Diogo Cordeiro 19th Jan, The fediverse, a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe", is part of the IndieWeb and consists on a decentralized social network that started with GNU social. Nowadays there are various pieces of software, other than GNU social, in the fediverse, like Pleroma and Mastodon, all of which can be installed on your own server. The fediverse has grown to have its own culture and is relevant because, quoting IndieWeb.
Before getting into that, let me just quickly familiarize you with the term Actor from the ActivityStreams 2. Each node a. In order to this be possible, each node hosts "all" the external nodes addresses and "all" their content not really "all", just the relevant for the actors involved. Actors send their content to a node and this becomes immediately available to all actors connected to the node, and is distributed to "every" other node again, not every, it is distributed through the fediverse as it makes sense.
When local actors actors in the same node participate in discussions with external actors from other nodes or simply subscribe to external actors' content, their node push that content to the relevant other nodes and eventually makes it available to all the connected actors.
That selective node-based distribution creates, inside the global network, a more or less extended local aggregation that is called the fediverse. At present, there are three super-networks in the federated social communication space, and they run on different protocols. While these super-networks function in similar ways and even have similar aims, they each come from a different history of development, and by extension, a different stack. The overlapping series of networks can be referred to in macro as The Free Network.
The Fediverse has historically operated as a micro-blogging network, and uses the OStatus protocol for servers to communicate with one another. It was introduced around and pulls together different platforms, namely: GNU social and the fork postActiv , Friendica, Hubzilla and Pleroma. Mastodon used to support but has recently dropped. Pleroma won't maintain anymore and may drop in the future.
