I can’t tell you how happy I am to get texts like these from friends. I’m so optimistic about the future of the #fediverse and always excited to talk about it.
The fediverse is still a tricky concept to explain though. I’d love to hear how you like to describe this gestures wildly at ActivityPub/Federation/Mastodon/Threads/AT Protocol/PeerTube to a friend.
@docpop My go to is: Ad free. Community funded. No algorithms. Open source software. Over 20,000 servers. Sometimes managed by one person, sometimes by many. Each has its own rules. Some have themes like art, politics, literature. Some have a few users, some have hundreds of thousands. Close to 14M users total. All can be connected via the fediverse. Some have created functionality that allows connections to other platforms, like Threads, or that is similar to other platforms, like Youtube.
@docpop I usually say the fediverse is built on ActivityPub, an "open standard" for social media. (Then I might go into how html is the technology that drives the web, but all the different browsers implement various "open standards" for rendering html, or websites would look different between Firefox, Chrome, and Safari.) Mastodon is just one open source implementation of this standard, but there are lots of others! And lots of websites host mastodon, just like word press.
@docpop I try not to use words like fediverse or activity pub at first—you can see people’s eyes quickly gloss over as those terms are used.
Instead I try to start broadly “a new protocol that lets people communicate with each other independent of application or service… similar to how email works: such that you can have Gmail and still communicate with someone using Outlook.”
Often this brings up loads more questions… because many people haven’t even thought about this as a concept. LOL
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