Their names might sound similar, but Fediverse is quite different from Metaverse. While Metaverse is owned by Meta's boss, Mark Zuckerberg, Fediverse is collectively owned.
Huh? What does that mean?
The Federation of Social Media
Fediverse is an acronym for "federation" and "universe." Imagine a collection of states within a federal country; in the Fediverse, the federation consists of platforms connected through a common protocol.
As of today, several platforms are part of the Fediverse, including Mastodon, Pleroma, Diaspora, Peertube, Pixelfed, and others.
Wait... what do you mean by common protocol?
Have you ever sent an email from Gmail to Yahoo or vice versa? If you think about it, those are two different platforms, but your email still gets through. The answer is because Gmail and Yahoo support the same protocol.
This is how the common protocol in the Fediverse works, allowing users to send and receive information across different platforms.
So, for example, if you post a photo on Instagram, people can comment from Twitter, Facebook, or even TikTok without needing an Instagram account first.
Or take followers, for instance. Your followers on Instagram and TikTok are different because they are stored on each platform's respective servers. But with the common protocol in the Fediverse, your followers will remain the same across all platforms.
Isn't that cool?
Decentralization of Social Media
As mentioned earlier, decentralization or platform autonomy is the "soul" and spirit of Fediverse from the beginning. But why is Fediverse so against centralization?
Today, social media users are becoming more aware of how vulnerable their position is. Any changes will directly impact them. Have you ever experienced or heard of account restrictions on Instagram?
Such incidents happen because of centralized control or content moderation, which in Instagram's context, means Meta is in charge.
Not just policy changes, even minor algorithm changes can have significant impacts. Imagine a content creator who has painstakingly built their business from scratch, gradually amassing millions of followers and tens of millions of likes by learning the algorithm.
When this algorithm changes, their content that used to be at the top might get "buried" below. This also affects their income as a content creator.
Fediverse aims to change that. If there’s an algorithm change, the content creator won't lose their followers, likes, or income because everything is interconnected.
Tracing back to its roots, decentralization through protocols is the true origin of the Internet. For example, email uses the SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), chat uses the IRC (Internet Relay Chat) protocol, and Usenet uses the NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol) protocol.
Even websites, which are a daily staple for us today, use the HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol).
Here’s a simple illustration:
How about it? Interested in trying out Fediverse?
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