hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2970.txt

Episode: 2970
Title: HPR2970: The Fediverse
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2970/hpr2970.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 14:02:15

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This is HPR episode 2,970 for Friday 20 December 2019. Today's show is entitled The Fediverse,
and is part of the series Social Media, it is hosted by Ahuka,
and is about 19 minutes long, and carries a clean flag. The summer is.
The Fediverse is the open network of social media platforms.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support Universal Access to All Knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Hello, this is Ahuka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode.
And I'm continuing the series on better social media on this one.
And the topic is the Fediverse. Now, when I first mentioned when I started this,
that it began with a talk I heard by a fellow named Ed Platt,
and that kind of got me started on taking a look at this new kind of social media.
And Ed was one of the panelists at PenguinCon 2019,
and he was on a panel about this thing called the Fediverse,
which helped me to bring this into a better focus.
Also on the panel were Michael W. Lucas, the writer on BSD and security topics,
among other things, Matt Arnold, Craig Maloney, and Mark Felder.
Now Fediverse is a portmanteau word for combining federation and universe.
And many of the applications I have discussed so far are part of this Fediverse.
But there are more things linking them together, such as a reliance on shared protocols.
This should not be too surprising since these applications are generally open source,
and that community tends to resist reinventing the wheel.
Now, this is a tendency and not an absolute rule as the proliferation of licenses would indicate.
And an exciting development is the adoption of an intercommunication protocol called activity pub,
which will not only facilitate communication with any application,
but should allow different applications to communicate with each other.
That means that the network is made up of all of the applications using this common protocol.
And that means you should be able to participate through any application.
Unlike proprietary platforms that try to keep you inside of their walls garden,
the examples of course being Facebook and Twitter, the two biggest,
the various components of the Fediverse want to support your freedom.
Now, this is not yet the promised land.
The big issue continues to be that only a small fraction of social media users have discovered the Fediverse.
And honestly, seeing your niece's baby pictures will not happen here in most cases, at least not yet.
But activity pub is a worldwide web consortium recommended protocol,
that aims in the words of Mozilla Fellow Darius Kazemi,
and he says you might remember the heyday of RSS when a user could subscribe to almost any content feed in the world
from any number of independently developed feed readers.
Activity pub aims to do for social network interactions, what RSS did for content.
Now, I think that's a great way to think about what the Fediverse developers are trying to do.
I subscribe to a lot of blogs through RSS, and I also subscribe to a lot of podcasts that way,
including most prominently hacker public radio.
In fact, when I find a podcast that does not offer an RSS feed, I will first politely inquire,
and if I don't get a positive response, I move on.
I know there are some podcasts out there that think, well, you know, you can get it through iTunes,
or you can get it through this special web, or you come to the website, and you can listen to it, and it's like, no.
I'm sorry.
I am not going to rearrange my life to suit your needs, and if that means I don't listen to your podcast,
you know, there are more podcasts out there than I have time for any way.
So dropping one or two is not a big deal.
So I love RSS. It works great.
And in terms of blogs, I can use any software I like to read the blogs,
and a different app to download my podcasts, and that's exactly what I do.
I'm not using one single RSS application, I have several.
And because of the protocol, none of that matters other than how well I like using the application.
The people creating the content make it available on a standard protocol.
I grab it using that same protocol, and it's pretty smooth.
As a contrast, if I'm using Twitter, I have to do it the Twitter way.
And if I use Facebook, I have to do it the Facebook way, and they don't talk to each other.
And having just recently gone through the shutdown of Google Plus, I can appreciate the openness of the platform.
As the mastodon blog says, and that's the strength of using open web protocols.
When you decide to switch to mastodon, you're not just gambling on the success of one project.
You can be certain that regardless of what happens with mastodon, the network will live on in flourish.
Newer and better software will be born within this ecosystem.
But you will never have to drag all your friends and followers someplace else again.
They'll already be where they need to be.
If Twitter shuts down, you'll lose your followers.
If Facebook shuts down, you'll lose your friends.
For some platforms, it's not a question of if but when.
Such events are usually followed by a scrambling into a variety of different platforms
where you inevitably lose some people as you have to make a choice which one to stay on.
This happened before, but it doesn't have to happen again.
Use the federated web. Join mastodon.
Now I think this is exciting stuff for someone who has been a promoter of software freedom.
So as I continue my explorations, I think I'm going to be keeping an eye on the Fediverse and probably really focusing on it.
Now on the other hand, some pretty big players like Diaspora and Gnu Media Goblin are not yet supporting this protocol.
Diaspora may not for the foreseeable future. Why?
Well, it's the usual story about open source projects.
They would need someone to take charge of it and they're happy with what they have now and don't see it as a big issue that needs addressing.
In other words, they haven't found someone who regards this as an itch that needs scratching.
Gnu Media Goblin, on the other hand, may do so more quickly.
The documentation site for Gnu Media Goblin, which says it was created in March 2018.
So it's not necessarily fully current. It says that it does not yet have full federation but is implementing the pump.io API, which is federated.
Christopher Lemmer Webber, whom I follow on mastodon, was both one of the co-founders of the Gnu Media Goblin project.
And co-editor of the activity pub federated social networking standard, so I'm hopeful here.
Also, another of the co-founders is my friend, Deb Nicholson, who I snagged as a guest of tech guest of honor for Penguin on a few years back.
I am generally hopeful when good people are involved.
Fediverse does have a few issues, so let's make sure we cover everything here.
It's not all unicorns and rainbows.
Federation puts every server in the hands of an administrator with no central authority regulating anything.
And this can have undesired, depending on your point of view, results.
For example, in 2014, Islamic State set up accounts on diaspora to distribute their posts when Twitter shut them down.
Twitter being a single source company could do that.
But diaspora has no single owner by design.
As the diaspora team posted on their blog, the decentralized nature of the network and the floss philosophy of the project are two of the key strengths of diaspora.
However, they can make it more difficult to act swiftly when there is inappropriate activity on the network.
Each pod administrator has final say over the content hosted on their pod, and we and our entire community of members work to help our pod mens to keep the network healthy and growing.
So, that's their point of view about this.
Now, in this case, most of the larger diaspora pods simply stop blinking or removed the IS related accounts and posts.
And as we discussed previously, that is something that federated servers can do, which I think is a strength.
So, yes, IS can set up their own server if they want.
That doesn't mean anyone has to listen to it.
Now, if you think certain posts or accounts should not appear, you too are free to find where setup a server that follows the rules you want.
And if you think all accounts and posts should be allowed, you just need to find or set up a server that operates in a maximum freedom of speech manner.
In this way, federation gives maximum control to users rather than to a corporate owner.
The other major benefit is the way applications can interact.
Jeremy Dormitzer explained it this way.
It's a language that any application can implement.
For example, there's a YouTube clone called PeerTube that also implements activity pub.
Because it speaks the same language as mastodon, a mastodon user can follow a PeerTube user.
If the PeerTube user posts a new video, it will show up in the mastodon user's feed.
The mastodon user can comment on the PeerTube video directly for mastodon.
Think about that for a second.
Any app that implements activity pub becomes part of a massive social network, one that conserves user choice and tears down world gardens.
Imagine if you could log into Facebook and see posts from your friends on Instagram and Twitter without needing an Instagram or Twitter account.
Another interesting little thing that you might want to take a look at is something called emojos.
Now, that's not a mistake.
Emojos are kind of open federated emoji.
Now, you're probably used to using emoji in various applications that support them.
But each app has its own set of emojis, which you may or may not find as useful as you would like.
And it should come as no surprise that a bunch of freedom-loving open-source federated media people decided to fix that.
Emojos can be used across all federated applications, but they need to reside on the server you are using.
As an example, on mastodon, there is a directory at HTTPS, colon slash slash EMOJOS.IN, where you can put in a domain name and see what emojos are available on that server.
If there are other emojos that you would like to use, you just ask the administrator if you're server to add them, and most likely that will happen.
But remember what Michael Lucas says about taking good care of your admin.
Ask nicely and buy him or hear him or her a beer when you get a chance.
Now, I checked mine and the emojos are covered by an agplv3 license, and there is a link to download any source code.
So, check right there.
To use one, just click on the emojo, and it is automatically copied to the clipboard, you can then paste it into any message.
Because it lives on the server, you can only use it on messages created on that server, but you can ask to add any that you need for other applications.
Now, what are some of the Fediverse protocols?
The first one, and we'll probably be talking more about that as this series goes on, is ActivityPub.
ActivityPub is an open decentralized social networking protocol, based on pump.io's ActivityPump protocol.
It provides a client server API for creating, updating, and deleting content, as well as a federated server to server API for delivering notifications and content.
And I've got a number of links in the show notes for these things that I'm mentioning, so make sure you check that out if you want more information.
Then there's the diaspora network.
Diaspora is a nonprofit user-owned distributed social network.
It consists of a group of independently-owned nodes called pods, which interoperate to form the network.
The social network is not owned by any one person or entity, keeping it from being subject to corporate takeovers or advertising.
According to its developer, our distributed design means no big corporation will ever control diaspora.
Next one is OStatus. OStatus is an open standard for federated micro-blocking, allowing users on one website to send and receive status updates with users on another website.
The standard describes how a suite of open protocols, including Atom, ActivityStreams, WebSub, Sammon, and WebFinger, can be used together, which enables different micro-blogging server implementations to root status updates between their users back and forth in near real time.
In the last protocol I want to look at, XMPP, which is Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol.
XMPP is a communication protocol for message-oriented middleware based on XNL, which is Extensible Markup Language.
It enables the near real-time exchange of structured yet extensible data between any two or more network entities.
Originally named Jabber, the protocol was developed by the eponymous open source community in 1999 for near real-time instant messaging, presence information, and contact list maintenance.
Designed to be Extensible, the protocol has been used also for published subscribe systems, signaling for voice over IP, video, file transfer, gaming, the Internet of Things applications such as the SmartGrid and social networking services.
Now, I'm not saying these are the only ones out there. They seem to be the most widespread, and I am particularly a fan of ActivityPub, which I think is doing a lot of right things.
And so we'll be talking about it more. Now, what are some of the major applications?
Fediverse platforms, and there's a link in the show notes, there's a Wikipedia site that you can go to for even more information.
But here are some of the major ones.
A diaspora, which we've mentioned, it is federated, it's not using the ActivityPub standard and may not do it at all, certainly not soon.
A friendika supports ActivityPub, diaspora network, and Ostatus.
Gnu Media Goblin, ActivityPub has been proposed.
Gnu Social, formerly status net, ActivityPub has been proposed.
Mastered on, dropped Ostatus to focus on ActivityPub.
Next cloud, when OpenCloud became too corporate, this forked, and it now uses ActivityPub.
PeerTube, a YouTube replacement, uses ActivityPub.
PixelFed, photo sharing, uses ActivityPub.
Now from this list, I've already given a little bit of coverage to Mastered on diaspora.
I'm probably going to take a look at some of these other applications as well.
But I think first I'm going to deliver some reports, probably a series of reports about the recent ActivityPub conference and some of the talks that I found interesting from that.
So, for the time being, this is Ahuka for Hacker Public Radio.
And I'm going to now sign off and remind everyone as always to support FreeSoftware.
Bye-bye.
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