Fedigroup – group system for the Fediverse August 7, 2023

Hey all,

The past year I’ve been playing pretty active on federated social networks. This led me to try and write a federated social network group system. Although this group system is far from being complete since Fedigroup is currently in pre-alpha level. I think it is worth sharing what I have learned, and also explain a bit why, if you met me during the past three years. I’ve been going about federated social networks.

You are also welcome to join a server I maintain here, Hayu.sh is the second largest Hebrew-speaking instance.

What is a federated social network?

A federation in servers means everyone can run their own server which is autonomous. And it can communicate with other servers too. Creating a large network. The first protocol on the internet is actually federated too – email.

There is no one central email server, or single email software. In social networks this means that you join a server, and follow and interact with everyone else. Even though your server could be, like in my case, hosted in your own home, with you owning all the data. You can also join a any other server, and switch between them.
For Hebrew speakers, I gave a small TED lecture about it, which is hosted on a federated video server. You can watch it here (Hebrew).

The Fediverse is the servers using the a W3C Standard that does just that

What made the Fediverse possible is the standard that was passed to describe it. The protocol is called ActivityPub 2.0. And it lets social networks share status messages (notes), shares (boosts) and favorites across different servers. It was created by a group of people who cared, not large companies. Despite some of them being members of the W3C. Its also worth mentioning that one of the major adopters of the ActivityPub 2.0 protocol was Mastodon, a type of social network server, which resembles twitter. And that really help gain critical mass.

Why didn’t I hear about this?

I was asked this by other developers and power users. It makes people dismiss the Fediverse as a passing or niche thing.

Unlike Facebook, Twitter even if you’re been avoiding social networks, their marketing will reach you, your news channel, municipality and country are likely using them. Their existence depends on it that you use and browse on their site. However, in the Fediverse does not have a business model that demands it. Or a marketing team. Its just people. You are welcome to join, but no ones income depends on it.

The Fediverse is growing though, by word-of-mouth, or text-in-blog. Recently even celebrities and others. The latest are the BBC, PNAS, George Takei, Neil Gaiman, Stephen Fry and the European Commission.