I'm gonna be that guy and point out that when people say "the Fediverse" what they probably more specifically mean is "what's implemented by Mastodon, a social network built on top of ActivityPub" and that for certain conversations, this matters.

Like, practically speaking, when we say "take the useful parts of Bluesky's experiments and port them over to the Fediverse" what I think people mean in practice is "port them over to Mastodon”.

I really don't think there is a Fediverse (i.e. an underlying network-of-networks speaking a common protocol of which Mastodon is _one_ application). There's just Mastodon. That's it.

@danhon I'd go the other way. Bluesky (and whatever else happens on the AT Protocol) is part of the fediverse, as are all the non-Mastodon AP servers.

@anildash I like that definition much better, but that only happens when there's interop. Threads<->Mastodon is much, much closer to a Fediverse, but again, doesn't exist. Yet.

@anildash and while non-mastodon AP servers exist, they're still in my mind in the negligible space of usage.

@danhon @anildash agreed, even where they do exist (I think Lemmy would qualify as big enough to be relevant) the interop between them is pretty much nonfunctional and broken. Lemmy developers have given up on adding interop since theyre frustrated with mastodon, and masto has other dev priorities mostly