fediverse, decentralized group of social media platforms in which each independent platform can interact freely with any other platform that is part of the group.

Great that they have an article on it, though their formatting the start of each article like a dictionary entry is a bit odd compared to Wikipedia.

If it were a Wikipedia article, it would probably need some copyediting to give it a more encyclopedic tone along with in-line citations.

Man, that "can" is doing a fuck of a lot of heavy lifting. lemmy, piefed are 100% when you start going pixelfed or loops, or mastodon the compatibility matrix stops looking like that nice spiderweb.

you're lucky if you can even finger a user between systems

you’re lucky if you can even finger a user between systems

I'm sure the gals at the blahaj zone are up for it

Meta's Threads is also working toward ActivityPub compatibility, which would significantly expand the fediverse user base.

Um... fuck no, please and thank you!

The bad news is: you can already follow accounts bidirectionally between Threads and Mastodon. The good news is: Meta did the bare minimum and seems to have stopped development.

How is the fediverse different from traditional social media?

The fediverse is a decentralized network of social media platforms that freely interact, unlike traditional social media.

I have a bit of a problem with the term "traditional social media".

The earliest popular form of social media was Usenet. The first one I ever used was web forums (run on phpBB or similar software). Those have a lot more "tradition" than Facebook or Twitter or TikTok, so why are they calling the latter three (deviations from the decentralized "tradition" of the Internet) "traditional social media"?! Is it just that they're the first form of social media that the authors of that article ever used?

I recommend uBlacklist to correct this.

Those were not considered social media in their heyday as the term was created after them specifically for sites where a user would maintain a non-anonymous profile and post content about themselves and curating a feed based on other profiles followed.

Forums and Usenet could be considered proto-social-media perhaps given they were clear precursors to it

Of course. I find "social media" a suboptimal term anyway. A good term for the concept is the "participatory Internet".

But if we are going to use it, then it's just media that is produced by society at large as opposed to paid journalists or authors. Meaning Usenet is social media.

Can confirm. Finger me between systems, bby!

Unlike X (formerly Twitter) or Facebook, which remain in business by profiting from consumers’ personal information, the fediverse aims to give users privacy and an ad-free interface.

Tbh I never understood the Lemmy users can interact with all other platforms that share the same protocol.

It's not like I can view a Mastodon user's history on Lemny, right?

It's not like I can view a Mastodon user's history on Lemny, right?

afaik you can

From mastodon viewing lemmy stuff is nice enough. It would be great if you could seamlessly crosspost and share between platforms.

Lemmy and history, no. On Lemmy you can see comments from Mastodon and posts (toot with a Lemmy community pinged inside. Which is rarely done but happens). But not the toots themselves
Piefed now allows to directly follow accounts (similar to Mastodon, Friendica, etc) and you can start getting the new toots after following an account https://piefed.zip/c/microblogs

ehh.. just tested and it doesn't seem to work.. somehow i remembered it working but maybe i was mistaken

sorry for the misinformation

Yeah, I keep trying the different things. We're really not using the fediverse for all it's capable of.

We can generally see all the users on all the federated systems, but none of their old content, a limited number of systems can follow other systems and see new stuff.

I'd really like to see being able to log into pixelfed.social as rumba@lemmy.zip, post images there (and in loops.video) and reference them in my mastodon and lemmy posts.

All the interoperability is threadbare.

Lemmy really is growing and I love that we're part of that

You can but iirc it takes quite a bit of bidirectional effort to enable that. Thankfully!