Let the Journey Into the Fediverse Begin

Less than a week ago as of the publication date of this article I started my journey into the Fediverse, or Federated Universe. This article outlines part of this journey and shows some of the outcome of the last few days.

What is the Fediverse?

According to the ChatGPT, the very popular AI chat bot from OpenAI, the Fediverse is defined as follows.

The “fediverse” is a term used to describe the collection of interconnected, decentralized social networks that are based on open-source, federated protocols. The term is a combination of “federated” and “universe”. The most well-known example of a fediverse network is Mastodon, but there are many other social networks and services that are part of the fediverse, such as Pleroma, Pixelfed, and Peertube, among others.

— Generated by ChatGPT

During my journey I was mainly focusing on Mastodon and played around with interoperability with other Fediverse platforms and products.

What is so special about the Fediverse compared to other Social Media platforms?

The Fediverse is not one social media platform and is not controlled centrally by one or a handful of corporations. It breaks the walled gardens into different, federated instances that are compatible and interoperable across different products. All of which share the underlying open and standardized protocols. Most notably ActivityPub, a W3C Recommendation with other open protocols and specifications complementing it.

My Journey

I signed up first on the Mastodon instance geekdom.social and was browsing through different instances by going to their instance websites and scrolling through the local and federated timelines to find people and organizations to follow.

The motivation, and the reason, why I signed up in the first place and why I am hosting my own instance is that it perfectly aligns with my own ethos. End-users need to be empowered and put back in control over their own data. Furthermore, my current professional work is closely aligned with federated social media and identity solutions, protecting the privacy of the user and giving the owners of those identities control back.

After first signing up I was on the fence if I should host my own instance. Shortly after I gave in and launched social.oberhauser.space. From there a lot of things happened.

• Landing Page Launch: Creation of social media landing page under oberhauser.space
• Timeline integration into static website: Integrating my personal feed (via call to my own instance API) into oberhauser.space and adding of static profile information.
• Follow Fediverse account via static website: Integrating follow me functionality into oberhauser.space
• Mastodon contact form integration into static website: Integration of a contact form into the static website oberhauser.space that uses the sender’s Mastodon instance to send me a message.
• Deeper dive into the underlying protocols: Mainly into ActivityPub and what other protocols and specifications are out there.
• Integration of Fediverse comments into this blog: See the comment sections below and try it out.

Below you see some of the screenshots of functionality mentioned above.

Timeline integration into static website

Follow Fediverse account via static website

On the static website the user will see the following input field and button.

Ones the user filled out there Fediverse instance or handle they are forwarded to their instance.

Mastodon contact form integration into static website

On the static website the user will see a contact form with the following fields.

The good, the bad and the ugly

For me being able to host my own instance in my own IT infrastructure and being fully in control and at the same time being able to interact and communicate with the whole world is amazing.

There are and will be a lot of issues down the road, such as the friction to educate the community and the market, making the experience easier and to have trusted instances where content is moderated in a reasonable way. After all we are talking about people on the internet. Some of those challenges are not technical, instead they are of the social nature.

I am definitely in for the journey and are eager to see how it plays out. If I can be part of it and if I can make the experience a little bit better I book that as personal success.

Please feel free to comment on this article via the Fediverse.