Introducing print3d.social and the fediverse
The what-verse?
Do you know what the fediverse is? It’s a social network. How do you join? You pick any one of the services on the fediverse that you like and join that. Imagine if you could follow your favorite YouTube channel from twitter and get to know every time they post a new video, without them having to go and post on twitter. Imagine if you could also reply to their videos in twitter and the replies showed below their video in YouTube. Doesn’t it sound awesome?
Yeah that’s not gonna happen, like, ever…
The thing is that the internet was meant to be like that. Enter the fediverse. The fediverse is a collection of social media apps that can communicate with each other. You can join mastodon or pleroma if you like short character-limited quips, or peertube if you prefer videos. Or pixelfed if you are a photo person. Prismo if you’re into news. Plume if you like longer writing forms. There are more, like misskey and anfora, and new apps are being developed right now too.
So that’s all?
Even when you do choose an app the journey doesn’t end there. There are many copies of that app on the web, called instances. Think about it as your local photography club. You can sign up to this one and if you don’t like the other photographers who hang out there, or if you have issues with the president of the board you can always pack up and go sign up on the one in the next town. All of them however communicate with each other. You don’t have to cut ties with that one friend you liked from the local place.
And why is that better?
This also distributes moderation so no big overseeing algorithm that sees nipples everywhere will censor your posts. However, just like your local photography club has rules, and you probably can’t showcase anything you want in the annual photo exhibition the same goes for your friendly neighborhood instance. If you don’t like the rules, there are other instances.
And how do I choose which instance? Eh, this is becoming hard work. I just want to be where all the cool kids are.
Some instances are thematic. This makes it nicer to look at their general timeline and discover similar-minded folks if you’re really into one subject. Some are more generalist. Some others restrict their audience to a specific political affiliation or opinion. Yeah there are nazis on the fediverse. But most non-nazi instances have them blocked anyway so it’s unlikely to meet them if you don’t go looking for them.
I didn’t get that name though fedi, what’s fedi?
The thing that makes all these apps and services talk to each other is called ActivityPub and it’s a form of federation. Another form of federation makes your e-mail from @gmail.com reach my email @qzx.gr and your boss’s @corporate-overlord.com despite being hosted by very different entities and on very different technology stacks. So the universe of federation is called the fediverse, or in short, fedi.
Hmm,
Oh, I forgot to tell you. All this looks like free but it is being supported by the people that run the instances. Be a good sport and give them a tip. There are usually no ads and these people will probably never ask you for money but this doesn’t make it less hard work or less costly for them to run the servers.
And what’s print3d.social?
We just love 3D printing and we believe that prints can be works of art. We made a [pixelfed](https://pixelfed.org) instance so anybody who likes 3D printing can post his creations. It’s a great discovery mechanism too because the instance’s timeline will be full of awesome 3D prints. If you’re as into 3D printing as we are, sign up! And remember, if you have any friends on mastodon (or elsewhere on the fediverse) tell them to follow you.
By the way it’s pronounced “printed social” inspired by the popular 3D printing software slic3r.
But I want to post my cat.
Then just 3D print a toy for it and post it playing with it. Ok, we won’t ban you for the odd cat-only pic but don’t overdo it. Also the server we run is very very small in order to keep the costs down so registrations will close at some point. Hurry up :-P
