Ever wonder what is out there in The Federation?
"The Federation refers to a global social network composed of nodes that talk to each other. Each of them is an installation of software which supports one of the federated social web protocols. "
There's The Federation -- and The Fediverse.
"Many newcomers to the federated web may hear of a casual reference to the fediverse, and may be curious about what that term means. A simple explanation might be that it’s a portmanteau of “federation” and “universe”, but it’s actually a little bit more complicated than that. Let’s dive into the nature of this beast, along with some of the history that comes with it.
At present, there are two supernetworks in the federated social communication space, and they run on different protocols. They are known as The Fediverse, and The Federation. While both supernetworks function in similar ways and even have similar aims, they each come from a different history of development, and by extension, a different stack. The overlapping series of networks can be referred to in macro as The Free Network."
From a nice page here! https://medium.com/we-distribute/a-quick-guide-to-the-free-network-c069309f334
"The Future?
At the moment, several projects in the space are working to adopt new supplementary protocols, with the intent of building better bridges between one another. The proposed development might end up looking like this:"
Learn more about the Fediverse?
That's the part many of us here inhabit - the Mastodon instances, and many other sites, serving different needs.
"Fediverse
is a portmanteau of two words “federation” and “universe”
It is a common name for federated social networks running on free open software on a myriad of servers across the world. Historically, this term has included only microblogging platforms supporting a set of protocols called OStatus. This didn't do justice to a large number of projects that federate, share same values and are reasonably popular. With the appearance and wide adoption of a new standard protocol called ActivityPub it makes no sense to further divide the federated world into “OStatus” and “non-OStatus” projects. This guide unites all interconnected federated networks under one term “Fediverse”. "
