What is Fediverse

The Fediverse is like a big collection of social networking websites that can all talk to each other by using a common protocol.

Think of email. If you have a Gmail account, you can still send emails to someone using Yahoo or Outlook. Even though these services are different, they can still communicate because they follow the same rules (called protocols).

How does it work?

The Fediverse is like a bunch of small towns online. Each town has its own rules, and its own community. All the towns agree to let their citizens send letters, visit each other, and even move between towns freely.

Each town in this example is a server called an instance. It’s a website run by a group of people or an individual. These instances can be small (just for a few friends) or big (for thousands of users).

Even though each instance is independent, they all follow the same set of rules to communicate, which means they can communicate with eachother. That set of rules is called ActivityPub which lets different instances (towns) communicate with each other (send letters, visit etc.).

Real live example

Let’s say you love purple puppies, and you want to connect with other people who also love them.

Step 1: Finding Your Home (Server/Instance)

You find or create an instance called purplepuppyfans.social, which is all about purple puppies.

Step 2: Meeting Other Purple Puppy Fans

Let’s say another person (let’s call him A, for this example) also loves purple puppies but is on a different server called purpledogs.world.

You post: “I just saw the cutest purple puppy! Does anyone have pictures?”
Even though A is on a different server, they can still see your post because both servers follow the same rules (ActivityPub).
A replies with a photo: “Check out my purple puppy!”

Just like that, you’re connecting with people across different servers as if you were on the same platform!

Step 3: Exploring More of the Purple Puppy World

You search for hashtags like #PurplePuppies and find even more people from different servers.
You follow them, and their posts show up in your timeline—even though they are on other servers!
Someone on a Pixelfed server (which is like Instagram) posts a gallery of purple puppies, and since Pixelfed also connects to the Fediverse, you can see and interact with it too!

Step 4: What If You Want to Move?

Maybe later, you find another server called awesomepurplepuppies.club that is even more active with purple puppy fans.

You can move your account there without losing your followers, just like switching from Gmail to Outlook but still keeping your contacts!

Why use the Fediverse?

The Fediverse is like social media without “big boss” controle. Instead, it’s powered by people running their own servers, able to communicate across different platforms.

Feature	Social Media	The Fediverse
Who owns it?	Big companies (Meta, X, etc.)	People & communities
Privacy	You are tracked & targeted with ads	No ads, no tracking
Freedom	You follow their rules and algorythms	You pick your community
Moving Accounts	You lose everything	You can move servers easily
Connecting	Stuck inside one platform	Open & connected to many platforms
Create your own?	No	Yes!

Things to remember:

The Fediverse is not one big company—it’s a network of independent instances (servers).
You can talk to people on other instances as long as they support the same rules (like ActivityPub).
If you don’t like your current instance, you can move to another one without losing your friends (kind of like switching email providers).
Different types of instances exist for different kinds of content (micro-blogs, images, video, converstations).

Examples of Fediverse platforms:

Mastodon – Like Twitter but open and decentralized.
Pixelfed – Like Instagram, but without ads or tracking.
PeerTube – Like YouTube, but run by independent people instead of one big company.
Lemmy – Like Reddit, where people can create communities.
Mobilizon – Like Meetup, where people can create and share events.
Live Demo – live demo of “find events near me”

Federated Events in numbers

Overall number of fediverse users: 1,489,206,329
Events im Fediverse: Gancio ~ 134,229, Mobilizon ~ 480,053
Users that can already interact with federated events: 87.196
WordCamps 2019: number: 142 attendees: 46,458

Last updadet 17. March 2025