https://lwn.net/Articles/916154/
"As of late, concerns about the future of Twitter have caused many of its users
to seek alternatives. Amid this upheaval, an open-source microblogging service
called Mastodon has received a great deal of attention. Mastodon is not reliant
on any single company or central authority to run its servers; anyone can run
their own. Servers communicate with each other, allowing people on different
servers to send each other messages and follow each other's posts. Mastodon
doesn't just talk to itself, though; it can exchange messages with anything
that speaks the ActivityPub protocol. There are many such implementations, so
someone who wants to deploy their own microblogging service enjoys a variety of
choices.
ActivityPub is a W3C Recommendation that describes how servers can exchange
messages in the form of JSON Activity Streams. The ActivityPub protocol is
highly flexible and is used for all sorts of things, but the scope of this
article is limited to software that uses it to provide a Twitter-like
microblogging service. The idea of federated microblogging was pioneered by a
project called StatusNet, which was the software that originally ran at
identi.ca, an early Twitter alternative. Instances of StatusNet, and eventually
other software, were federated with each other using a protocol called OStatus.
ActivityPub and OStatus are not interoperable, but they have some parentage in
common; Evan Prodromou, the creator of StatusNet, subsequently created pump.io
and changed identi.ca to use it. Though development on pump.io seems to have
stalled, its API formed the basis of ActivityPub. Some projects continue to
support both protocols; Mastodon removed support for OStatus in 2019.
All of the various servers running this software exist in a federation somewhat
like email, colloquially known as "The Fediverse"; usernames are similar to
Twitter handles, but also include a domain component that identifies the server
hosting the account. For example, LWN has an account at @
LWN@fosstodon.org; it
is hosted on Fosstodon, which is a Mastodon server for people interested in
free and open-source software."
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
