Fediverse
What is the fediverse?
The fediverse is a collection of interoperable social media platforms and independent servers.
Unlike centralized social networks like Facebook, which can’t communicate with other social networks, decentralized networks like Mastodon support following profiles and engaging with content on different Mastodon servers and other decentralized social platforms. The interoperability is made possible by ActivityPub, an open-standard protocol.
The term fediverse is derived from the ‘federated’ nature of independently run servers and the virtual ‘universe’ of interoperable social platforms.
The co-creator of ActivityPub, Christine Lemmer-Webber, defines federation as a technical approach to communication architecture that achieves decentralization by many independent nodes cooperating and communicating to be a unified whole, with no node holding more power than the responsibility or communication of its parts.
Fediverse resources
- Fediverse guide by Pixelfed
- Fediverse on Wikipedia
- Fediverse Party
- Social Web Foundation
- To the Fediverse!
Jon Henshaw is the founder of Coywolf and an industry veteran with almost three decades of SEO, digital marketing, and web technologies experience. Follow @jon@henshaw.social