I'm gonna be that guy and point out that when people say "the Fediverse" what they probably more specifically mean is "what's implemented by Mastodon, a social network built on top of ActivityPub" and that for certain conversations, this matters.
@danhon Hi Dan, I've been in this space since about 2008.
While Mastodon is the current biggest player in the space today, there's no guarantee that will be the case in the future, especially in the advent of Threads and other networks with millions of users joining.
It's important to understand that this space was built not just by one project, but by many. The Fediverse can be estimated to consist of around 90 different projects and platforms. Not all of them speak ActivityPub!
@danhon It's also kind of wild to me to hear "there's just Mastodon", when in fact we've managed to approximate nearly every kind of corporate social platform in existence.
Microblogging: Mastodon, Pleroma, GNU Social, socialhome
Images: Pixelfed, Frequency
Macroblogging: Friendica, Misskey, Firefish
Music: Funkwhale
Video: PeerTube, Goldfish, Vidzy
Interest groups: Lemmy, Kbin, Mbin, PieFed, Sublinks
And this is just a short list, there's actually a lot going on.
@danhon to be clear: Mastodon monoculture is a huge problem. A lot of platforms are built to simply be compatible with Mastodon, not each other. The lack of a platform-agnostic testing suite for developers to work against hurts us in the long run.
These are all things being worked on, and they're more important than ever. But this network has always been more than Eugen Rochko's little brainchild. Loads of people are innovating across many different efforts.
@deadsuperhero I'm just going to say that I think these applications and their usage is more on the scale of proof-of-concept in terms of ActivityPub usage, and negligible in terms of actual usage.
*Most* of them I'd also say are used mainly because they're Not The Siloed Versions, not because they're that much better on any other axis.
@silverwizard @deadsuperhero I wish it weren't monoculture and desperately want it to not be monoculture!