What does "the Fediverse" mean?
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@evan I chose network and this is mostly how I use it. I think it is the important meaning too. With my friends we sometimes use "fediverse" to refer to a culture, but that is mostly as a joke - e.g. if we see someone on the street that looks like a stereotypical fediverse user. It's a fun game we play trying to get at the hidden patterns of this user base. I want fediverse to continue to facilitate a home for that culture, but ultimately I also want other cultures here - many.
@evan@cosocial.ca the fediverse is pulling a @cwebber@social.coop by playing dumb, asking basic ActivityPub questions, and watching the fireworks fly.
Thanks to everyone who replied.
I think this is an important topic, because the different definitions result in different policy decisions.
If you think of the Fediverse as a culture, or a group of people, then questions about who can join are really important. Who has access to our time and attention? Who do we want to hang out with, and have among us?
If you think of the Fediverse as a set of principles -- decentralization, open standards, open source, anti-capitalism -- then questions about who can participate depends on if they accept and represent most, or all, of those principles.
If you think of the Fediverse as an open, permissionless network, then a lot of the shibboleths go away. Anyone can join the network -- and anyone else can choose whether or not to communicate with them.
I use "Fediverse" for both a network and a culture. I also use "ActivityPub network" or "Open social web" for the network itself. I think it's very important to make the network as open, permissionless, and connected as possible. Everyone on the planet has a right to be on that network.
@evan a series of tubes
@evan Yes.
The Fediverse is a culture, made up of people, with a shared set of principles, communicating over a network.
It is a network of networks.
@evan Group of people made up of several interconnected interoperable networks with a culture of inclusion, decentralization and free access as a core set of principles.
And I love you all for it.
@evan Personally I think "the Fediverse" is actually a network of a group of people following a set of principles to establish a culture.
@evan To me, "None of the above". The "Fedi" part being Federation which is just a collection of distinct entities which retain their distinctness, and "verse" being shore for Universe which is the set of all entities. This thing is a Federation of computer nodes, out of the set of all computer nodes on the Internet, sharing a common communication protocol and interaction rules and controls.
@evan I picked "A group of people" but I think it's more like "A collection of groups of people"
@evan@cosocial.ca the Fediverse, in abstract, means pretty much all of these things, but when people are referring to a concrete "the Fediverse", they first and foremost mean this network characterized by running on ActivityPub on the open, public internet (as opposed to smaller bubbles running over Tor and such), which happens to also uniquely specify a group of people (who use this network), a set of principles about moderation and federation and accessibility, and to a lesser extent, a culture, but the culture is much more subjective and more of a gradient across the network. the group of people are often more precisely referred to as "fedizens" and the principles might be called something like "fediquette". but "the Fediverse" refers to the network as a whole, containing all of these elements.
@sodiboo so, what did you choose?
