Mozilla lämnar fediversumet – stänger Mastodonservern

Fediversum (engelska: Fediverse) är ett nätverk av olika webbtjänster och -servrar som kommunicerar över en uppsättning gemensamma protokoll. Namnet är ett teleskopord av ”federation” och ”universum” som syftar på nätverkets uppbyggnad av samverkande delar. Den största enskilda plattformen är Mastodon som 2019 hade fler än 3 800 000 användare på 2 700 instanser. Sammanlagt har Fediversum fler än 8 900 000 användare fördelade över 19 000 instanser och 100 sammanlänkade projekt.

Mastodon is free and open-source software for running self-hosted social networking services. It has microblogging features similar to Twitter, which are offered by a large number of independently run nodes, known as instances or servers, each with its own code of conduct, terms of service, privacy policy, privacy options, and content moderation policies. Each user is a member of a specific Mastodon server that can interact seamlessly with users in any other server. This is intended to give users the flexibility to select a server whose policies they prefer, while being able to communicate within a greater federated social network. Mastodon is powered by the ActivityPub protocol, making it a part of the fediverse and able to communicate with other services that support it such as Lemmy, Pixelfed, Misskey, PeerTube and Pleroma. Mastodon was created by Eugen Rochko and revealed to the public via Hacker News in October 2016. It gained significant adoption in 2022 following the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk. The project is maintained by the German non-profit Mastodon GmbH. Development of Mastodon is crowd-funded, and does not contain any support for advertisements or monetized features.