Draft:What is not the Fediverse?
 A lot of info might still be missing and the page might change at any time. |
"The Fediverse is a giant decentralized or "federated" network of social media services owned and moderated by the people, consisting of mostly free software."
That's the first sentence in this wiki's article about the Fediverse and it already makes clear what we consider the vital principles of the network and also, what we don't consider part of the Fediverse, because of not living up to these principles.
To recap, the principles are:
- decentralized/federated
- owned by the people
- moderated by the people
- (mostly) free software
So what we don't consider part of the Fediverse are:
- centralized plattforms
- corporate owned servers
- unmoderated or badly moderated servers (including AI-assisted moderation)
- proprietary software
Here are some examples:
| federated? | people owned? | moderated well? | non-proprietary software? | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bluesky | theoretically yes but in fact all users are one one instance that is indirectly communicating with parts of the Fediverse | ✖️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
| Threads | no, one centralized instance with ability to communicate with parts of the Fediverse | ✖️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
| no, one centralized instance with ability to communicate with parts of the Fediverse | ✖️ | unknown, probably not | ✖️ | |
| flipboard.social | yes, its a Mastodon instance | ✖️ | unknown, probably not | yes, its a Mastodon instance |
| instances on #FediBlock for bad moderation | yes, but blocked by a huge part of the Fediverse | yes, probably most of them | ✖️ | ✔️ |
| instances mirroring content from other platforms | no, mirroring is not federation | doesn't apply, since there are no people on these instances | no, they just mirror badly moderated content from elsewhere | most probably are |
Many of the reasons for not being considered part of the Fediverse go hand in hand. E.g. Bluesky uses the AT protocol, which is free and allows federation. But Bluesky itself is proprietary software, so there is basically only one central instance owned by the company. And since its owned by the company it is not moderated well. Bluesky claims they have a cool novel approach to moderation which allows communities to moderate for themselves and everybody to choose their own moderation, but what that means is just that they don't bother moderating at all.