In the current technological context, the fedivers ('federated universe') emerges as an innovative proposal to democratize social networks and regain control over our digital data.
Fedivers is an acronym for 'federation' and 'universe' that represents a set of social networking services capable of communicating with each other using standardized communication protocols such as ActivityPub . Unlike traditional networks controlled by large corporations, these platforms allow users to migrate between servers while maintaining their connections and content .
And how does fedivers work? The best analogy is that of email . Anyone with an email account can send an email to anyone else with an email account on the Internet, regardless of the application they use such as Gmail, Outlook, etc. Similarly, fedivers users can interact between different platforms that share the same protocol.
Currently, the main fedivers platforms are the following:
- Mastodon - microblogging (alternative to X/Twitter)
- PeerTube - video sharing (alternative to YouTube)
- Pixelfed - image sharing (alternative to Instagram)
- Lemmy - forums and news aggregator (alternative to Reddit)
- Mobilizon - event organization
- WriteFreely - blogging
- Funkwhale - streaming audio
According to experts in free networks, this model presents significant advantages, such as greater privacy , absence of invasive advertising , democratic control of communities and resistance to corporate censorship . In addition, it fosters cultural and linguistic diversity by allowing each instance to develop its own norms and style.