Last time I placed the rise of the fediverse in a larger context, with some reflections on the state of the internet at large. This time, I want to zoom in a bit more on the context of how the technical side, the ActivityPub protocol, came to be.
Drama over the new Harry Potter game leads to the shutdown of the mastodon.lol server.
The continued bot transition towards Mastodon.
A public conversation on how to interpret Mastodon’s user numbers.
Wildebeast, controversial new server software from Cloudflare is released.
The major theme of this week is news around technical infrastructure. Mastodon.social experiences a DDoS attack, Twitter shuts down free access to the API, Stanford is called on by the community to start their own Mastodon server, and new tools get released with some interesting implications on the capabilities of the fediverse.
Two posts resonated with me recently, about the power of small software. Small software is simple technology, nothing shiny, build to meet the need of a specific group of people
The theme of this episode is reflections on the web. If you’d want to summarize what the fediverse actually is, you could do worse by saying that at its core it is an ‘internet build on top of the internet’.
