A Perspective on the Fediverse - Open Web Protocols means that when you switch social networks (or it shuts down) your friends and followers are never lost

This is not yet the Promised Land. The big issue continues to be that only a small fraction of social media users have discovered The Fediverse, and seeing your niece’s baby pictures will not happen here in most cases, at least not yet. But ActivityPub is a W3C recommended protocol that aims, in the words of Mozilla Fellow Darius Kazemi:

“You might remember the heyday of RSS, when a user could subscribe to almost any content feed in the world from any number of independently developed feed readers. ActivityPub aims to do for social network interactions what RSS did for content.”

“And that’s the strength of using open web protocols. When you decide to switch to Mastodon, you’re not just gambling on the success of one project. You can be certain that regardless what happens with Mastodon, the network will live on and flourish. Newer and better software will be born within this ecosystem, but you will never have to drag all your friends and followers someplace else again–they’ll already be where they need to be.

If Twitter shuts down, you’ll lose your followers. If Facebook shuts down, you’ll lose your friends. For some platforms, it’s not a question of “if”, but “when”.

More at The Fediverse - zwilnik

#technology #socialnetworks #fediverse #interoperability #OpenStandards

I first mentioned in Better Social Media? that I heard a talk by Ed Platt that got me started on the new kind of social media. Well, Ed was one of the panelists at Penguicon 2019 on a panel about The Fediverse which helped me to bring this into a better focus. Also on the …

source https://gadgeteer.co.za/perspective-fediverse-open-web-protocols-means-when-you-switch-social-networks-or-it-shuts-down