“Fediverse” is a common name for services that rely on federation to operate.

The union opposes having one hosting party, where everyone should be able to run the server, create an account on it and then use the same services. This ensures that there is no problem if one hosting party is offline, as the data is spread out.

For example, look at Twitter. If you want to use this, you can only do so via Twitter’s servers themselves, so you must also agree to their terms and conditions and trust that they will handle your account information correctly. The standard variant of this is the Mastodon. Anyone can run their own Mastodon server, which means there are plenty of alternatives with their own data handling and terms of use. This means that you can “simply” choose the server that suits you the most in terms of rules and privacy (or create your own!) and create an account on it. With a regular service, this means that you can only communicate with other users on that specific server, which causes massive fragmentation, but it’s true. this That’s the power of how federation is used: With an account on Server A, you can still reply to a post from someone on Server B.

In the backend, standards are defined and used to enable federation, of which ActivityPub is one.

Some standardized alternatives on other services/websites:

• Reddit -> Lemmy
• Discord -> matrix
• Twitter -> Mastodon
• YouTube -> PerTube

There are also some disadvantages to using union. For example, resource usage for server administrators; Because it facilitates communication between servers, any activity on the server should generally be propagated to the servers that also retrieved that information, so that those servers keep connecting again and again to retrieve the data. In addition, what is active and what is inactive varies for each server: some servers do not always make federation possible, depending on the server’s purpose. In this case, it’s mainly about not relying on God’s grace (read: big tech companies), for example what the government did: News: Dutch government starts Mastodon instance for government accounts

Federation is currently mainly useful/interesting to enthusiasts (in the broadest sense of the word, this may be due to technology, privacy aspects or something else) due to drawbacks and effort for both server administrators and ordinary users. But that doesn’t make it any less legitimate; The more widely it is used, the more you can expect the technology itself to improve.