First exposure to the fediverse

2023-06-05T13:00:40Z

Now that reddit is 'going to shit' people were talking about alternatives like lemmy and /kbin.

So I joined kbin.social just to check it out and look around before I decide if I want to host a own instance or not. Interestingly one thread there was: What was your first exposure to the fediverse?, so I wrote an answer there and I think it's worth to pour it into a blog post too:

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I was checking what the definition of Fediverse is, and when I go after the one from the Wikipedia:

The fediverse (a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe") is an ensemble of federated (i.e. interconnected) servers that are used for web publishing (i.e. social networking, microblogging, blogging, or websites) and file hosting, which, while independently hosted, can communicate with each other.

If so, then my first exposure was when I implemented Pingback (Trackback was too complicated for me) to my weblog so it looks like it was 2005.

In 2006 I wrote the Personal Avatar (or Pavatar) specification, a decentralized alternative to Gravatar. It never really took off, but there were some implementations for it like for Drupal, WordPress

Later, around 2012, I was involved in the Tent protocol which was an alternative to OStatus and build a client for it. But because how bad their handled their community a year or so later I switched to:

Indieweb where I implemented a set of protocols and markup on my website to be interoperable with other websites which implement the same set of protocols and markup like microformats, micropub, webmention, etc. To this day I still am using my own website as the main publishing platform and automatically cross post every note and picture to Mastodon.

Otherwise I joined Mastodon with my own 1 person instance in 2019. Later PeerTube with my own instance for my family in 2020 and my own Matrix server in 2020.

Today I joined kbin.social just to test it before I decide if I should set up my own instance or not.