David Blue, Federated

If you’ve been keeping up with the web at all in the past two years, you’re no doubt at least somewhat familiar with the terms “Mastodon,” “Diaspora,” or “federated social.” Extratone readers may remember my interview with Eugen Rochko last April — the day when his federated social “clone” made its way around the front pages of the major technology and tech media websites. Though the piece itself was designed and written quite disastrously (genuinely sorry about that — it was easy for me to get carried away when I had no idea what I was carrying,) Eugen is a great communicator of his ideal, which you’ll find to be as aligned with a FOSS future as you’d think it would be.

I signed up for mastodon.social in the February of last year, yet I suppose year sof o find myself going back to Twitter looking for what I only get on Mastodon, these days: diverse, sincere, talented, and extremely curious users from all over the world backed and deeply co-habitated with an inclusive developer culture filled with smart problem solvers who just want to contribute something grand. It’s not exactly easy, yet instances and variations on the ActivityHub project, itself have begun springing up at a pace I can’t keep up with. There’s the open-source federated blogging CMS Plume, along with the gorgeous and very promising Instagram-esque PixelFed. Additionally, Diaspora is gorgeous and fully-functional now.

Directory of my accounts across the Fediverse

Mastodon

• Mastodon.Social
• Mastodon.Technology
• FOSStodon
• Toot.Cafe
• Radical.Town — perhaps the loudest-looking property in the Fediverse.
• Experience Shift, from our friends.

PixelFed

• Fedigram
• PixelFed

Diaspora

• Diasp.org

Others

• Baptisete.Gelez.xyz, the current public test instance for the upcoming federated blog CMS, Plume.