Behold the Fediverse

I'm trying to think of something clever to write about federation or diversification. I'm not coming up with much. Perhaps if I take a look at a definition of fediverse it might help.

Wikipedia has the following to say:

The Fediverse (a portmanteau of “federation” and “universe”) is an ensemble of federated (i.e. interconnected) servers that are used for web publishing (i.e. social networking, microblogging, blogging, or websites) and file hosting, but which, while independently hosted, can communicate with each other.

You're probably wondering why I'm rambling on about fedivi (is that the collective noun?), and you'd be quite right to be wondering because I've not explained anything yet.

It all started late last night, when I stumbled back into the tentacles of the federated Mastodon universe. If you've not heard of it, Mastodon is an open, free social network that anybody can join. Rather than operate a monolithic service such as Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook, it's a federation of lots of servers – each serving a particular community of interests. Here's the trick – anybody on any server can follow anybody on any of the other servers.

It's a bit like saying “I hang out in the tech community, but I'm also interested in books, comics, music, and art – so I might follow people who are members of servers that revolve around those subjects”.

Anybody can start a server and connect it to the rest of the “fediverse”.

Anyway.

While falling straight down the Mastodon rabbit-hole, I started to learn about more federated services – among them a publishing service called “WriteFreely”, and a photo sharing service called “PixelFed”. Services with many independent servers around the world providing free alternatives to Tumblr, Wordpress, Substack, Instagram, Flickr, and wherever else – and none of them selling or using your data for any sort of commercial means.

I'm still learning, still reading, still tinkering, and still delving around to find out how it all works. I've begun pulling a few bits and pieces together, that can be found at the following locations:

In other news, I've also been meddling with a publicly accessible method of publishing the various writing that had previously been behind the paywall at Medium. After a day of experimentation, desk thumping, and endless reading I managed to funnel all of previous writing into Github at the following URL:

It uses a free service provided by Github called Jekyll that turns markdown text files into a published website. All I have to do is upload articules as plain text to Github, and it re-builds the site for me. All clever stuff. If you're interested, Jekyll is actually a “Ruby on Rails” application in the background. You weren't interested. It's ok. I didn't think you would be.

My dinner will be ready in a bit. I'll return to “slice of life” stuff next time, honest.