Years ago I was trying to find away to keep folks connected across all their various digital streams. At the same time, the large Platforms were kicking off their meteoric rise that came to define the internet for the next 20 or so years. As you have no idea what I was doing back in 2007, you know who succeeded.
In the last few years, tho, people have soured on the way the internet has been built and all eyes are on the Fediverse. The Fediverse is the return to the morselization of the internet and a way to take back our social graph, take back our things that are in the cloud.
Way back when I said:
Do you want to have full control over your data, your social graph, your communications, just like you do now with your mobile phone? Source: Take back the graph! Facebook, The Cloud, and a return to the basics of social networking – Molecularist
Now, Ghost, a newsletter platform whose star has risen after the debacles at Substack, has published a manifesto of sorts in support of ActivityPub, the leading protocol for building the Fediverse.
As the article says:
This has long been the dream, and it seems like the platforms betting on it in various ways — Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, Flipboard, and others — are where all the energy is, while attempts to rebuild closed systems keep hitting the rocks. Source: Newsletter platform Ghost adopts ActivityPub to ‘bring back the open web’ – The Verge
Alas, I really haven’t dabbled in all this Fediverse stuff. Yes, I have been banging this drum (or a version of this drum) for a while. But my head (and communities) are elsewhere these days. So, while all this is exciting for me, the Fediverse is not not really part of my life.
Maybe some other time.
Tho this quote captures the expectations I and other have as Fediverse takes flight.
That’s the fun part about the fediverse — it’s a lot of old ideas about the web being open and interoperable, but there’s still a lot of new things yet to be invented on top of that foundation. At this point I’m not sure any social platform that launches without an eye towards federation stands a chance, really. Source: Newsletter platform Ghost adopts ActivityPub to ‘bring back the open web’ – The Verge
