What is the fediverse?
if you've stumbled upon my little corner of the internet then you're more than likely to have heard the term fediverse. this is one of the things I'm very interested in and hope to see grow, so what is the fediverse? the best definition you're gonna find out there is that "the fediverse is a collective of federated interconnected servers operating on the same protocols to allow for communication focusing on being open-source and being decentralized." but what does that even mean, let's break it down into something more readable shall we?
to give you a good explanation and example we need some context to put it against, let's take large social media companies like twitter, facebook and instagram as an example, each of these is a company that is responsible for managing the service (I.E the app) and letting you use it so that they make money. their main goal is to make money nothing more, they don't care about you and they only see you as whatever amount of income you make for them.
now comes the fediverse, you most likely know some more mainstream parts of it like mastodon which has recently blown up. if twitter facebook and instagram were a part of the fediverse you would be able to tweet from facebook, share instagram posts on twitter and post facebook stuff (don't like it never use it) on instagram, everything in the fediverse relies on a few key concepts, interoperability, meaning everything ca talk to everything else and decentralization meaning their is no one company or group that have control over the fediverse, no one owns mastodon, everyone can use it, and anyone can host there own instance (server) and use it however they want. the fediverse has many other parts rather than just mastodon, due to the recent explosion of mastodon te fediverse has gotten a lot of coverage, that's how I got here!
let's not get into the nitty gritty of how it all works, i'll be going through most of this with the assumption you have limited to no understanding of how the fediverse works and as such I'll try to make this as easy to understand as possible.
basically most if not all mainstream media is owned by a company they can do anything to that media you (usually) do not own it! since most people don't read the all importaant "terms and conditions". the fediverse is a bit different, for one nobody really "owns" mastodon it is a decentralised social media meaning it isn't a company, it's completely open-source and anyone can use it. it isn't paid by stealing info or ads or selling your data, it's mainly paid by donations and each instance (which is what a server is called in the fediverse), is kept a float by admins paying for this by optional donations. remember to tip your admins every bit helps.
I'll add more next update...