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:
Home page of gFam account on Mastodon
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.
The more popular apps in the Fediverse
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...
By Per Axbom - https://axbom.com/fediverse/, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=125076684
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.
Source
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!
Posted from my blog with Exxp : https://lifebe.com.au/uncategorized/introduction-to-the-fediverse/
My first foray into fediverse was Diaspora freaking ages ago (can't even remember when, but I was still on Facebook at he time so long time x_x), and I eventually deleted my account on the server that I was on to free up the resources for someone else as I slowly stopped using it.
The second attempt very shortly after that was Friendica which was so very much more feature rich but at the time I was playing around with it, struggling to take off. I hope they're doing better now.
A friend recently really, really tried very hard to get me onto Mastodon knowing that I would probably be interested because I was into all that decentralisation nonsense (she also playfully blamed me for the reason she had started getting crypto ads recently XD as far as I know she has never looked at crypto stuff but she knows I do and we interact almost daily) but I still haven't because I struggle to do anything shorter than an epic.
Sometimes I feel like I should give it a go or get back on Diaspora or see how Friendica is going, but I can barely keep up with here as is.
Then I checked literally just then and there is a Mastodon integration for Nextcloud (which by the way has Hub which I kind of want to try out but I don't have anything worth trying it out with, and the self-hosted version which I have has probably most if not all of the same stuff and I realised that it can do the same decentralised socnetty thing too).
More to think about because I don't have enough to think about already x_x
I hope this stuff keeps spreading like an uncontrollable wildfire and very violently upends the centralised things.
Me too!
I love that everyone working on ActivityPub projects seems to be motivated by building cool decentralized stuff and not just unimaginable profits or dominating market shares. I do think if the Friendicas of the world had gotten the right level of interest early on then there would have been no space for these centralized monsters... but we are where we are and all we can do is fight back and make the internet what we want it to be... for future generations if not for us.
Friendica happened around the same time G+ did, and even had more and better features that G+ did at the time. I vaguely remember a conversation with the lead on Friendica that they had no idea what the "wow" factor was or how to get it, as the product was pretty solid and reasonably well polished (it was still under heavy development at the time I looked) but when a friend of theirs was testing it, they were very positive about it, but when that friend got onto G+ they were raving.
And I think that's what a lot of places even like hive and its various hydra front ends probably struggle with.
Yeah, the Hive blockchain is absolutely incredible... but it definitely lacks that wow amazing feature that gets people so excited for a shiny new thing.
I play with some of that. I created a Diaspora account ages ago, but didn't use it much. Since Twtr went downhill I have used Mastodon more. A lot of people there are very anti-crypto. I know some are not into earning online, but that is a luxury position as others are desperate to earn. I know of some efforts to integrate Hive into that ecosystem. It will be interesting to see how that is taken.
Yeah, I think lots and lots of people are very anti-crypto now, seeing it all as scams and ponzis... so it feels like we have an even tougher job ahead of us than we did a few years ago.
I've been using Threads a fair bit, and apparently they're working on joining the Fediverse too, but I don't really understand how that's going to work since Meta is, ah, evil(ish).
Hive is not perfect, but it has some advantages over some other coins, including not using much energy and lack of fees. Scams can happen on any platform, including conventional finance such as shares.
I did not even look at FB/Meta Threads. I don't know any friends who say they use it and I distrust the company.
Yeah, that's totally fair enough... you shouldn't trust it.
The only reason I'm on it is to try and convince non-blockchain people to try my own project. It is a trillion times less toxic than Twitter, but I have no idea what Meta is doing with all that data they're collecting.
We love the Fediverse!
Integration with Hive is everything and makes all the difference, ie:
https://cast.garden/about/follows
Whoa! What am I looking at here? What is Cast Garden?
So much exploding in the social media world right now
It's honestly pretty overwhelming... but it makes sense right... people are sick of Zuck and Elon making massive decisions that affect them.
That's a nice addition. Besides, the need to non-censurable blogs is increasing. Making different of them make them almost impossible to be obscured.
Integration with Hive would be great, especially if some independence from the chains can be kept
Yeah, my gFam.live site has been blocked by Instagram (and now Threads) from posting any links... and I have no idea why and absolutely no way to negotiate a change... and I think lots of people are seeing a need for non-censurable blogs and ways to drive traffic to those blogs.
We are having so many social media platforms now and it is very cool especially the ones that pay and thank you for sharing this with us.
I really appreciate it
#hive #posh