You’re now wondering what does “on the fediverse” mean. That’s understandable. Simply put – it means content published here is now plugged into the next version of the social web. Let’s go through it in a bit more detail.
Web 2.0
We’re so used to Web 2.0 now that it’s become part of everyday life. What is it? It’s the web of social media and ecommerce. These things are so ingrained in our daily lives that we hardly thing of them as things! Before the advent of web 2.0 the internet was a collection of largely static sites.
Then came along ecommerce, online shops, accounts, MySpace, Facebook, Friends Reunited. It was an internet of social and monetary transactions. But
Metaverse and the Fediverse
When Mark Zuckerberg declared the Metaverse – in a bold move to claim ground in the next phase of the internet – there was much speculation over the technology and abilities – add to that Elon Musk’s abysmal attempt at Twitter (X), and the resulting migration to Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky and you couldn’t turn your device of choice on without metaverse this, federated that, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and a billion opinion pieces. So – what’s going on?
One of the biggest things to to emerge from it all is the next phase will be “portability” from one sphere to another. So, a profile on Threads is also accessible on Mastodon (more on this in a bit!). Or an item in Roblox is available across its games, or even into different games. That’s what NFTs are – digital assets that can be ported over to different places and are unique.
A platform that has existed for some time that meets a lot of the criteria for this new web is Habbo – from Sulake. In is users create spaces that they customise with furniture and items that they buy with the platforms digital money. They can port their avatar to users different rooms – taking anything they have on them and trading items. They’re the real pioneers with this idea with virtual spaces.
Aside from that the big player currently are Federated Networks – the Fediverse. Mastodon, Bluesky (which uses a slightly different protocol) – even Threads will eventually operate as a federated network. What this means is a profile, and posts, can be accessed and “federated” to the different platforms. So an account on Mastodon, will be viewable on Threads and vice versa. What this does it effectively eliminate usrs having multiple digital iterations of themselves. A single account can be seen across whatever platform. The user data and content is portable between them.
So – portability is key but what the Fediverse, and things like blockchains and cryptocurrencies utilise is the security and the resilience of decentralisation. By using a network, they are harder to attack, break, fall over.
What does this mean for this content?
This site now acts as a node in the fediverse network. My profile – @Thom-Baker can be searched for and followed on any platform using the ActivityPub decentralised social networking protocol such as:
Posts, articles, videos – whatever content I produce here is accessible across all these different platforms. Pretty cool, right? And it means My content can have a wider reach than just sitting on one platform, and avoid the work of publishing across different networks.
What do you think? Are you already in the Fediverse?
