Federated space or Fediverse On another post, a member states, " I am making my home in the federated space where I...
Federated space or Fediverse On another post, a member states, " I am making my home in the federated space where I am in control of my existence and never have to start over with contacts."
I'm not sure what "federated space" means and cannot find a good explanation on the web. It sounds wonderful.
Does it make a difference how you enter federated space? Is there a preferred mode of entry? Once there, what has been your experience? Has it lived up to your expectations? What were those expectations?
Occupants of "federated space," would you be willing to enlighten me and share your experiences with others here?
Thanks!
P.S. As per your great comments below I see Fediverse is the accepted search term for information on this subject.
#Fediverse
#FederatedSpace
#Google+
I'm not sure what "federated space" means and cannot find a good explanation on the web. It sounds wonderful.
Does it make a difference how you enter federated space? Is there a preferred mode of entry? Once there, what has been your experience? Has it lived up to your expectations? What were those expectations?
Occupants of "federated space," would you be willing to enlighten me and share your experiences with others here?
Thanks!
P.S. As per your great comments below I see Fediverse is the accepted search term for information on this subject.
#Fediverse
#FederatedSpace
#Google+
just like Star Trek in the galaxy.🚀🌌 the Federation protecting the Federated space👽👾 I think he was being sarcastic when he said it
ReplyDeleteI am not an expert but here are hints:
ReplyDeleteFederation refers to a social network that is decentralized. One example (of many) is Diaspora. There are many federated Social networks.
Each instance runs on its own resources and is controlled independently of other modes.
In contrast, G+ is owned and operated by Google using Googles (fabulous!) computer and network resources.
Facebook is centrally controlled and operated by a large company.
A huge challenge with federation is a lack of critical mass in terms of attracting a very large set of users. You don’t need to follow a huge number of people, but you want to be able to select smart and creative folks from a very large set of candidates.
🤓🤓🤓
ReplyDeleteTrucker Kev The Paid Tourist Ha! Good references there! "Federated Space" in this case refers to social media that allows you to share with other social media somehow. In other words, people don't have to be on Facebook to see your Facebook posts.
ReplyDelete...I think...
Let's see what others have to say...
Ron K Jeffries Federation in itself isn't a problem for attracting users. Usenet News, before it collapsed, managed very well. The problem is that most people have already found a platform.
ReplyDeleteThat glowing endorsement of federated space is a bit of wishful thinking, at the moment. But it's a fine aspiration.
ReplyDeletemedium.com - A quick guide to The Free Network – We Distribute – Medium
ReplyDeleteThe replies above should answer your question well. But let me add another dimension. Federation may be an interim condition. The underlying issue is servers being able to communicate among themselves, passing posts, reactions, notifications, subscriptions, etc amongst themselves. That interoperability depends on technical protocols and shared semantic data structures. At first these open source communities were using hacked up protocols (ostatus, etc) and APIs (app program interfaces) to build bridges and gateways, but now there are proposed and tentative W3C social networking protocols defined, especially ActivityPub (which see). Once these open source and decentralized platforms adapt the emerging standard social network protocols, then "federation" morphs into plain and simple interoperability analogous to when the internet adapted HTTP/HTML to allow transparent interoperability at the URL/document/media abstraction level. ActivityPub, etc is the additional layer on the protocol stack to handle social interaction abstractions. So, in that sense living in the federated universe means using these decentralized platforms which try to talk to each other as opposed to living in the proprietary world like FB, twitter, g+, wordpress, youtube, etc etc, which don't talk to each other.
ReplyDeleteJeff Diver I see that Isaac Kuo has made a really great post above. He is very well-informed it seems.
ReplyDeleteSo I can only add my personal experience. I am now a member of the pluspora pod on diaspora*: I joined about a month ago and am really enjoying it! There no equivalents of Communities there but that very absence means that, consequently, I am daily discovering new and unexpected topics and people, by chance. It suits me very well!
#Fediverse FTW
ReplyDeleteBill Brayman You said: "...proposed and tentative W3C social networking protocols defined, especially ActivityPub....".
ReplyDeleteI am not an IT geek, merely a user. Are these changes to which you refer going to have beneficial or adverse effects on users' experience?
Right now I am almost thinking (metaphorically!) "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!".
Roy Gardiner Yes, W3C standards will help tremendously. The current situation is a bit of a kludge, but far better than the lack of anything universal at FB and twitter.
ReplyDeleteBill Brayman The federated web space is based on W3C protocols
ReplyDeleteSee links at the bottom of my blog post at
infinitemetaverse.com - Infinite Metaverse Alliance (IMA) - Open Simulator and Social Media
Shelenn Ayres Thanks, good article and links I'll read closer later. Not sure exactly what you meant in your comment, but it might be confusing to say federation is based on W3C standards. Better technically to say federation development is the main source for creating the standards which are just now being approved and are at this point only partially being incorporated into the federation. For example, Diaspora apparently is not on board with ActivityPub yet. I'm just now researching this, and would love to know what's the deal with them, are they resisting the standard, trying to improve it, or what? And, BTW, you make a convincing case that Friendica is an appealing place to get started with these decentralized platforms.
ReplyDeleteBill Brayman As you will see when you look at the W3C working group page and the social protocols W3C page you will see there are 6 protocols. Chicken or egg arguments are not relevant to me in choosing a new social network home. ;)
ReplyDeleteThese are summarized on the federation.info link. Not all network types support all of the protocols. Friendica and Hubzilla support the most.
Of the six which could become four:
ActivityPub is the likely successor to OStatus
Zot is the likely successor to DFRN
Answer to my own question - diaspora's use of w3c activitypub standard? Apparently there are still some substantial issues. Way technical, but you can get the gist here from a Diaspora developer: schub.io - ActivityPub - one protocol to rule them all? - Dennis Schubert
ReplyDeleteIsaac Kuo You mention Pluspora. It’s ok/fine and is run by Nice people. As of today about 7000 people have Pluspora accounts.
ReplyDelete7000.
Over the years I have experimental with several federated social networks. You also mentioned Mastodon which as you stated is an alternative to Twitter. It’s pretty cool but
Even the larger instances are tiny when compared with G+.
That doesn’t mean Mastodon is a failure, but it offers a tiny fraction of the number and variety of Twitter users.
Ron K Jeffries Pluspora is one community, the diaspora platform has millions; quick google says this "As of March 2014, there are more than 1 million Diaspora accounts" I was thinking that we often forget the difference between platform and community. Instead of one platform one community with fb and twitter, we will have one to many with decentralized platforms. I'm not sure what that means in the long run.
ReplyDeleteThanks to you all for your enlightening comments! I'm a slow learner with a lot of homework. I haven't had a chance to check all your great references yet. However....
ReplyDeleteHere's two more questions:
I see from [ https://the-federation.info/ ] that the size of the whole Federated universe is about 3,700,000 identities whereas I think I read somewhere that Facebook has billions of users.
If we join the Federation and ignore Facebook, will we be limiting ourselves to a small "silo" of possible contacts (at least for the time being) compared to the large numbers on Facebook?
Some of my most interesting G+ interactions have come from followers outside the USA that do not communicate in English. I know of no other social network aside from G+ that has an integrated translator. Even with all its billions of subscribers, Facebook (warning: I'm no expert on this and have very little Facebook experience) seems to confine me to my English-speaking neighborhood much more than G+.
Given the current choices of federated and non-federated social networks, which would you recommend best reaches out worldwide to the international community?
Jeff Diver If you want a fair comparison, it is only G+ users we are talking about here. Many have FB accounts and Twitter accounts etc. Experts tell us active users on G+ is around 3.5 million prior to the sunset notice. People are on G+ because they prefer it to FB and others already. So comparing to FB doesn't make much sense for me.
ReplyDeleteNo one has to choose one place (I have a MeWe account and a Discord account and a Twitter account). The difference for me is not where my gym locker or campsite or desk will be (analogies to other accounts above) but where my new home "neighborhood" will be. I care about what my neighborhood will look like, whether I can change how it looks, whether I can participate in its improvements, whether anyone else has control over my presence, who my neighbors are, and what control I will have over my privacy rights. The one thing I want to avoid is ever having to move and start a contact list over again. For these reasons, I choose the decentralized federated web space for my home but not necessarily for work or recreation where I have other accounts setup for those.
Bill Brayman The total user base is misleading. Diaspora has been around for a long time, so it has accumulated a lot of inactive accounts. How many are actually active? Those with (visible Public) activity in the last month is only around 20,000 - of which a quarter of that is the pluspora pod alone.
ReplyDeleteYes, there a lot of other diaspora pods, but in terms of active user base, pluspora is actually the largest of them! And that's with a user base which sprung up almost entirely within the last two months.
These are not numbers indicative of a "huge" movement. These numbers are enough to keep diaspora going for many years through thick and thin, but it's really small compared to the relative newcomer Mastodon.
G+ has only given us misleading stats also. How many actual active G+ users are there? Who can say? IIRC, I've read estimates that it may be on the order of 3 million, though. If that's accurate, then less than 1% have migrated to pluspora.
The thing is - community funded projects don't need the sort of volume and revenue generation of the "big boys" to sustain themselves. And they don't have perverse incentives to prevent you from easily migrating to alternatives.
Isaac Kuo Very interesting. Well then, maybe we should look forward to operating within our Dunbar number after all. I'm bad at that, always have a large source of content and interaction, so much that i'm really way past my cognitive limit. But what i see on the few communities i just started, there is still pretty good diversity and social energy.
ReplyDeleteShelenn Ayres Good point. I have found, however, that many G+ members are far better versed on alternative social media than I am and their comments have been very helpful.
ReplyDeleteI like what I would call your "real estate" approach to evaluation. The character of the neighborhood based on the criteria you mention is something I should consider.
Multiple platforms will probably be what I end up on. In the meantime I taking things one cautious step at a time.
Shelenn Ayres I think it's a cop out to say "Just get multiple accounts on multiple services!" But I think the answer why this is a cop out is enlightening.
ReplyDeleteIt takes time and effort to build and maintain a following on a social media site. Trying to split attention across multiple sites increases time and effort, and it's frustrating to have disconnected audiences with comment threads silo'd from each other.
So to answer Jeff Diver's question - it's not so much about the active user base. There's almost always going to be too many people for you to follow everyone you'd be interested in. In other words, you'll limit your circles/communities to the volume of content you can deal with.
The question is efficiency. You noted the issue of different languages. You can use translation on any site. But G+ makes it efficient.
That's the real question - how much bang do you get for your time and effort? And that's the main reason I spend most of my time on pluspora rather than Hubzilla.
In theory, Hubzilla vastly increases my reach because it federates with Mastodon. In practice, I have very few Mastodon followers/followees. I don't know the culture of Mastodon pods and I haven't spent the time to figure it out yet. Without that, I don't know how to attract followers or discover interesting followees. But it's important to me that I'll be able to do it in the future.
So, Hubzilla doesn't yet have that big advantage over pluspora for me. And for most of my social media interaction, pluspora's UI and way of doing things is faster and more efficient for me. I'm already comfortable with the UI because early G+ was a diaspora clone. I like its stripped down style, and I find browsing its Stream to be very efficient. I find its notification system friendly for "tab-mongers" like myself.
The bottom line is that I can go through a lot more volume and handle interaction with a lot more people through diaspora than Hubzilla. For my style of doing things, that makes diaspora my main daily driver. I ust Hubzilla mainly for my permanent blog.
Isaac Kuo Efficiency is what I have in mind. I can easily transition from G+ to Friendica and interface with blogs and twitter as well because of cross posting options from Friendica. The only centralized services I will use are for specific target groups of users on those services... much like joining a gym friends use or choosing a workspace with like minded users for example. People use Flikr for images, YT and others for video, etc. My other G+ is integrated with Twitter so Friendica replaces that feature.. and if I want to integrate with Blogger, LiveJournal, or WP Friendica can do that as well. I spend far less time perusing Friendica than I do on G+ because it is a better platform not beccause it has fewer posts. Time will tell who follows us from G+ to the federated web space... but there are a lot already migrating as you know.
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