The year drawing to a close marked the beginning of a quiet revolution in social media: the rise of pedivers, which could reshape the social media landscape. We used ChatGPT to explain what Pediverse is and how its rise will affect our communications.
What is the Pedivers?
Fediverse is short for "Federated Universe" – an umbrella term for a network of interoperable and decentralized social media platforms. Unlike traditional social networks, where each platform operates completely differently, social networks based on the pedivers protocols allow users on different platforms to communicate with each other seamlessly, or transfer their accounts from one network to another without losing their network.
How does it work?
At the heart of pedivers are open protocols, which allow for a kind of common "language" between platforms. So, for example, posts uploaded by users will look exactly the same behind the scenes, no matter if the user uploaded them on the social network X or Y. In addition, the information is also uniformly available to other social networks, so that a user on one network can click "like" to content from another social network, comment on it and follow the user who uploaded it.
The most common protocol in the field is ActivityPub, which stores all content in a unified manner between different platforms, so that users can communicate with each other and even "port" their account – their posts, photos, videos and comments to others, and even followers and followers lists – between compatible networks.
What does it give us?
One of the Pediverse's main strengths is its decentralized nature; Traditional social networks have concentrated power and user data in the hands of individual corporations. Pediverse, on the other hand, has power divided between different services and servers, giving users more control over their online presence. Users can choose to open an account on a service that aligns with their values and preferences, while still communicating with users from other compatible services. Anyone can set up their own server to connect with everyone else — and server administrators can block communication between their users and servers they consider too extreme.
How do you become part of the Pediverse?
The Pediverse started from decentralized networks such as Mastodon, which is an open source social network based on ActivityPub, and anyone can set up their own server, which will connect with all the other servers on it. It even allows you to set up different types of networks – there are those designed like Facebook and Twitter, with an emphasis on text posts, there is Pixelfed, which focuses on images and is similar to Instagram, and PeerTube which focuses on video and is a substitute for YouTube. Today, there are about 15 million accounts on all Mastodon servers worldwide;
In 2019, an internal venture called BlueSky began on Twitter to test compatibility with the Pediverse, and in 2021 it became a separate company of the same name, which has built its own protocol, but will soon begin supporting the Pediverse protocols. Meta has been exploring support for Pediverse for a long time, and two weeks ago Mark Zuckerberg announced that Threads, the app that offers Instagram users a Twitter-like textual interface, will support ActivityPub next year; And days and last week, Flipboard, one of the world's oldest photo-focused social networks, announced that it would not only support ActivityPub, but would make it its core.
Challenges
Despite what seems to be a rush towards pedics, it doesn't look like he'll soon become an all-embracing person in the social media world. This is because the large companies do not want to fully support it, and their support for it is partial, to prevent users from leaving them for independent servers. However, the growing support for open protocols certainly heralds more freedom of choice for users – at least when it comes to communicating with users from other social networks, even if not necessarily transferring all personal history to them.
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