What is the Fediverse?
As you can tell by my various fediverse profiles, I do use and enjoy the fediverse. But you are probably wondering what is the fediverse?
Well the fediverse is a series of various social media software connected together using the ActivityPub protocol. What this means is that software that use the ActivityPub protocol can have users interact between users that use different software. Most software that use ActivityPub are free and open source.
If you want to join the fediverse I would recommend avoiding large instances (such as mastodon.social, mastodon.online, misskey.io, firefish.social, pixelfed.social, lemmy.ml, kbin.social, etc) I would also recommend an instance that uses Akkoma, Mastodon Glitch-soc or Iceshrimp. Labyrinth.zone and Seafoam.space are good instances for Akkoma, I don't really have any other recommendations for the Twitter-likes apart from avoid mastodon.art and tech.lgbt, for PeerTube I recomnend diode.zone as they have almost all of the PeerTube features enabled.
Out of the 2 main Reddit-likes I would recommend kbin over Lemmy due to them having questionable developers, unfortunately kbin is not a great user experience.
Owncast is by far the easiest to self host, probably because it is currently single user instance only and they wouldn't have as much users otherwise, it is run an install script and then launch the file it has made, of course you would probably want https and a custom domain, but with Caddy that can easily make it have https. Also Owncast offers control over the video quality, it even supports 120fps live stream (although you do probably want to have a dedicated GPU on the server to handle it).
There is even more software that uses ActvityPub but I have mostly just used the list of ActivityPub software from joinfediverse.wiki, Wikipedia lists even more software that I haven't listed (although a few don't actually use the ActivityPub protocol).
Examples of software that use the ActivityPub protocol include:
| Software name | Mainstream equivelent | Source code | Notable Forks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Akkoma | 🡕 | ||
| Mastodon | 🡕 | Glitch-soc, Ecko, Fedibird, Hometown, Smalltown, koyu.space | |
| Misskey | 🡕 | Calckey/Firefish (was abandoned, now maintained), Foundkey (abandoned?), Iceshrimp, Sharkey, Catodon, Hajkey (abandoned?), Meisskey, Cherrypick | |
| Pleroma | 🡕 | Akkoma | |
| GoToSocial | 🡕 | None | |
| Pixelfed | 🡕 | None | |
| PeerTube | YouTube | 🡕 | None |
| Kbin | 🡕 | None | |
| Lemmy | 🡕 | None | Funkwhale | Bandcamp, Soundcloud | 🡕 | None |
| Owncast | Twitch | 🡕 | None |
| WriteFreely | Blogger | 🡕 | None |
| Castopod | Apple Podcasts | 🡕 | None |
| BookWyrm | GoodReads | 🡕 | None |
| Friendica | 🡕 | None | |
| Hubzilla | Facebook, Dropbox, Google Cloud Storage, Google Calendar, Google Contacts | 🡕 | None |
| Mobilizon | Facebook events & groups | 🡕 | None |
