This is an archive of past discussions about Fediverse. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Origin of the name

Would be good to find out exactly how the name Fediverse was coined, or if that's not known, some of the known points of origin. Danylstrype (talk) 17:08, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

History

The OStatus standard was first developed for connecting together many instances of StatusNet (now GNU Social), a federated social networking server created by Evan Prodromou. At the time, the developers of a number of other software and websites expressed interest in federating with StatusNet using the new standard, although none of them are still actively supported. In 2013, Identi.ca, one of the most popular StatusNet sites, changed from StatusNet to a pump.io, a newer software and protocol also created by Prodromou. Later that year, ongoing development of the StatusNet project was handed over to Matt Lee and Mikael Nordfeldth, who announced they would continue development using the name of Lee's project GNU Social.^[1] Danylstrype (talk) 17:08, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

Trackers and Visualizations

Fediverse.org:^[2] A list of active GNU Social and PostActiv servers.
Raday by Amberstone:^[3] Visualizations of the relative sizes of the largest servers in the Fediverse. Can collect data from Mastodon servers and some GNU Social servers.Danylstrype (talk) 17:08, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

Secondary Sources

More to come. Danylstrype (talk) 17:09, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

Additional potential sources

Might help. JamesG5 (talk) 20:28, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

@JamesG5 Thanks for the encouraging comment on my user page. My first goal here was introducing the topic and establishing baseline notability. I realise some careful research will need to be done to improve the page, such as find credible secondary sources documenting the origin of the neologism, and backing up the claims I want to make in the draft sections above. Thanks also for these links. There are a number of links at Talk:Mastodon_(software)#Articles online about Mastodon that could be checked for useful references to the Fediverse, as well as the references on the main Mastodon page, and the pages about OStatus and GNU Social.

Fediverse is specific to OStatus

User Paulfree14 has removed relevant content from this page, claiming incorrectly in his edit comment that the term Fediverse is not specific to software using the OStatus protocol. I am undoing this change. The other main social network federation protocol is the Diaspora protocol, and the set of software federating using that protocol is collectively known as the Federation: https://the-federation.info/ I've also removed the awkwardly worded phrase about "interoperability to each other", which adds no new information to the sentence it was added to, and makes that sentence harder to read. Danylstrype (talk) 10:06, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

Up until recently, fediverse referred specifically to apps that inter-operated using OStatus,^[4] but with most of these apps implementing or planning to implement the newer ActivityPub standard, and all the apps in "The Federation" (except Diaspora) planning to do the same, some people are starting to use the phrase "the fediverse" to refer to the network of apps inter-operating with either OStatus or ActivityPub, or to the federated networks as a whole^[5]. I notice Misskey has been added to the list of fediverse apps on this page, but AFAIK it only supports AP, not OStatus. At some point we need to gather some third-party sources and update this page, maybe in a way that reflects these differing definitions? --Danylstrype (talk) 11:12, 26 May 2018 (UTC)

References