Is Your Future Distributed? Welcome to the Fediverse! – TidBITS

A new concept with old roots has started to come to the fore on the Internet: federation. Instead of a centralized system, typically run as the equivalent of a single giant database by a company with a profit motive or investors to repay, federation relies on distributed servers. Each server, called an instance, runs a common protocol. Servers using that protocol agree to exchange nuggets of information, like brief posts or pieces of media. The best-known and most popular example of a modern federated system is Mastodon, a micro-blogging network that has garnered great attention as the primary alternative to Twitter. (See this articles sibling, Mastodon: A New Hope for Social Networking, 27 January 2023, for more about the ins and outs of what Mastodon is, why you might join, and how to use it.)

The concept of federation has garnered recent attention because of the rise of the Fediverse, a set of open-source protocols that manage user activity on a server and the interchange of information among users on other, independently operated servers. (The most widely used such protocol is ActivityPub, supported by the World Wide Web Consortium, but there are others.) Server softwaretypically open-source as wellsupports federation by allowing users to register accounts locally, then letting local users follow and be followed by users on both the local server and other servers within the Fediverse that run the same protocol. In essence, this open-source system builds a skein of connections across servers that dont have to make prior arrangements to interact.

Theres no center of the Fediverse. Each participant and each server has their own agenda, operating principles, and local data store. The connections among servers are all consensual, voluntary, and subject to change. No authority dictates whether a given server can or cant connect to another; nor can an overarching authority demand that users or content be removed. (Governments and courts are another matter, but they are always extrinsic actors with regard to individual or commercial speech.)

You can find Fediverse software for exchanging music, social networking, and photo and music sharing, among many other purposes. This nifty sitenon-authoritative by its nature!explains the Fediverse in depth and lists a huge array of Fediverse apps. I also love this graphic created last November by Per Axom that visualizes many Fediverse apps as branches and leaves of a tree.

The Fediverse exists in stark contrast to most organizations centralized, commercial efforts to connect people via the Internet. Its an example of the ethos of IndieWeb, which simultaneously looks back to the best of the Internets earlier days and forward to the best of what can be built today. The Fediverse is designed to share resources in a cooperative way that lifts all boats while also providing individual points of authority that decide how to connect to other independently operated networks and servers.

While your immediate interest may primarily be Mastodonand for that, see the article linked abovethe Fediverse is broader, a galaxy in which Mastodon is the language of peace among many star systems and trade routes, while co-existing with many other federated systems. Lets dig into what the Fediverse is and what it means.

In the universe of possibilities of how people communicate electronically with one another, the choices largely separate out into centralized, decentralized, and distributed. This is not a new distinction, as you can see in this network types diagram from an influential 1964 research paperby Paul Baran.

Here are the definitions with services as examples:

The oldest among us might find this reminiscent of what used to be called store-and-forward systems, like the original FidoNet, UUCPNET, and BITNET. These were early examples of a kind of federation. Every server knew how to pass information destined for non-local accounts, even if that merely meant passing it along to the next server. With UUCP, for instance, mail could be addressed using bang routing, which listed out each server between the source and the destination. These networks were critical in the early days of internetworking when modems were expensive, bandwidth scarce, and no backbone existed.

Centralization is, by definition, in opposition to that spirit. It spread partly because of the cost of resources required to manage the necessary computational and bandwidth requirements as the Internet grew richer in media and more complicated. The technical bar to entry also deterred mass adoption. Newer services provided an easier on-ramp to some components of the Internet, and early and then mature social networks captured audiences who primarily used email and a browser, and didnt want to blog, build a Web site, or post on Usenet.

Thus something that charts a new course on old paths has to demonstrate a thriving community, provide easy access, and work reliably. Its hard to argue that all three of those exist today in the Fediverse, but each of those elements is heading in the right direction.

Mastodon and the Fediverse represent something far better than Web 2.0and vastly better than whats already seen as the ill-fated, ridiculously branded metaverse/crypto-focused Web3. The Fediverse is more like Web 1++: what you liked back in the early days, only modern and much more of it.

Federation has some drawbacks related in part to the lack of a central organization that handles infrastructure and policy. That said, these drawbacks are really all two-edged swords, with both negative and positive aspects:

You might recognize some of these problems from email, which is effectively a federated service despite the mass numbers of consumer and business email accounts hosted by Apple, Google, and Microsoft, as well as for employees by large corporations. For instance, the admins who run email servers can and do block mail from going to or being received from other email servers; constantly updated lists of bad actors aid that process. Individual email recipients can use tools to block messages from individuals or entire domains. (In contrast, admins of federated servers may have to examine individual messages constantly, something thats rarely done with email). Email used to suffer from limitations on email attachments volume of messages sent, sometimes resulting in huge backlogs in receiving emails. These issues have shrunk over time as the cost of running servers has dropped.

Despite these problems, email has thrived. Turn-of-the-century predictions that email would become increasingly balkanized, with servers interacting only with subsets of other servers, didnt come to pass. One specific worry was that any given email message might not be able to get from here to there, wherever there was, because of a block in between. That hasnt happened. The success of email as a decades-long accidental experiment in federation should give us hope.

In the Fediverse, most instances do block other instances. But its typically a subset of other instances for various bright-line reasons. The most common are instances used by people with extremist ideologies. This so-called defederationblocking traffic from another instancehappens at the discretion of the admins of an instance. Within Mastodon, in particular, you can also mute or block accounts or entire instances distinct from the instance on which your Mastodon account is hosted. You then will never see that individual or posts from that domain.

Admins can also take various moderation actions against individuals and posts or other items. In the Mastodon world, some instances have a robust moderation team and a detailed acceptable use policy. Some even have a review board or advisory group to ensure fairness and offer recourse. Moderation doesnt scale, making it a challenge as the Fediverse grows. An increase in users and activities could result in the heavy-handed removal of posts and people or insufficient throttling of bad actors. That, in turn, could lead to other instances being defederated from an instance that is either too severe or not severe enough!

Fortunately, while every account must live on a particular instance, you own your social graph, your connections with other people. You can migrate your identity from one server to another, bringing followers and those you follow along, and leaving behind an automated forwarding address. (With Mastodon, your posts dont migrate but remain in amber on the previous server unless an admin there removes the account.) If youre blocked or banned on the instance where the account you want to migrate lives, that naturally introduces complexity.

If a given Fediverse project, including the underlying ActivityPub protocol, became too radical in its behavior, it could be forked, or become a duplicate of the project taken in a new direction, because most of these efforts are open source. People running instances that use a protocol could opt to install the forked version if they didnt like the primary direction. This could split up the Fediverse or a service within it, but in practice, most forks usually have a primary branch.

Not all apps compatible with the Fediverse are dedicated to it. For instance, Manton Reeses Micro.blog service supports ActivityPub as a format and enables it by default on accounts created starting in October 2022. In Mastodon, you can add a Micro.blog users feed as easily as adding another Mastodon user. WordPress users can install an ActivityPub plug-in (in beta) to allow similar feed subscriptions. The Fediverse is also highly flexible around RSS, using it as a sort of lingua franca to obtain non-interactive feeds.

The future of the Fediverse isnt dependent on mass adoption by hundreds of millions of people. No company has to pay thousands of employees or maintain massive server resources. Instead, its predicated more on momentum and commitment. Open-source projects and volunteer-run servers require people who believe what theyre doing is worthwhile, whether from enlightened self-interest or generosity.

The excitement over the Fediverse is that we could see the blossoming of a dream held in the equivalent of an Internet seed vault for nearly two decades, thanks to the current focus on Mastodon. As blogs died, RSS receded, and people owned less of what they posted and their relationships with others, the question was if the seeds of that dream of a distributed Internet would be forgotten. The Fediverse is fresh soil. Lets see what blooms.

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Is Your Future Distributed? Welcome to the Fediverse! - TidBITS