Once upon a time, in a galaxy not so far away (this one, in fact), a few internet rebels decided that they were tired of the corporate overlords controlling their online lives. Thus, the fediverse was born — an attempt to wrest control of microblogging services, such as Twitter and its ilk, away from centralized powers and into the hands of the people.
It is weird. Lemmy is the second largest fedi platform, having long since passed Pixelfed. But it is rarely mentioned in articles like these. I'm not sure what makes it such the black sheep.
And instead mentions Bluesky, which I wouldn't even really classify as part of the Fediverse. Sure, it's federated, but it's pretty much just federated with its own self, and isn't accessible from any part of the Fediverse at large.
The article is nice, but I'm not sure if I'd send it to friends that aren't familiar with the fediverse. It seems to gloss over some problems and focus less relevant ones
It doesn't touch on the issues with Blueskys protocol and makes it sound like an equivalent choice (or worse, a better choice). In the downsides section it touches on racism in badly moderated instances, and the difficulty of setting up an instance. Those issues aren't relevant to the vast majority of users who will join a large instance that has defederated from the bad stuff.
It's a nice article for those who are already somewhat familiar, but a bad first impression
tl;dr: Here's everything you need to know about the fediverse, assuming you're never going to use it. Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, Friendica. Now, back to our regular coverage of all the biggest social companies, including TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and Reddit, as well as funding and acquisitions of new social startups.
This reads like a whole lot of research was boiled down to fit the "barely an article" constraints of a casual news outlet. The outline is all over the place but seems well-intended; it's just not clear what information we're supposed to take away from this.
Kudos for mentioning GNU Social, Zot and Diaspora, but I'm not really sure any of them are relevant anymore?
Was just listening to the latest episode of Dot Social podcast where there was a discussion with CEO of Ghost (alternative to Substack). They're integrating ActivityPub into the platform, but where they're going with it is that you can use your Fediverse ID instead of email to sign up.
Once they have that worked out, any likes or comments automatically migrate back to the fediverse. Replies back to replies also show up in your timeline and your followers can see them. This makes discovery pretty effortless. They can also use the stats to keep track of engagement across all fediverse services.
It also means turning one-way streams like RSS (podcasting), email services, and commenting services into common two-way communities.
You're now going beyond just catching up to existing services and doing things just not possible in closed silos. Real "Aha!" moment.