As an elder millennial I was among the first kids who logged onto a computer to surf the amazing Information Superhighway. First stop: The Future!…and email. My friend Becky had told me about her amazing “email account” and I had to have one. But alas, I signed for a Yahoo! account and Becky had Hotmail. We were living in different worlds. Except we weren’t…we learned that we could still send emails to each other with no problem, the fact that we were on different platforms didn’t really matter as they utilized the same underlying protocols and could communicate with one another.
Fast forward 30 years. Me and Becky are still friends and we express that by following each other on Instagram. We used to be on Facebook but much like the rad mall we used to hang out in back in the day, the social media giant is mostly empty except for a few active mall walkers. We’re too old for Tik-Tok, we didn’t even bother trying. Instagram is our final haven and truth be told we would like to leave that but to where?
Maybe the Fediverse. The Fediverse has fascinated me lately as it operates a lot like Becky and I’s old email accounts, using an open protocol (ActivityPub) to create an open, decentralized form of social medias that can all talk across the void to one another. There are several but the biggest now are Mastadon (micro-blogging, like Twitter), PixelFed (think Instagram) and PeerTube (yeah). And within each of these platforms, any person can spin up their own instance of it with it’s own users who can in turn see/talk/share content with anyone on the other instances and platforms. There is no central company truly “in charge”, each instance manages it’s own rules and moderation.
It’s always hard to say what will catch on in tech, but I think the Fediverse has promise and is worth watching. W3C supports the ActivityPub protocol so it has some merit. Plus, the current social media landscape just feels due a reshaping. The concept of the Fediverse might conceivably take us back to what the internet was supposed to be in it’s original inception, a more open frontier.
