Many complain of the censorship or in any case of the limitations on freedom of expression on mainstream social networks such as facebook, twitter, instagram etc etc. An alternative solution to continuing to complain is to use something else, since valid alternatives exist and fediverse is one of them. In this post, therefore, I would like to illustrate broadly what the fediverse is and in the next go in detail to see strengths and weaknesses.
LET'S BEGIN
To understand what the fediverse is in a few words imagine that you are only a facebook user, your friend carlo only a user of twitter and andrea only of instagram. Clearly you cannot directly, within your social network, write to your friends, see their posts, reply to them, relaunch your friends' posts, like them; you can do this only through a series of steps by transferring the content in question from one platform to another; and in any case you will simply have transferred data now crystallized to a new platform in the form of screenshots or links but without having the possibility of direct interaction with the original post.
Not only that: you just don't see your friends' activities on other servers. You can only know something if they send you a link or screenshot! Or maybe they make you a phone call or an email ...
However, if fb, instagram, twitter used a common protocol to identify among others: users of any platform, posts from any other platform. And if this common protocol was able to make you connect to users of other platforms, see their posts, reply, like, reply by commenting, block users, send messages while remaining each of our three initial friends on their social platform it would be very interesting; I would say fantastic.
Well this hypothesis is reality in fediverse.
In fediverse FB would be an instance. The way in which FB offers you posts, information, settings, the graphic way of interacting in the fediverse depends on the software used for the frontend. The theoretical protocol with which everything that passes on FB can be read by twitter or instagram users is on the fediverse a series of protocols of which the most used is activitypub but there are others that you can see here: https: https://the-federation.info/#protocols
Conceptually it is simple, in practice: also :-)
So the fediverse in substance is a set of social networks that adopt common protocols with which they identify users, posts, methods of interaction between users, database management so that they can all communicate with each other. The servers can then be built on different software which basically for the user defines the appearance of the site with which they interact. To clarify with examples:
- mastodon server https://mastodon.social/public
- pleroma server https://pleroma.site/main/all
- gab server https://gab.com/home
As you can see there are differences in the presentation of the sites and also in the functions implemented. But the interesting thing is that if you have an account on a mastodon server you can interact with any user of the other instances. Here we have presented three of the most used instances at user and server level, but there are others too. If you want to take a look before the next posts go to this which is one of the most complete sites regarding statistics and information on the fediverse https://fediverse.network/?count=users
Even more interesting is that all this software is open source: if you are geeks you can safely, and according to the rules of the various licenses, fork the software, modify it and run your server with changes to the original instance but always maintaining protocol compatibility and therefore always being part of the fediverse.
TERMINOLOGY AND SOME FEATURES OF THE VARIOUS SOFTWARE
Each tribe has its own linguistic rules ... On fediverse tweets or posts are called status or toots or gabs depending on the server or app you use, likes are favorites etc etc. Hashtags are called hashtags! You will learn immediately.
Personally I have an account on a gab server and a pleroma, so I will talk mainly about these. The main differences are as follows.
On Pleroma you have the possibility to choose, as you can see from the screen below, whether to interact only with those you follow, timeline, or with all the server on which you have the account, public timeline, or with the entire fediverse, The Whole Known Network . Direct message is self-explanatory and Interactions are the likes, replies, mentions, requests that affect your account.
On Gab the thing is slightly different because you have the possibility to interact with who you follow or with the whole fediverse; the public timeline on the Gab server is missing. Notifications are the same but positioned differently. What is really different from pleroma and the other software you can see in the following figure which represents the top bar:
They are the groups, the chat. These are two peculiar functions of Gab that I find very useful.
The groups are created by one or more administrators who define their rules and issues of interest; then users sign up and can post in the group. The statuses that a user enters into a group are also reported on his personal profile. Compared to the use of hashtags on other servers, mandatory if you want to make a specific discussion on a topic, or to threads long kilometers that then become unmanageable, the groups offer a significant simplification, concentrating specific issues in a unique place. When you are enrolled in a group you will have all the notifications of the posts that appear on the group, unless you disable the notifications in the settings.
The groups on Gab are many and range from what i think is the most numerous, or Free Speech with 74600 users, up to groups of few people. The covered areas are the most varied: if you do a search on Gab you will have the results for the groups. Remember that most are, at least in the title, in English; so initially you search in your language but if you don't find anything, switch to English.
The chat, recently introduced and still a little rough, gives the possibility to make direct chats with other users or private chats with several people; these chats are private and encrypted. Then there are public chats of general interest that anyone can activate and to which anyone can be added.
I close this first part with this link that displays the entire fediverse: the servers are connected with lines that represent the levels of interaction between users of different instances; the screen is dynamic so try to zoom in or search for specific servers to see how they interact with the rest of the federation:
In the next post we’ll go into the details of the fediverse; here the link: https://www.publish0x.com/chancellor-on-brink-of-second-bailout-for-banks/what-is-the-fediverse-part-ii-of-iii-xrvwzz
