WTFediverse?
What is the fediverse, and why should brands care?
Until Twitter began what many believe to be an inevitable death spiral at the hands of Elon Musk, the fediverse was an unknown term to many and an even lesser-known domain. Today, we see the fediverse and ActivityPub woven into mainstream marketing chats as Mastadon, Blue Sky, and a host of new social platforms launch in a bid to capitalize on the eroding market share of the little blue bird.
Simply put, the fediverse is a decentralized social media network, meaning it’s not controlled by a single company or organization. Thousands of different servers are connected, allowing users to follow each other, post messages, and interact with each other even if they’re using different social media apps.
The fediverse is open source, fully transparent, and generally can offer more data safety and security. Unlike other social media platforms which have evolved to commoditize engagements, reach, and community data, the fediverse is still a community-oriented social media experience where building relationships and sharing ideas comes first. The bonus is your community of friends and followers can move with you from one social media app to another because they aren’t “owned” by whichever app you use.
What does ActivityPub have to do with this?
ActivityPub is the protocol that powers the fediverse, allowing different social media apps in the fediverse to talk to each other. ActivityPub allows users on different platforms to follow each other, see each other’s posts and interact with them.
Does my brand need to invest here?
Brace yourself for this…Probably not. With few exceptions, most brands won’t find exceptional ROI in building a social media app or even creating a server on an existing social media app like Mastodon simply because of the network's limited scope and reach.
While the fediverse has grown significantly since its launch over a decade ago (yes, you read that right) the network just recently reached 1 million users. Unless you have a business objective linked to creating a dedicated brand community, and a bench of developers with the appropriate skill set, you’ll likely get more value from continuing to leverage the communities you’ve built on existing closed social media platforms like Meta, Twitter, TikTok, and LinkedIn.
This blog post was written with assistance from a large language model.