Fediverse

The majority of fediverse platforms that are available are free and open-source software, and are based on the ActivityPub protocol. However, alternative protocols such as AT Protocol and Nostr have formed their own networks separate from ActivityPub.^[2]

Design[edit]

While a traditional social networking service will host all its content on servers managed by the owner of the website, the decentralized servers that make up the fediverse allow any individual or organization to host their own servers (referred to as an "instance").


Every instance is independent, and can set its own rules and expectations. Even so, much like how users of one email service such as Gmail can still send emails to users of another service such as Outlook, users may still view content and interact with users on any other instance in the fediverse. A user on one Mastodon instance, for example, may still view and interact with posts made by a user on a different Mastodon instance.^[3]


Instances hosted by different social networking services may communicate with one another as well. A user on the microblogging platform Misskey, for example, may view and interact with posts made by users on Mastodon. Some fediverse networks even allow users to interact with different social networking formats from the same platform. For example, a user on a social news instance running Lemmy can interact with another post from a kbin instance, a similar service as well as microblog statuses from Mastodon.^[4][5]

Adoption[edit]

Following the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk in November 2022, certain major social networks, including Threads,^[15] Tumblr and Flipboard have expressed interest in supporting the ActivityPub protocol.^[16] Flickr had also expressed support in supporting ActivityPub, however no information was released by the company after the initial tweets by the CEO and is expected to be cancelled.^[17][18]


Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg tweeted on November 22, 2022 that Tumblr was adding support for ActivityPub interoperability, in response to a user's complaints about Mastodon's complexity.^[19] However, no further information was revealed for over a year, and was expected to be cancelled after a leaked reorganization that moved most of Tumblr's staff to other Automattic projects. However, in an AMA following the leak, he revealed that the interoperability feature was not cancelled and that there was a small team working on the potential of implementing the protocol.^[20]


In December 2023, Flipboard announced that it has begun to federate selected profiles and magazines with the fediverse. It had previously ran its own Mastodon instance, flipboard.social, as a test of the Fediverse.^[21]


The release of Threads in July 2023 had included in its press release that it planned to support interoperability with the ActivityPub protocol in the future.^[22][23] In December 2023, select Meta employees began to federate with ActivityPub.^[24] A roadmap was revealed in January 2024 that detailed the integration of ActivityPub in Threads.^[25]


In March 2024, Threads implemented a beta version of Fediverse support, allowing Threads users to view the number of Fediverse users that liked their post, and allowing Fediverse users to view posts from Threads on their own instances.^[26][27][28] On April 2, the official Threads account for President Joe Biden enabled federation on its profile, making Biden the first President of the United States to have a presence on the fediverse.^[29]