Has anyone reading this gotten into the "fediverse" at all? As far as tech things go, in my estimation, decentralised or federated social might be the most significant burgeoning paradigm to potentially affect how we spend our time online. I say might be because unlike a lot of the trends that have entered the zeitgeist and swiftly disappeared (or proven themselves to be literal fraud), federated social has actually sustained itself. And I say potentially because, for as long as it's been kicking around – most notably in the form of Mastodon – no one has quite figured out how to communicate to the average person what exactly it is, OR why it should matter. I'm a pretty technically fluent person, but I've genuinely struggled to figure out why I should care any of this, but a few ideas have more recently started to come into focus.
Recently, Ghost announced that they're federating over ActivityPub to allow sites publishing on their platform to build audiences from across the fediverse. The theory is that, rather than limiting ones audience or followers to only those who subscribe to their site through Ghost's subscription flow, users would be able to follow from ANY ActivityPub account (such as a Mastodon account). This is akin to if it was possible to publish a blog on Wordpress or Tumblr, and people could read your posts via Twitter and subscribe right on the spot. Why people might want to do this, or what they might get out of it is ultimately up to any individual publisher to derive, but I think the point lies in the inter-connectivity between accounts.
One of the big talking points around decentralisation is account portability for users; the ability to migrate your account from one server which hosts your identity and related activity to another, should the need arise. But I think a more interesting angle is the inter-platform fluency. The power for ones account to interact with a variety of content publishers, publishing across a variety of platforms, hosted across a variety of servers – all parties involved owning their own relevant part of the interaction – is a really compelling vision of the internet! And, again, I don't really understand a ton about the ActivityPub protocol (or its newer competitor AT Protocol), but I'm really invested in the idea of the interplay between online identities and destinations being more freely opted into, and unencumbered by platform incentives.
I have a lot of reading up to do on what these protocols support, and what types of metadata can be federated, but I'm already envisioning a world wherein a label can build a Birdcall website, and convert subscribers from anywhere they can be reached. Or where music fans who support multiple federated labels running on Birdcall can access all their purchased music, authenticated via a singular account which doesn't necessarily belong to anyone but themselves. And right now, the primary application/interface for ActivityPub accounts is social feeds (i.e. Twitter-clones), but during my more active tenure on Bluesky (which runs on/is currently developing AT Protocol), one of the most interesting applications I encountered was actually a live social audio app called SkySpaces (which may or may not still be in operation). I can already imagine a music player app intersecting with social accounts to revive and revive the original community-centric music recommendation landscape of pre-acquisition* Last.fm, or an actually useful version of iTunes Ping/Apple Music Connect!
Anyway, this is an incredibly vast, and incredibly dense area of interest, but I'm curious to hear from anyone who might be more familiar with what's going on in the fediverse, or have any other ideas about what could be possible.
*I truly have no idea what Paramount/CBS is doing with this, or why they even wanted it in the first place.
