Beyond Mastodon and Bluesky - Toward a Protocol-Agnostic Federation

You’ve heard of stuff like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Make an account on one, and it only works there. You can’t send a DM to your friend on Twitter from Facebook Messenger. You can’t browse your friend’s Instagram feed from Twitter. Each one is closed off from the others. If you want to view things on a centralized platform, you need an account there. If you want to move your account from one to the other, you’re out of luck. If you’re banned, goodbye to everything you’ve posted, all your connections.

It didn’t have to be this way. It doesn’t have to be this way. There is hope for a more connected future.

In the beginning, there was FidoNet

Of course, there were things before it, and you could argue that any of them are better starting points. You could go all the way back to the Big Bang and the original federation: the entire cosmos. I’m not. FidoNet sounds like a social network for dogs, and I like dogs. It was also huge.