Tech Press don’t understand the #Fediverse, so how can they understand its growth?

To hear them talk, most of them believe that #Mastodon and the Fediverse are one and the the same. Some of them go so far as to call the Fediverse the “Mastodon network”.

Which means that they don’t have a clue about what the Fediverse entails, nor how it has grown.

Case in point: between Jan-May 2023, #Misskey and its forks grew by 300,000 accounts. No one in the Tech Press reported this.

Okay, perhaps they didn’t know because the bulk of growth happened in Japan. But still, this is fairly important to know since Misskey is now responsible for generating the bulk of Fediverse content. Still, Tech Press think the Fediverse is about Mastodon.

And now, #Lemmy and #Kbin are experiencing lots of growth, with both collectively gaining 100,000 users in a week. This is quite a noteworthy event since the #RedditMigration is part and parcel of dissension on #Reddit – a pretty major Big Social platform.

Does the Tech Media report on this? Nope. But again, that’s because they don’t understand the Fediverse nor what it entails.

Then Meta signal that a new project they’re making, #P92 (a.k.a., #Barcelona), will be joining the Fediverse. There’s even screenshots that show this app interacting with remote Fediverse servers.

But instead of reporting about how this will affect the existing Fediverse, press such as the #BBC say this is an altogether different social network than Mastodon.

That’s right! Tech Press don’t even realize P92 will be joining the Fediverse – a social network that already exists!

Is this all ridiculous? Yes.

But this is why we have to be forthright about what the Fediverse is, what it entails, and what it all matters.

We, on the Fediverse, must be our own Press.

@fediversenews

@Codex ☯️♈☮ @CynthesisToday I think the #Fediverse is the easiest to understand for those who halfway know their way around computer stuff if you start at the protocol level.

#ActivityPub is a digital communications protocol standard. Like e-mail or RSS or Atom or XMPP or Matrix, for example. Or like #StatusNet or the #Diaspora protocol or #DFRN or #Zot, now known as #Nomad in its latest incarnation.

The server application projects that are based on ActivityPub are different server-side software implementations of the same protocol. Some have more features, some have fewer, some specialise in particular tasks which is possible because ActivityPub is not specialised itself, not a one-trick pony.

Like, for XMPP, you have jabberd and ejabberd and Openfire and Prosody and Tigase. For e-mail, you've got various mail servers and MTAs.

The main difference here is that ActivityPub is so versatile in its capabilities that it can be used for a whole lot of different things. #Mastodon, #Pleroma, #Akkoma, #MissKey, #CalcKey etc. were made for microblogging. But ActivityPub can also be used for actual blogging platforms like #Plume or #WriteFreely, for video streaming like in the cases of #PeerTube and #Owncast, for audio streaming like in the cases of #Funkwhale and #Castopod and for link aggregators/discussion communities like in the cases of #Lemmy and #kbin. Only to name a few examples.

Still, there are enough parts of this protocol fixed so that all these projects, all these implementations of ActivityPub can connect to one another and ideally communicate with one another.

Now, why is all this made so that they can connect to one another?

That's because they all use the same protocol. The alternative would have been to do like Mike MacGirvin did with DFRN for #Mistpark, later #Friendika, today known as #Friendica, and create a whole new protocol from scratch, even though StatusNet was readily available. Well, only that Mike's intention was to federate Friendica with everything that moved, regardless of protocol.

Okay, better comparison: The alternative would have been to do like the four Diaspora* creators and create a whole new protocol from scratch with no intention whatsoever to connect to the outside world.

Well, instead, all those clones of YouTube and Instagram and Reddit and GoodReads and so forth chose ActivityPub. It was a win-win situation: They could use an existing protocol which actually worked for them instead of taking upon themselves designing a whole new protocol first and then their server application on top. And they could expect a wider audience, namely everything else that uses ActivityPub. Two birds, one stone.

Oh, and by the way: Neither the Fediverse nor ActivityPub was designed around Mastodon, nor was ActivityPub designed by Eugen Rochko (Mike Macgirvin did have some saying in it, though, AFAIK), and quite a few Fediverse projects already existed before Mastodon. Pleroma is three and a half weeks older. MissKey is two years older AFAIK. #Hubzilla was forked from Friendica four years before Mastodon came out. This means that Friendica has to be even older: six years older than Mastodon.

None of these projects will ever give in to Mastodon's limitations and reduce their own feature set for the convenience of Mastodon users. Oh, and neither will the projects that came after Mastodon. If something from another Fediverse project doesn't look good on Mastodon, it's Mastodon's problem.

@jupiter_rowland

Thank you for taking the time to help with understanding. You provide a lot of examples which should hit pretty much everyone's current knowledge basis.

If I may try to translate to my knowledge basis. I'm very familiar with #BGP, #TCP/IP and have a deeper than basic use knowledge of #DNS, #SMTP and #HTTPS. Basically, I understand the concept of the Open Systems Interconnection Model (OSI Model) as described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model

In the wiki link, this diagram describes the interoperability idea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:OSI-model-Communication.svg

At what layer does #ActivityPub operate? Same as #HTTPS? In a similar way? #ActivityPub handles both the server-to-server and server-to-client parts according to: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ .

So #Mastodon is yet another piece of software that implements parts of the overall #ActivityPub protocol (but not the full extent of the protocol) while attempting to provide the function that non-tech users have come to expect of the bird application?

1/n

@jupiter_rowland
2/2

I'm not familiar with most of the other "things" like #Pleroma, #Akkoma, #MissKey, or #CalcKey, but I'll guess that those "things" (?server application projects?) are using a different sub-set of #ActivityPub protocol to service a different set of use case foci?

Different use cases might have different focus, such as microblogging (#Mastodon) or bulletin boarding (#kbin subbing for #reddit) or video streaming (#PeerTube subbing for #Youtube) or other use subset of social function?

In analogy to your last paragraph, if something doesn't work well on the Safari implementation of #HTTPS, it's Safari's problem.

Thank you for your thorough answer. While I personally don't know about a lot of the examples you provide, it made me think differently about how to frame questions.

@CynthesisToday Pleroma, Akkoma, MissKey and what's still but not for much longer called CalcKey are "Twitter-like" microblogging projects based on ActivityPub, just like Mastodon.

They cover pretty much the exact same use case as Mastodon. But they all offer extra features. They all have significantly higher character limits than Mastodon. AFAIK, they all also support text formatting, i.e. things like bold type or italics. And at least some of them support actual quotes. CalcKey in particular has an impressive feature set for a "mere" microblogging platform.

I'm tempted to say that they're "Mastodon with stuff on top", but that makes it look like they're Mastodon clones which they aren't. Pleroma is three and a half weeks older than Mastodon, and Akkoma is a fork of it. MissKey is even older than Pleroma, AFAIK by two years, and CalcKey is a fork of it.

HTTPS can't be compared well with ActivityPub as it's mostly S2C whereas the compatibility issues between Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse are S2S issues. Also, Mastodon and Lemmy are server applications (HTTPS equivalents: Apache, nginx, lighttpd etc., just all with the exact same use-case) while Safari is an end-user client application (ActivityPub equivalents: Tusky, Mona, Fedilab, Whalebird etc.).