(2022-11-02) Axbom The Many Branches Of The Fediverse

Per Axbom: The many branches of the Fediverse. Federated? What does that mean? All the different instances of Mastodon can talk to each other. All the different instances of Pixelfed can talk to each other. And all the different instances of Mastodon can talk to all the different instances of Pixelfed.

As Mastodon has grown in popularity and adoptance, many tend to think of the Fediverse as only those applications that are based on the ActivityPub protocol. But protocols will come and go, and there are already others (not included in the diagram) that are not questioned as fediverse-included: such as Zot. I would argue that yes, Matrix is most definitely Fediverse software.

One ActivityPub application already working on Matrix protocol support (very early on) is Socialhome. Socialhome today supports both ActivityPub and diaspora.

Here is a complete list of the tools mentioned in the visual.

• Bonfire
• Bookwyrm
• Castopod
• Diaspora
• Drupal (via plugins)
• Friendica
• Funkwhale
• GnuSocial (will be tying this closer to OStatus in the next iteration)
• Hubzilla
• kbin
• Lemmy
• Mastodon
• Matrix.org
• Micro.blog (paid service that federates with ActivityPub)
• Misskey
• Mobilizon
• Nextcloud
• Owncast
• Peertube
• Pixelfed
• Pleroma
• SocialHome
• Wordpress (via plugins)
• Write freely
• Write.as (hosted version of Write freely

Image description of the diagram

A tree-like visual where the tree grows from a green platform labeled “ActivityPub”.