The Fediverse Beyond Mastodon mini-series is complete. Here's everything.
Four posts on what else runs on ActivityPub besides Mastodon: microblogging alternatives & forks, photo and video platforms, writing tools, forums, books, music, and more.
Four posts, in the order they should be read:
The Rest of the Ecosystem: Misskey, Pleroma, Friendica & more — The microblogging platforms that aren't Mastodon. Several predate it, some were federating before ActivityPub existed, and they make different assumptions about resource requirements, interface design, and what a timeline is for.
The Visual Fediverse: Where Photos and Videos Live Outside the Algorithm — Pixelfed, Loops, PeerTube, and the smaller photo clients. Your work sits on infrastructure you or your community control, and no ranking system decides who sees it.
The Written Fediverse: Where the Words Live — Ghost, WordPress, WriteFreely, Micro.blog, Plume, Flipboard. Each arrived at federation by a different route, and one of them pointed its own users toward competitors instead of maintaining its own implementation.
Forums, Reading, and Music on the Fediverse — Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin, NodeBB, Bookwyrm, Bandwagon. Reddit's 2023 API pricing change sent tens of thousands of accounts to the Threadiverse in under two weeks. The formats built for reading and listening grew more quietly.
If you post photos, there's Pixelfed. Video, PeerTube. Long-form text, Ghost or WriteFreely or Micro.blog. Threaded discussion, Lemmy or PieFed or NodeBB. Books, Bookwyrm. Music, Bandwagon. You can follow most of it from an account you already have.
A reef isn't a single organism. Each of the organisms on the reef settled where conditions suited it. The substrate they share is what makes them a reef and not a scattering of unrelated lifeforms. ActivityPub is kinda like that substrate and the four posts in this mini-series are about some of what's growing on it.
Although the mini-series is complete for now, in the future if I discover a platform that I explore and love, I might add a new post to the series.
Anything new in this series appears under the tag - The Fediverse Beyond Mastodon. The wider umbrella it sits inside is under the tag - Exploring the Fediverse, which collects every series so far.
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