Fediverse: The Federated Future of Social Media

Since the dawn of smartphones, social media has been largely fragmented: users of one social network cannot follow or interact with users of another. But as one platform after another falls into various controversies, we have been seeing mass migrations into federated social media or the "Fediverse", run by independent organisations and individuals.

In this talk, I will cover:

• A brief history of the Fediverse and my experience using it over the past 13+ years, with a focus on the ActivityPub protocol
• An overview of some of today's federated platforms, including Diaspora, Mastodon, Peertube, Akkoma, and Bookwyrm, and how they interact with each other
• Differences from "mainstream" platforms, both technical and cultural
• Upcoming challenges with major players like Meta, Wordpress, and Flipboard beginning to adopt ActivityPub
• How your next social media platform could plug into this network

I will also mention how XMPP projects like Conversations and Prav aim to do to private messaging what ActivityPub is doing to public social media