This post is part of a series on Mastodon and the fediverse. We also have a post on privacy and security on Mastodon, and why the fediverse will be great—if we don’t screw it up, and more are on the way. You can follow EFF on Mastodon here.
A wave of people have announced that they’re leaving Twitter to check out something called Mastodon, and that leaves many wondering, what is Mastodon anyway? More importantly, what is the “fediverse” and what is “ActivityPub”? This explainer will help you make heads or tails of this new approach to communications and social media.
What is the Fediverse, Federation and Mastodon?
Federation is a broad term that means a group that has smaller groups within it that retain some measure of autonomy within that whole. In internet terms, the most well-known federated system is our old friend, email.
No matter how much you love or hate email itself, it is a working federated system that’s been around for over a half-century. It doesn’t matter what email server you use, what email client you use, we all use email and the experience is more or less the same for us all, and that’s a good thing. The Web is also federated – any web site can link to, embed, refer to stuff on any other site and in general, it doesn’t matter what browser you use. The internet started out federated, and even continues to be.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C, a standards organization that gives us many protocols, especially HTML) created a protocol in 2018 called ActivityPub that enbales federated systems similar to social networking. The systems built on top of ActivityPub, are collectively referred to as the fediverse.
One of the most famous services within the fediverse is Mastodon, a Twitter-like social network and communications system to which many users are switching following the recent turmoil at Twitter. At a very basic level, Mastodon is a web server (o
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