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   Chris Trottier (atomicpoet@calckey.social)'s status on Wednesday, 31-May-2023 03:42:18 JST Chris Trottier

   What is the Fediverse?
   
   The clue is in the name! It's a portmanteau of "Federated Universe".
   
   It's not a platform no is it an ecosystem, it's an entire universe of stuff!
   
   Now think about what's in our literal universe: galaxies, black holes, comets, cosmic dust, planets, an unfathomable amount of stuff.
   
   This is not unlike the Fediverse which also has lots of stuff 🌌
   
   #LearnFediverse

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     Chris Trottier (atomicpoet@calckey.social)'s status on Wednesday, 31-May-2023 03:49:39 JST Chris Trottier

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     But what do we mean by "federation"? Before I go further, let me talk about my favourite science fiction: Star Trek!
     
     In the 1960s, Star Trek introduced an interesting idea. It was called the United Federation of Planets (UFoP).
     
     The idea was that a whole lot of planets came together to build an organization greater than themselves.
     
     Humanity got together with other alien species to cooperate. Rather than going to war, we humans created diplomatic ties with Vulcans, Andorians, and Tellarians to build something greater than ourselves.
     
     Seeing the power of cooperation, even more alien species joined the United Federation of Planets, pooling resources together, to build prosperity.
     
     This is not so different from the Fediverse. In fact, the fictional UFoP works a lot the Fediverse!
     
     #LearnFediverse

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     Chris Trottier (atomicpoet@calckey.social)'s status on Wednesday, 31-May-2023 03:53:45 JST Chris Trottier

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     The fictional United Federation of Planets works because they're a network of diplomatically connected to planets.
     
     In Star Trek, there are hundreds of planets that make the sum of the Federation. What's core to making the organization work isn't military. It is communication.
     
     Check out this map of Star Trek's fictional Federation.
     
     #LearnFediverse

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     Chris Trottier (atomicpoet@calckey.social)'s status on Wednesday, 31-May-2023 03:58:51 JST Chris Trottier

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     Like Star Trek's fictional Federation, the Fediverse has "planets". But we have another term for this.
     
     We call them nodes.
     
     Each node communicates and cooperates to build something greater than the sum of its parts.
     
     When one node cooperates with another, and there's a tacit agreement with other nodes that they will continue to talk to each other, this is called federation.
     
     #LearnFediverse

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     Chris Trottier (atomicpoet@calckey.social)'s status on Wednesday, 31-May-2023 04:14:02 JST Chris Trottier

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     Interestingly, the concept of a Fediverse is as old as Star Trek itself. It's not a new idea. Just like Star Trek, the idea started in the 1960s.
     
     In the 1960s, United States Department of Defense launched Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET).
     
     ARPANET was a network of federated nodes that communicate with each other over vast distances.
     
     Amusingly, in early memoranda, ARPANET was described as the "Intergalactic Computer Network".
     
     The idea was simple. If you have three computers, rather than having three separate sets of commands, have one set of commands that would enable conversation across the three computers.
     
     And as more computers join the network, each which would have access to the same set of commands, the usefulness of the shared connectivity would increase.
     
     Here's an early map of what ARPANET looked like.
     
     #LearnFediverse

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     Chris Trottier (atomicpoet@calckey.social)'s status on Wednesday, 31-May-2023 04:25:20 JST Chris Trottier

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     What you're seeing here is one of the first nodes on ARPANET. It's known as a Interface Message Processor (IMP).
     
     Note the word "Message" in "Interface Message Processor" because messaging was core to its use.
     
     These nodes were used to connect participants of ARPANET, and they were the precursors to today's modern routers.
     
     An IMP's job was to be a middleman node that would literally store and forward a message from one originating node towards its ultimate destination.
     
     Why do I mention IMPs? Because right out of the gate, the goal of federating nodes was about creating the infrastructure for sharing messages. And what enabled this unique form of cooperation were IMPs.
     
     The terminology has changed, but the idea remains the same.
     
     What the Fediverse is about is sending messages from one node to another. And when there cannot be a direct connection, middleman nodes can send messages from one originating node to its ultimate destination.
     
     #LearnFediverse

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     Chris Trottier (atomicpoet@calckey.social)'s status on Wednesday, 31-May-2023 04:36:12 JST Chris Trottier

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     So what happened to ARPANET?
     
     In the 1980s, the National Science Foundation (NSF) expanded ARPANET to universities, providing funding for supercomputing centers. These centers provided for the expansion of interconnected nodes.
     
     And this expansion was just the start. Soon ARPANET found its way into commercial enterprises, community centers, libraries, and homes.
     
     It evolved into what is now known as the Internet.
     
     That's right, the Internet itself is a collection of federated nodes.
     
     This chart is a visualization of Internet routing paths -- all connected to nodes.
     
     #LearnFediverse

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     Chris Trottier (atomicpoet@calckey.social)'s status on Wednesday, 31-May-2023 04:48:30 JST Chris Trottier

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     Node connectivity isn't the entire story. It can happen in several ways. Here's three ways networks can connect with each other:
     
     1. Centralized: where one authoritative node facilitates the connectivity of all other nodes, making all decisions regarding connectivity
     
     2. Decentralized: all nodes are connected to each other, with no singular authority, each node making autonomous decisions about who it connects with
     
     3. Distributed: All nodes are connected to each other, with singular authority being collective, each node acting in sync with all others -- often as a "mesh"
     
     Of these three models, the Fediverse is decentralized at the node level.
     
     #LearnFediverse

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     Chris Trottier (atomicpoet@calckey.social)'s status on Wednesday, 31-May-2023 05:01:24 JST Chris Trottier

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     In the 2000s, more and more of the Internet became centralized. There were numerous reasons for this, among them:
     
     1. The growth of cloud computing
     2. The adoption of mobile devices that required the computational resources of cloud computing
     3. The growth of Internet platforms instead of protocols
     4. The emergence of building public services based on private and for-profit proprietary APIs
     
     No where was this trend more apparent than in the realm of social media.
     
     Modern social media grew in tandem with cloud computing, often built first for mobile interfaces, often requiring an app, with an ecosystem requiring APIs associated with that app.
     
     This is how the whole world centralized around Instagram, Facebook, Twitter -- the rest of Big Social.
     
     #LearnFediverse

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     Chris Trottier (atomicpoet@calckey.social)'s status on Wednesday, 31-May-2023 05:12:43 JST Chris Trottier

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     Into the 2010s, the flaws with centralization of social media quickly became apparent. A centralized node:
     
     1. Lacks redundancy
     2. Can be overwhelmed by bad actors
     4. Is limited in scale for moderation
     5. Is constantly targets for compromize
     
     If a centralized node breaks or goes down, the whole network breaks or goes down with it.
     
     Nowhere was this more apparent than with the Cambridge Analytica scandal that severely damaged Facebook.
     
     #LearnFediverse

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     Chris Trottier (atomicpoet@calckey.social)'s status on Wednesday, 31-May-2023 05:17:00 JST Chris Trottier

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     In 2018, the W3C validated a protocol called ActivityPub that allowed interoperability between different social networks.
     
     Instead of one social media node acting as a centralizing silo, each of them can federate -- cooperating to send messages across the universe that is the network.
     
     The Fediverse.
     
     This is social media's version of the United Federation of Planets.
     
     It is ARPANET yet again -- a model that continues to work over decades.
     
     And it's the future of social media.
     
     #LearnFediverse

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     Chris Trottier (atomicpoet@calckey.social)'s status on Wednesday, 31-May-2023 05:18:04 JST Chris Trottier

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     I'm going to continue with another thread tomorrow, specifically talking about #email. Because to really understand the #Fediverse, email is essential to understand.
     
     #LearnFediverse

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     Tracy Hall (video_manager@mstdn.social)'s status on Wednesday, 31-May-2023 05:56:05 JST Tracy Hall

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     • Lauren Weinstein

     @atomicpoet
     I hope you're familiar with @lauren - who operated / maintained that very machine?

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     Lauren Weinstein (lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org)'s status on Wednesday, 31-May-2023 07:16:58 JST Lauren Weinstein

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     • Tracy Hall

     @video_manager @atomicpoet That doesn't look like our UCLA one exactly. Ours (IMP #1) had four big bolts on the top (the joke was for lowering into submarines). Also, the last time I saw a recent photo of it the DYMO label that I glued down above some switches (when it kept popping up) was still there.

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