Category: Social networks

社交功能成为智能产品重要突破口

随着科技的发展，人们可以通过多种渠道进行社交，例如社交媒体、在线游戏、视频通话等，这种多元化的社交方式让人们更加方便地与他人交流，并且人们对于社交越来越个性化的需求在提升，他们希望通过社交获得更多的信息、知识、技能等，同时也希望通过社交展示自己的个性和特点。这样以来，社交功能也开始成为智能产品一大应用方向。

智能产品的社交属性

人类在进化过程中逐渐形成了社会性行为和社会组织结构，除了生存需要以及繁衍以外，包括学习和传承知识、社会认同感以及心理需求都开始成为当下人社交的重要原因。这也让不少智能家居产品开始丰富其自身的社交属性，来拓展销量。

比如智能音箱，不仅能够播放音乐，还可以上网、聊天或者给家人朋友发送信息等，这些都是额外的社交功能。并且有的产品，可将智能音响、智能灯泡等产品连接到多个手机和智能设备，让所有家人和朋友一起控制，这样可以达到互动的效果。

大多数拥有智能家居的家庭，基本都建立了家庭网络，将所有智能设备连接到同一个网络中，便于共享和使用。可以通过设置权限等方式，实现有策略的使用。

而共享经济的兴起为人们提供了一种新的生活方式，他们可以通过共享家居设备来节省开支。这种方式也促进了智能家居设备的社交化，因为人们可以通过共享设备来建立联系和关系，从而形成一个社区。

更重要的是，随着社交媒体的丰富，不少产品已经可以在社交媒体上进行分享，以便用户能够更好地管理自己的家庭生活，并保持与家人和朋友的联系。

而近几年人工智能的高速发展，如ChatGPT等生成式AI，加速了智能家居的个性化服务发展。例如，智能家居设备可以根据用户的喜好和习惯自动调节温度、照明等参数，以提高用户的舒适度和便利性。

一个很有趣的例子是，深圳已经有不少体育馆与一些精彩视频制作公司进行合作，通过安装在体育馆内的摄像头，来实时的拍摄运动者的运动状况，并通过AI技术，智能截取运动者的精彩瞬间。这样一来，用户可以通过相关的小程序，来一键制作精选视频，并分享到社交网络上。

既满足用户的分享与社交需求，又能够将精彩操作进行保留。这种技术门槛并不高，最主要是通过AI技术来识别人脸以及形体，再判断哪些动作为高光时刻并进行记录与剪辑。

社交需求将带动上游相关产业的爆发

从目前人们所需求的社交来看，主要是进行分享以及寻找社会认同感，满足心理需求等，依照这些需求便能够为智能产品寻找到更广阔的市场空间。与此同时，产品也开始向着越来越社交化的趋势发展。

当然，这些社交化主要依靠目前的物联网技术、人工智能技术、云计算技术、社交媒体等技术来实现。利用物联网技术，使智能家居产品之间可以互相联通，享受共享数据，完成实时的互动交流。

通过人工智能技术，智能家居设备可以分析大量数据，快速响应和预测用户需求，为用户提供更加个性化的服务。比如上文提到的人脸识别、形体识别以及语音交互等相关功能。

利用云计算技术，智能家居产品可以存储大量数据，并使用数据进行智能分析和智能决策，为用户提供更加智能化的体验。

此外，智能家居产品需要搭载各种传感器和控制器，以及相应能支持技术的芯片，以实现各项功能。

其中传感器是智能家居设备中不可或缺的一部分，它们可以感知周围的环境和用户的行为，从而实现设备的智能化和自动化运行。控制器是智能家居设备中的核心部件，它可以控制和管理设备的运行状态，从而实现设备的互联互通和智能化运行。

在产品朝着越来越社交化的趋势发展时，与家庭网络、移动设备和云端进行连接，从而更方便地共享数据和信息等功能成为刚需。这也进一步带动通信模块的需求，它可以将设备连接到互联网上，实现设备的互联互通和数据传输。

可操作性的提升也是社交化的重要一点，例如智能可视化界面可以使得家人可以在线控制和操作智能家居设备，如家庭音响、电视、家居保安，从而更加快乐和方便地与家人、朋友进行沟通和交流。

基于以上趋势，智能产品正努力在社交化应用中不断更新迭代，在智能、绿色、安全、环保的前提下，创造出更好的家居社交体验。并且随着产品社交属性的加深，也将带动更多相关软硬件的需求，如传感器、摄像头、控制器、通信模块、存储等。

End

从马斯洛需求层次理论来看，随着人们自身已经满足了生理需求以及安全需求后，智能产品开始提供给人们归属需求，大多数的智能家居产品都在这一领域中。但随着人们生活层次的提升，尊重需求以及自我实现的需求在不断上升，这些需求实现的过程主要是社交，因此社交功能将成为接下来智能产品发展的重点。

Open and closed social networks: the pros and cons

Today, 3.6 billion people are on social media. But where, exactly?

There is more to social media than what the public sees on open social networks. Closed social networks, fueled by the simple beauty of privacy, host multitudes of users who find deep satisfaction in the intimacy of the niche communities.

Both open and closed social networks bring people together, but in unique digital spheres. Let’s explore the pros and cons.

Pros of open social networks

1. Reach.

Organizations, public figures, micro-influencers and the everyday person alike can provide content that has the potential to reach millions. And on the flip side, anyone who has access to an open social network has endless content at their fingertips.

2. Exposure to a variety of thoughts and opinions.

In a world where the majority of people seek like-minded company, open social networks acquaint users with viewpoints that often contradict their own, therefore encouraging a potentially greater number of open-minded thinkers.

3. Opportunity to make informed evaluations.

Open social networks allow users to learn more about people and organizations so that they can form more inclusive opinions. Consumers might browse a store’s Facebook page before buying products; parents might vet their teen’s new boyfriend with an Instagram scan; and hiring managers might screen applicants by investigating their Twitter accounts.

Cons of open social networks

1. Inauthenticity.

According to a New York Times Customer Insight Group study, “The Psychology of Sharing,” people share online for five reasons:

I would argue that the act of sharing has the potential to be more powerful and rewarding when in closed social networks, where people do not feel as pressured to present idealized, inauthentic versions of themselves. Open social networks are sometimes plagued with judgment and criticism, suppressing genuine self-expression.

2. Lack of deep emotional connection.

A closed social network might be likened to an intimate dinner and an open social network likened to a big party — the latter leaves far less room for deep emotional connection. In her article for Psychology Today, Dianne Grande discusses the human need for emotional connection:

“Each of us has an innate need to feel safely attached to another person who will be there in our times of physical or emotional need.”

Ultimately, open social networks are crucial to society and the marketplace of ideas, but they don’t always provide the emotional satisfaction of closed social networks.

Pros of closed social networks

1. Meaningful, authentic engagement.

Meaningful engagement is at the heart of closed social networks. Last year, I joined a women’s ketogenic dieting group for class research purposes, and I was blown away by the support and encouragement among the members — from keto flu to carb withdrawals, their sisterhood sustained them.

2. Rich community.

I would not be surprised if members of closed social networks know one another better than their next-door neighbors. In a fast-paced society, this is the reality. Closed social networks provide a feeling of fellowship among users, whether it’s over pumpkin spice lattes or single parenting.

3. Safe space for discussion of sensitive topics.

Despite social movements seeking to normalize the discussion of sensitive topics like mental health, workplace discrimination, etc., closed social networks remain one of the only safe spaces for individuals to release emotions and connect with fellow sufferers. One mental health Facebook group, for example, helped save the lives of two members who were contemplating suicide.

Cons of closed social networks

1. Potential for rapid spread of misinformation.

Due to the private nature of closed social networks, misinformation can spread without hindrance, like this COVID-19 fake news pandemic that affected German-language WhatsApp users in March. In April, WhatsApp took action by introducing a limit on “highly forwarded messages,” and its efforts resulted in a 70% decline.

2. Echo chambers.

Unlike open social networks, where users often encounter opposing perspectives, closed social networks can serve as incubators for homogeneous thinking. In her book “Reclaiming Conversation,” author Sherry Turkle discusses the irony:

“The web promises to make our world bigger. But as it works now, it also narrows our exposure to ideas. We can end up in a bubble in which we hear only the ideas we already know. Or already like.”

Fediverse

The Background

For most of us, social media is a daily part of our lives. We use it to connect with friends, share our experiences & cat photos, and debate strangers about Star Wars trivia. That’s the upside.

But the downside is pretty awful…

Traditional social media platforms offer little or no control over our own data and images. For example, even though we own our Facebook posts, pictures, and videos, the legal reality — which hasn’t changed since 2015 and you should absolutely read here — isn’t what you probably think:

“By using their platform, users grant Meta a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that [we] post on or in connection with Facebook…”

Translation? The platform can use our data and posts to create a pornographic amount of earnings and profit:

Meta earned a net $23 billion dollars in 2022

Shitter earned $4.4 billion in revenue in 2022

Snap earned $4.6 billion in revenue in 2022

These earnings come from learning details about who we are and selling that data to advertisers, who then bombard us with targeted advertising based on our click history and user profile.

Worse, every traditional social media platform manipulates not only what and who we see but also when we see it based on a hidden algorithm. That has led to bubbles of people who confirm each other’s biases and helps the now pervasive spread of disinformation and outrage.

Back in Episode 49 of my newsletter, I explained why the Facebook empire run by Mark Zuckerberg is a manipulative, destructive, and greedy corporate entity that refuses to protect its users’ privacy or stop the spread of disinformation. Not that Shitter, Instagram, or Snapchat are any better. They’re not, but that’s intentional.

Today’s social media design results in substandard products based on a parasitic premise: you and your data are the product and maximizing profits is more important than Democracy, security, or privacy.

That’s not an exaggeration: Facebook publically states on its terms page that it cannot guarantee our safety.

But… what if there were a better design?

What is the Fediverse?

First, let’s get the name out of the way: Fediverse stands for Federated Universe.

The name is a good descriptor. The Fediverse is a network of interconnected social platforms offering features we’ve come to love including micro-blogging, photo sharing, music and art posts, or interactive messaging boards. The main difference? The Fediverse platforms collectively operate, in this case on open standards and protocols.

Design matters

The design of the Fediverse is a big deal. Today’s biggest social media platforms are owned and controlled by a single, corporate entity and are run on closed standards using code and algorithms that we’ll never see. These decisions allow a few, select people to wield enormous power and control over billions of people’s daily experiences.

Because of that, let’s call this The Dictator Approach to social media: “I’m in charge! You have no choice but to trust me! Me and my teams know what’s best for you and for your data so we’ll take care of things for you.”

The Fediverse goes in the opposite direction.

Instead of having a single, corporate owner, The Fediverse is a federation of independently operated “instances”. Instances are simply servers that an individual or a company uses to run the software and services used to access The Fediverse.

Let’s call this The Democracy Approach to social media: “Lots of people share control! That includes you! And, since you know better than we do what’s best for you and your data, you get to decide how all of that is managed.”

How does it work?

I’ll use Mastodon as an example. For those who haven’t heard of Mastodon, it’s a federated social media platform that looks and works a lot like Twitter… only it isn’t owned by a control freak who likes giving white supremacists a place to amplify their vile hatred.

That’s why I now call the platform Shitter. It’s also why millions of people and advertisers have left Twitter and flocked to greener pastures.

Joining Mastodon is easy: users register by signing up via an instance that best represents their region, interests, or personality. There are thousands of different servers and some specialize in catering to gamers, artists, the LGBTQIA+ community, and, of course, tech.

As I’m a writer on Medium, I created my Tech Talk account on their Mastodon instance. Once I’m logged in, I can interact with other users on the Medium instance. Fun! However, the real magic is that all Mastodon instances also allow users to read, follow, or chat with people on ANY OTHER instance.

How? Because The Fediverse is built on open-source communication protocols. This decentralized design ensures that there is no single point of failure or censorship. That way, one person or corporation can’t have complete control over the network.

Doesn’t that sound familiar?

It should. What I just described is, essentially, how email works. Anyone can sign up for any email provider. But even if I sign up for ProtonMail and you sign up for Outlook, we can still send each other emails. That’s because email servers all use the same standard protocol to communicate.

The goal of The Fediverse is to bring that model of communication to social media.

What’s under the hood?

At the core of The Fediverse’s decentralized design is a communication protocol that allows interaction between instances. It’s called ActivityPub and it’s an open-source and decentralized protocol for social networking. ActivityPub allows instances to exchange messages, share content, and follow each other, creating a network of interconnected platforms.

Sidebar: open-source means that ActivityPub’s code is publically shared, so that anyone can view it, confirm that it is secure, and — more importantly — find bugs and improve it. For these reasons, open-source is considered “The Gold Standard” of software.

To best demonstrate how powerful ActivtyPub is, let’s do a thought experiment… Imagine if a user on Facebook user could seamlessly share messages with users on Instagram, Snapchat, or Shitter. Wouldn’t that be cool?

Of course, that’s not possible because there IS no interconnectivity between the big, private social media platforms.

But there is in The Fediverse, and ActivityPub is the reason why! This is why I think of it as the root of the Fediverse tree:

Security

Security and privacy are major concerns when it comes to online interactions. This is why privacy advocates despise Facebook and Shitter. The Fediverse addresses these concerns by incorporating security measures into its design.

Decentralization

Design is important. In this case, the design of the Fediverse network is one of its security measures. In a decentralized network, no single point of failure or vulnerability can compromise the entire system. That means the Fediverse will continue to operate, even if ten, 100, or 1000 servers are hacked or shut down for any reason.

Not true for Facebook.

Back in October of 2021, they had a global shutdown that lasted for 6–7 hours. BILLIONS of people couldn’t log on to any of Facebook’s kingdom of social media websites, including WhatsApp and Instagram. And, while I’m no fan of Facebook, a global shutdown event like that is terrifying. BILLIONS of people who rely on the Facebook empire of apps to communicate with one another… suddenly could not.

While traditional social media platforms can’t stop attacks like these, the Fediverse now makes them irrelevant: malicious hackers have no ability to simultaneously take down nearly 10,000 servers in 10,000 locations run on 10,000 networks that are administered by 10,000+ admins with different security protocols.

You own your posts and data

One of the fundamental principles of The Fediverse is user ownership and control. You retain ownership of your posts and have the ability to decide who can view and interact with your content. In practical terms, that means you can:

1. Set your posts to auto-delete after a certain amount of time

2. Export your posts, media, and follower lists

3. Leave one server and migrate to another without losing your followers

That last item, in particular, is amazing to me. It’s like saying, “I don’t like you anymore, Facebook! So I’m gonna MOVE all of my friends and followers over to Snapchat or MeWe where I’ll interact with those same people.”

Amazing… but there are limits.

Currently, although users can migrate friends/followers, they cannot migrate their posts and media from an old server to a new one. Instead, old posts can remain posted (if you elect that) so that old posts from the previous account redirect to the NEW ones. Neat.

Currently, users can only download an archive of their posts and media, but cannot bulk upload them onto a new instance. While that sucks, I’m guessing that — in the not-too-distant future — Mastodon and other services running on ActivityPub will make that possible as well.

Caveat emptor

Security isn’t just about the tech that you use: it’s also about how you use your tech. Mastodon is a better option than traditional Social Media platforms, but it still puts your data into the world. And sharing with the world has its benefits and its drawbacks. Once you’ve posted something, you have far less control over it, so:

1. When in doubt, don’t post it.

2. Once posted, assume that your post can/will be found later.

3. Choose your partners and platforms wisely.

On a decentralized network, each Fediverse instance operates independently. That means that each employs its own admins who, in turn, implement their own security measures and moderation policies. Some admins may operate their instances with stronger community guidelines than others. Read those guidelines before you join an instance.

If you’re in doubt, join well-run and well-liked instances such as Medium’s, Mastodon.Social, or others.

And, if all of that isn’t enough… there is one other security solution for those who want the MOST control over their data.

Run your own instance

The design of The Fediverse enables anyone to run your own instance. This means that we can set up and host our own social media platform on our own networks, free from corporate oversight or rules.

Running an instance allows users to create a digital space that aligns with their values and preferences. They can curate the community, moderate content, and customize the platform’s features to cater to the specific needs of their users. You can also restrict membership, if you desire, to ONLY people that you invite. Want a social media platform just for your extended family or for your college or high school graduating class? You can do that now.

This level of customization is impossible on Facebook or Shitter.

In my opinion, it provides a more tailored and personalized social media experience. Frankly, it’s also a lot more like our in-person interactions. We not only choose who to spend time with and who to avoid, but we also decide which community organizations to join or leave based on how those communities behave.

That kind of freedom should be built into the design of our digital worlds as well.

With the ability to run your instance, you have the freedom to create your own social media space and shape the online experience according to your preferences, not someone else’s.

Why It’s Better than Tradition Social Media?

If I haven’t made it clear already, The Fediverse offers many advantages over traditional social media platforms. Let’s explore the biggest and best of these…

You can move your data

In The Fediverse, you have the flexibility to move your data between different instances. This portability feature is a huge advantage over traditional social media platforms, where migrating your data isn’t possible. If you’re dissatisfied with one Fediverse instance or you simply want to explore different platforms, you can transfer your profile and followers to a new instance within The Fediverse. Here’s how.

This freedom ensures that you are not locked into a single platform or subject to the whims of a centralized authority. It allows you to explore different communities, discover new connections, and adapt to evolving preferences without losing your online identity and social network.

There’s no advertising?

That’s right, friends! There are no advertisements on The Fediverse, so you won’t be bombarded with tailored ads based on your browsing habits or personal information. This absence of advertising creates a more authentic and focused social media experience, where interactions are driven by genuine connections and shared interests rather than any commercial overlords or creepy agendas.

There’s no algorithm.

Traditional social media platforms employ complex algorithms that curate your feed and prioritize certain content over others. This manipulation can lead to information bubbles, echo chambers, and the amplification of certain voices while suppressing others.

The Fediverse takes a different approach. And by different, I mean none.

There is no algorithm governing your timeline on The Fediverse. Instead, you have direct control over the content you see. You choose who to follow, which instances to connect with, and how to curate your feed. This user-driven approach ensures a more diverse and inclusive experience, where you have the power to shape your online environment and engage with a wider range of perspectives.

The money thing

All of this should beg the question: if there are no ads and no algorithms and it’s free to sign up and use then… how does The Fediverse actually support itself? It’s the obvious question and the answer is also obvious: it runs on donations.

Therefore, you should donate. Does that mean you have to donate? No. But ask yourself how much it’s worth to:

1. Not have your data harvested by a company?

2. Not be manipulated by an algorithm?

3. Not be bombarded by ads?

4. Not have your posts, pics, videos, and writing owned and manipulated by others?

If you don’t want yourself to be the product, then it’s 100% worth donating $60–100/year to your instance admin. That money goes to paying for the hardware and software that runs your instance but it will ALSO go to paying for the time that admins put into fixing problems, moderating users, and creating a safe, fun, and informative environment.

Popular Fediverse Platforms

Nearly every popular social media website now has a Fediverse equivalent. All are free to join. That makes it easier than EVER to connect with friends, share opinions, and post photos and videos, all while NOT having a company harvesting that data for their personal or corporate profits.

I urge everyone to check out the platforms below and set up accounts. Then, tell your friends and family to do the same. Traditional social media companies and their “dictatorship approaches” cannot survive when users leave in droves when they discover that there are actually better solutions.

I’ve linked my own accounts below, so come find and connect with me!

Microblogging:

Migrate from Shitter – > Mastodon

Photo Sharing:

Migrate from Instagram – > PixelFed

News Feeds & Messaging:

Migrate from Facebook – > Firefish

Video Creation & Watching:

Migrate from YouTube – > PeerTube

Topic-Organized Discussions:

Migrate from Reddit – > kbin or Lemmy

Writing:

Migrate from Medium – > WriteFreely

Music & Composition:

Migrate from Soundcloud – > FunkWhale

ActivityPub, Fediverse and the Future of social networks

A Crash Course into ActivityPub

The ActivityPub protocol is a decentralized social networking protocol, it defines how applications can represent and communicate classic social network interactions such as ‘Posting a Photo’ or ‘Following a person’, creating a standard with which decentralized social network servers and clients can communicate. ActivityPub is a real-time pub/sub protocol, based on HTTP and JSON.

Let’s start by breaking down an ActivityPub request with one example request, this is a request from Alice to follow Bob on a social network:

HTTP POST Request:

{
"@context" : "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
"id":"https://my-example.com/my-first-follow",
"type" : "Follow",
"actor" : "https://mastodon.social/users/Alice",
"object" : "https://mastodon.social/users/Bob"
}

At first glance, you might notice how intuitive it is, we are making a request of type ‘Follow’ performed by the actor ‘Alice’ to the object ‘Bob’. There are three sets of types in ActivityPub:

Activities: They describe actions that can happen on the social network.
Actors: Describe entities that can perform activities.
Objects: Describes an object of any kind.

With these three sets, we can describe classic social network interactions, such as posting an image, following someone, or checking in on an event. The value that ActivityPub creates is by defining a standard to communicate these interactions across federated social networks, creating the possibility, for example, for a user on a social network to follow and interact with someone on a different network.

In order to enable federated social network interactions ActivityPub created the definition of an actor Inbox and Outbox, these are a collection of every action published by the actors that are ready to be requested by other social networks (Outbox) and a collection in which an actor receives actions performed by other actors (Inbox).

In practical terms, your “Inbox” will be an endpoint in which other actors can do POST requests to inform you of new activities, and your “Outbox” will be requested using GET requests by actors to update themselves on the latest activities you created.

Your Inbox and Outbox exist on your ‘Home Server’, we are going to explore the concept of a ‘Home server’ later but for now think of it as the server that is hosting your social network account, this server is going to be responsible for the underlying infrastructure of your social network, for receiving new activities posted on your Inbox and for making your Outbox available for other networks to fetch.

The Fediverse

‘Fediverse’ is a combination of the words “Federated” and “Universe”, it’s also a term that was invented to describe a group of federated social networks that interact with each other using protocols such as the ActivityPub. It started out with a single social network in 2008 and now has more than thousands of live instances with millions of active users. Since the release of ActivityPub in 2018 most of these servers already added support for it and it’s now the most prominent protocol for this server-to-server communication.

In order to join the Fediverse as a user you need to either create your own server to host your account or to choose an existing instance to be your ‘Home server’. Your home server will be responsible for all your account infrastructure on the Fediverse, it will host your Inbox and Outbox and will be the source of truth for your account information.

Adding support for ActivityPub and joining the Fediverse means that a social network can leverage the existing user base of the Fediverse to create content for its own users and to increase the reach of users on its network.

One of the biggest drivers behind the growth of the Fediverse is the open-source project Mastodon. Mastodon is an open-source social network server based on ActivityPub that you can use to host your own social network, it’s also the backend for some of the biggest Fediverse projects that are currently live, such as the Mastodon Social (1M+ users) and Truth Social (2M+ users).

Why would users care about the Fediverse?

There are two main benefits of being part of the Fediverse, Freedom and Content.

Being part of the Fediverse means that you have the freedom to choose a network tailored to your specific needs as your home server, users are free to pick instances based on their content moderation policy, technical reliability, and others, while still being able to interact with their friends that are using a different network or even hosting their own instance.

Using a Fediverse social network also means that you are going to have more content than a traditionally upcoming social network. The Fediverse already has millions of users and several social networks have already announced that they are going to add support for it, such as Tumblr and Threads, this means that even if you are part of a small federated instance you can still consume content being posted on other social networks.

As Bill Gates once said, “Content is king” on the Internet, and since the beginning of social networks users have flocked to where content is being published, but this might change with the Fediverse. With content being available to the whole Fediverse as opposed to a single social network instance this means that each user can make their decision about their home server without taking content into consideration.

Challenges Ahead

Both ActivityPub and the Fediverse have several challenges ahead if they are to continue with their current growth rate.

The first and most pressing one is scalability, ActivityPub is a very recent protocol, it was published in 2018 and so far it has been an uphill battle to scale it with constant outages and degraded user experience. This could be a common case of scaling issues for an early-stage social network with a high growth rate however there are some design decisions behind this protocol that might make it especially hard to scale. Jeff Darcy, an engineer at Meta, wrote a post about this topic, I recommend the read for more context about some of these issues as well as some insights on scaling social networks.

Another important issue is privacy and safety, being a distributed and decentralized network the Fediverse doesn’t have guarantees on how instances are going to handle users right to privacy. Let’s walk through an example, a user posts a picture on their feed, the post is then distributed to all the instances connected to the Fediverse however the user realizes they made a mistake and chooses to delete the picture, in this scenario, a request to delete the picture will be sent to all instances but there are no guarantees that they are going to actually fulfill this request. This issue is not only about instances acting in bad faith, there might be legitimate instances with different policies regarding content deletion requests. In short, there are no guarantees on how instances and users in different instances will interact with the content you post.

Lastly, it’s not clear what the incentives will be for existing social networks to join the Fediverse. Networks in the Fediverse distribute all the content being posted on them, meaning that users will be able to access content that was previously only accessible on their own app/website on a completely different surface, over which the network has no control over. This creates several monetization issues, for example, websites won’t be able to display ads when you consume content shared by them on a different social network.

Keep an eye out

Regardless if you want to create an account in a Fediverse instance or if you use a social network that will add support for it, I recommend keeping an eye out for this space. It’s not frequent that we have an experience of a distributed and federated group of social networks at this scale and, given the current growth trend, it might just be the beginning of a new standard for how social networks operate on the web.