Building the Fediverse & Social Web Together
The fediverse and social web are exploding with new projects and activity. It has become popular with decentralized social media platforms, but the same technology can be applied to blogs, forums, discussion groups, and even private messaging apps.
What is the Fediverse and Social Web?
Interconnected platforms, websites, and blogs.
The Fediverse
To put simply, the fediverse is a network of independent decentralized social media servers (also known as fediverse servers) primarily run by smaller organizations and individuals. Most of them are privately run, commercial free, and community-based.
These fediverse servers & platforms can communicate with each other using protocols such as Zot protocol and ActivityPub, allowing people to follow and interact with others on different servers and platforms. For those of you who are coming from large platforms, that would be like if people on Facebook could follow and communicate with people on LinkedIn, and vice versa.
The Social Web
The social web expands the fediverse and includes platforms that use the same technology, but don't fall into the definition of the fediverse. For example, large commercial platforms, such as Threads, are generally not considered to be part of the fediverse, but are considered to be part of the social web. Fediverse-enabled apps and blogs would be considered part of the social web, but may or may not be considered part of the fediverse, depending on who you ask.
Opinions Vary
While not everyone may agree on the exact definition of these terms, what they have in common is interconnectivity and cross-platform communications.
Defining Traits of the Fediverse and Social Web
Key components of the fediverse and social web include interconnectivity, independence, and decentralization.
You can self-host your social identity and content, or you can choose any number of platforms and providers as your home base on the fediverse. Regardless of where your social identity and content is located on the fediverse, you still have access to millions of other channels and people on the fediverse. You can follow them, and they can follow you. And for websites that support federated single sign on, you can even log in with your social identity.
Pioneers, Collaboration, and Cooperation
Some of the early pioneers include Identi.ca, GNU/social, Friendica, Hubzilla, and more. Later came projects like Mastodon, PeerTube, Pixelfed, and others. Even giants like WordPress and Meta are getting involved with a WordPress ActivityPub plugin and Meta's Threads platform.
As we see more people get involved, and more players in this space, collaboration and cooperation become more vital. And it is important that smaller players are able to participate, even as larger players enter the field.
Our Goals
This website is designed to give you some basic information about the fediverse and social web, define terms, and provide links to resources and organizations involved in this exciting space.
It is also our intention to build fediverse-enabled project management tools and make them available to fediverse and social web projects that wish to collaborate.
Project Management & Collaboration Tools
Our ultimate goal with this website is to create fediverse-enabled collaboration tools for decentralized social media and social web projects.
Some of the features we are working on include:
- Multi-user project management
- Fediverse-enabled forums for discussions
- Federated single sign on
- Project wikis
- Links to relevant resources on other servers.
In addition to providing these tools, our goal is to give project leaders flexibility on how they want to manage their project. For example, they can use our wiki or their own. They can create discussion groups and forums on our platforms, or they can use their own. We also want to work with other platforms to provide integrations, to make it easier for people to collaborate.
Initially, discussion groups and forums will be available via Zot Protocol, ActivityPub, and OpenWebAuth. To use the project management tools and edit the wikis, we will initially support OpenWebAuth only. In the future, if there is interest, we would like to create a federated project management platform, but for the time being the tools will only be available on this and other websites.
Documentation
As this website expands, we will create documentation on the following topics:
- Concepts
- Initiatives
- Projects
- Organizations
- Communities
- Platforms
- Protocols
- History