The term: "Mastodon" vs "fediverse" vs ...?

With the recent uptake, the general public talks about “let’s leave Twitter and use Mastodon instead”.

Worse, often it is described as “the Mastodon service” (as opposed to many independently operated services that all happen to run the same software)

Worse, very few people talk about the core value proposition here, which is not “Mastodon” but the fact that it is an open network in which anybody can participate with any software, only assuming it speaks the right protocols.

In other words, the “fediverse”.

Which unfortunately, in my view, is a term only hard-core geeks could love. Hard to imagine anybody else would go to the picnic at the park and enthusiastically tell their friends and non-geek family "all the cool kids are on the fediverse” — and they would turn around and sign up.

Can we do better? Uptake by the general public could probably be 2x with a friendlier term. FreeNet is taken — but something like that would be better.

(IMHO it’s not "ActivityPub” either. For one, other protocols are necessary to make it work, from Webfinger to HTTP signing. In the future, all of those will evolve and perhaps be superseded, but the “fediverse” (whatever its name) will hopefully remain.)

(Now taking cover in case anybody considers this line of thinking unacceptable :-))

Cheers,



Johannes.

https://reb00ted.org/

Received on Tuesday, 20 December 2022 00:49:51 UTC