Fediverse Rising
This is a copy of my article sent in to the Beach hut article published January 2022
Fediverse Rising
Former President Donald Trump just launched his own social media network. If the login screen looks familiar, that may be because it has the same look and feel of the social media application Mastodon [1]. But what is Mastodon, and why is it important?
Mastodon is a decentralized social media site. This means that instead of one big site, like Facebook, people can run their own “nodes” and the users on each can share information with the rest of the network. There is no advertising, no data collecting, or tracking, so there is more privacy, although this is not to say public posts can’t be “scraped.”
Mastodon sites are federated and there is no single owner of the whole social media service. You can run your own Mastodon server, called an “instance,” and interact with other users on other instances. These communicate through a protocol called ActivityPub. [2] The network of instances, called the Fediverse, consists of instances running the Mastodon software licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License [3] from the free software foundation [4]. An example of Federation is e-mail, there are different providers of e-mail e.g disroot, protonmail and they can all work together.
Just like on mainstream social media such as Facebook and Twitter, you can share pictures, messages, media, and links and can follow other people or topics (using hasthtags) of interest. A project called Trunk [5] helps you find people who like similar interests.
The Fediverse community values user input. The community on socialhub [6] are keen to build a social network system that is welcoming and safe for everyone, one that everyone can collaborate and work together. Some of this community are communicating with the EU / UK governments to ensure legislation and internet governance is fit for purpose and puts users before profits.
References
1. https://docs.joinmastodon.org/
2. https://activitypub.rocks/
3. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html
4. https://www.fsf.org/
5. https://communitywiki.org/trunk
6. https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/
Links
TAGS
#YearOfTheFediverse,#FediverseRising,#Science,#Technology,#ScienceDaily,#PaigtonLibrarySTEMGroup,#Fedevolution2022
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