Fediverse
The Fediverse is a federated social network.
As always, check the OSM Community Index for a collection of communities. Currently it does not yet support the Fediverse.[1]
General functioning
Analogous to e-mail, you register as @alice@example.com and reply on a public discussion by @bob@example.org on a different server. Clients are generally free software.
A server is usually specialized in one format (deep threading, microblogging, image gallery, ...) although they can all talk to each other. Considering which format suits you best will help you choose the server where to make an account.
You do not have to sign up on the OSM servers - any Fediverse account can talk on the OSM communities, thanks to federation. For example: mastodon.uno is a generic Italian server, unrelated to OSM. You make an account and log in, in a web browser or an app. Without ever changing website, you open a post from en.osm.town (which is an OSM specific server) and a reply by a user of lemmy.ml (which is a generic server, unrelated to OSM), and leave your own reply.
Quirks:
- under ActivityPub at least (the most popular protocol), a server only makes a local copy of a federated post if eithersomeone on the server reacted to the post (like, reply) or had previously followed the author of the post (called actor - an actor is usually a person, but on Lemmy it can also be a community). Otherwise, you will not see the post on your server.
- Lemmy and Mastodon differ in their interpretations of the ActivityPub specification, which leads to limitations in how they communicate to each other.[2] A notable example is that a reply in a thread is not visible across federation, in some cases.[3]
Lemmy
Lemmy is a Reddit replacement. Known communities are
Mastodon
Mastodon is for microblogging.
PeerTube
PeerTube is for video hosting. Known servers are from OSM France and OSM Hungary.
Planned
Federation with the Fediverse (ActivityPub protocol) is currently planned, but not supported yet, by Discourse (community forum) and Panoramax (libre Street View).