How the 'Fediverse' Works (and Why It Might be the Future of Social Media)
upstart writes:
A brief, jargon-free explainer on the freer future of the social web:
Idealist nerds have a long history of giving terribly confusing names to potentially revolutionary technology. So it goes with Fediverse, a portmanteau of "Federation" and "Universe," and the potential future of the social internet. But what does that mean?
Put simply, the Fediverse is the collective name for a bunch of different social networks and platforms that are connected to one another. Users on any of these services can follow users on any other one and respond to, like, and share posts.
There are a lot of articles and websites that explain this concept in detail, but most of them get bogged down in technical language pretty quickly. I'd like to avoid that, so here's my good faith attempt to explain what the Fediverse is in plain English.
First, though, let's talk about email.
Email is decentralized (and why that matters for the Fediverse)
Anyone with an email address can email anyone else. Gmail users, for example, aren't limited to talking with other Gmail users-they can send messages to Outlook users, Yahoo Mail users, and even people who are running their own email servers in their basement. Basically, anyone with an email address can write anyone else with an email address. To put it another way, email is decentralized.
There is no one company or institution that is in charge of email-there are many different email providers, all of which are compatible with each other. This is because email is an open protocol, one that anyone who wants to can build a service for.
The largest social media networks do not work this way right now. You can't follow an X user via Facebook, for example, or subscribe to a Reddit community from Tumblr. That's why all of those websites are full of screenshots from the other ones-people want to share posts from other sites but there's no good way to do so. That's a problem the Fediverse seeks to remedy.
The Fediverse is an attempt to make social networks more like email-that is, to allow users on different services to follow and interact with each other anywhere they want, without signing up for a million different accounts.
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