Hi everyone!

So with all the social media chaos happening at the moment, X-Twitter imploding, Threads launching, BlueSky launching, Post.News launching, etc etc, I thought I’d investigate Mastodon and the Fediverse because it seems super interesting and way more along the lines about what I like about Hive and gFam in terms of decentralization.

Mastodon looks and acts a lot like X-Twitter:

You can easily create micro posts and publish them. People can like, comment, repost and bookmark your posts. You can see what’s trending and easily explore. The Home page only shows you micro posts from accounts you’re following.

Okay, cool… all seems simple enough and easy to understand.

The thing is, Mastodon is only one application on the Fediverse, they can all interact with each other and one account will work on all of them. This is very similar to the Hive Blockchain and how Splinterlands, 3Speak, LikeTu, Reverio, LeoFinance, etc all use the same account.

The applications in the Fediverse all center around the ActivityPub.

As far as I understand, ActivityPub essentially provides the W3C formats and the APIs for reading and publishing content to all the servers within the Fediverse. You publish content on one of the applications within the Fediverse and every other application has the opportunity to consume that content… if they choose.

There is lots to like with this model, including, that your account and your followers are the same across applications. Anyone who made the jump from X-Twitter to BlueSky or Post.News understands the frustration in trying to find the people you like following again, or trying to build up an audience again. This was part of the reason Threads launched so successfully a couple of months ago, it’s a Twitter clone, but everyone already following you on Instagram could easily also follow you on Threads.

Also… Threads will apparently connect to the Fediverse too… but Threads is a walled garden and the Fediverse is an open protocol, so we’ll see what happens there…

Usually your Twitter friends are your Twitter friends and your Facebook friends are your Facebook friends and you may follow someone on both, but you probably don’t. I definitely don’t.

ActivityPub and the Fediverse combine it all so your friends are just your friends… regardless of the application they’re using to see your content.

As people, we’re totally multi-faceted and so I might really enjoy someone’s artistic posts, but absolutely hate their political posts. As far as I know there’s no way to filter or categorize the different content types so if I wanted to post Pixel Art to one audience and Interledger Protocol content to a different audience, it’s probably best, at this point, to set up multiple accounts.

Speaking of the Interledger Protocol, Jeremiah Lee created an Interledger Protocol Server so that he can work on incorporating Web Monetization and Payment Pointers into the overall code of the Fediverse. It’s not a guarantee that it would be accepted, but if it is, it could mean that all members of the Fediverse could easily monetize their content and/or applications through microtransactions. Huge win for the internet as a whole.

Here is a video presentation of that development if you’re interested.

What that means, is that if you add a video to PeerTube or a podcast to Castopod, then you could receive micropayments for the time that subscribers watch/listen to your content. People could make money from what they create without advertisements, brand deals or sponsors/patrons. If the Web Monetization code gets accepted into the Fediverse protocols then any and all of the applications in the Fediverse could enable Web Monetization/Browser Payments…

As far as I can tell, most people developing on the Fediverse aren’t doing so for profits, but for the good of the internet and because so much of this incredible resource is gated by massive technology corporations and/or Elon.

Twitter’s destruction has caused a massive amount of disruption in certain communities that have been made to feel extremely unwelcome there, the science community, for example, seemed to have created a bunch of accounts in lots of different places, but Mastodon seems to be a winner. It’s hard to trust an Elon or a Zuck when you can instead trust a bunch of volunteers trying to fix the internet.

I am hoping that one day I can incorporate gFam into Hive, the Fediverse and the Koinos blockchain but we’ll just have to see how that all works out.

I’m still very much learning about the Fediverse but if you have any questions, please let me know in the comments.

Thanks for reading my Introduction to the Fediverse!