Federated Networks are AWESOME! When I first learned about the concept of federation when I started using Jabber/XMPP, I was blown away. I could set up my own private chat server on a Raspberry Pi and still be able to communicate with people from the internet. I did not rely on external service providers and instead could run my service on my own hardware.

About a year ago or so I learned about ActivityPub, another federated protocol, which allows users to share their thoughts, post links, videos and other content. Mastodon is probably the most prominent service that uses ActivityPub to create a Twitter-like microblogging platform.

But there are other examples like PeerTube, a YouTube-like video platform which allows users to upload, view and share videos with each other. Pleroma allows users to create longer posts than Mastodon and Plume can be used to create whole blogs. PixelFed aims to recreate the Instagram experience and Prismo is a federated Reddit alternative.

But the best thing about ActivityPub: All those services federate not only per service, but only across each other. For instance, you can follow PeerTube creators from your Mastodon account!

And now the icing on the cake: You can now also follow this particular blog! It is traveling the fediverse under the handle @vanitasvitae@blog.jabberhead.tk

Matthias Pfefferle wrote a WordPress plugin, that teaches your WordPress blog to talk to other services using the ActivityPub protocol. That makes all my blog posts available in and a part of the fediverse. You can even comment on the posts from within Mastodon for example!

In my opinion, the internet is too heavily depending on centralized services. Having decentralized services that are united in federation is an awesome way to take back control.