this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2022
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Fediverse
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Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".
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@nom_nom Different servers realize different services, or at the very least they realize them in different ways. What's new is that these services are at least somewhat interoperable with each other: I can comment on this Lemmy thread via Mastodon, altough I cannot start threads in a Lemmy community. Other AP servers work much better with Lemmy. For example, Friendica (a Facebook clone) allows for the publishing of posts in groups (which is what Lemmy communities basically are).
Very interesting, and thank you for the excellent explanation. I think I understand a little bit more now: so they are different services but because of the shared protocol it allows for some interoperability between services, and the unique part about the Fediverse is that it isn't simply an API, but all federated services (lemmy, mastodon, friendica, etc.,) are all literally interconnected, but the exact functionality depends on the service itself. Did I get that right?
@nom_nom That's basically it. There are many kinds of AP servers floating around, and while most of them overlap quite a bit (what the Fediverse is mostly about is microblogging), there's also stuff like ForgeFed, which is an extension to the protocol that will eventually allow Gitea (a Github alternative) instances and similiar Forge servers to federate with each other. Of course, you won't be able to commit code through Mastodon, but you might be able to comment existing issues on a project.
@nom_nom Btw, here's a good article on the Fediverse https://axbom.com/fediverse/
It also explains that the Fediverse isn't really made of just one protocol: ActivityPub is the most popular one by far (mainly thanks to Mastodon, which has been widely adopted), but there are also a few others (the most notable one is Matrix, which allows private and decentralized instant messaging).