Pembroke87 Joins the Fediverse

I first became aware of the idea of a decentralized social network through Kim Stanley Robinson’s science fiction novel, The Ministry of the Future. Here is his fictional account

 For everyone else, using these sites means they’ll control their data, rather than it being used and mined. That privacy can then be a resource to them. They can sell their personal data if they want. That plus the security of encryption, and the public ownership of these sites a commons, should be enough to entice every user on the planet to shift. Publicize it, make it easy, set a date, be ready to handle the influx, boom.

At the time, I’d watched The Social Dilemma, I knew big social networks were bad for me and worse for the world, and I was intrigued by this idea. Stanley Robinson’s book intersperses fiction with non-fictional chapters, and the chapter above was paired with one about the then state of decentralized social networks. I’ve kept my eyes open ever since.

Today, WordPress.com, which hosts this site, announced their support for the ActivityPub protocol that enables the decentralized social media network known as the Fediverse. You may have heard of Mastodon, which is the most well-known server software, and mastodon.social, which is the most well-known node in the Fediverse.

If you’re old enough to remember the early days of the Internet, when we had email services provided by Lotus and Unix Mailserv (memory’s foggy here), you’ll remember that sending an email to someone at another company might have been tricky or even impossible. Then along came SNMP, the (Simple Network Mail Protocol) and soon all those servers could talk to one another, and you could send email to anyone in the world (although you still needed a magic incantation to get to folks on Lotus).

ActivityPub is for social networks what SNMP is for email networks. It enables you to share, discover, reply to and boost stories, follow and message other people privately or publicly. To complete the analogy, Mastodon is sort of like Lotus or mailserv; it is software you can install if you want to support the ActivityPub protocol yourself. Mastodon.social plays the part of GMail, one of thousands of ActivityPub servers on the Internet. While it doesn’t live up to Stanley Robinson’s ideal of being able to sell your data, ActivityPub does allow more control over your data and the algorithm that supplies your stories than any of the social media giants.

So, Pembroke87 has joined ActivityPub. What does this mean to you? If you’re already on the Fediverse, you can subscribe to this blog where you are and it will show up like any other story in your feed; you’ll be able to respond to it directly as if it were any other posting. BlueSky (sort of), Threads, Tumblr and Flipboard have all indicated plans to implement ActivityPub if you wish to continue to sell your data to tech billionaires. My hope is that Google’s Blogger, where the majority of model railroad blogs I follow resides, follows suit so I can interact with those blogs without having to log in to Google.

There is a link in the huge menu to the right, or you can follow pembroke87.ca@pembroke87.ca wherever you are.

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Image credit: Wikimedia Foundation, Creative Commons ASA License