the original founder committing suicide.
• Mastodon
• Pleroma

Other software includes:

fill this out; mention peertube and matrix at least?

Problems

these are all just bullet points, might add more later.

• nazi bar problem
• anyone can host -> anyone can harass
• the general amorality of who contributes in foss
• bfdl issues with mastodon
• modified instances not respecting deleted posts.