How the fediverse could shape the future of the web
Mastodon was launched in October 2016, and I set up an account on it shortly after. But the decentralized social network remained the preserve of a relatively small group of users until Elon Musk took over Twitter in October, with nearly half a million people joining it in a week, taking the number of active monthly users to one million in early November and more than two million by mid-December.
Welcome to the fediverse: a collection of federated nodes that aims to decentralize the social networks: each server sets its own rules, and all of them facilitate the flow of information with each other, beyond the reach of the big companies that have dominated the social web landscape so far.
You might have read that after the initial furor users are abandoning Mastodon or the fediverse, but that’s what journalists who are too lazy to do their job properly are saying. The reality is that Mastodon’s numbers continue to climb, that the conversation is getting more interesting, and that the setup, albeit with its obvious vulnerabilities and issues, is starting to look like something much more ambitious than a simple replacement for Twitter, which was apparently the initial idea.
The interesting thing about Mastodon and its network of federated servers is the constellation of movements that are starting to emerge…
