Is it time to start caring about the fediverse?

A silly name isn’t keeping the fediverse from picking up momentum.

What happened: Flipboard, a news and magazine story aggregator app, is integrating with ActivityPub, a protocol being used to enable “the fediverse” — a decentralized network of interoperable online services.

• Users will see content from other federated apps, like Twitter competitor Mastodon, in their Flipboard feed, and vice versa.
   
• The app is working with 27 publishers during a test phase, including The Verge, Fast Company, Canada’s National Observer, Semafor, Pitchfork, and Digiday.

Why it matters: With 145 million monthly active users, Flipboard is the largest service to connect to ActivityPub so far. Since fediverse apps are connected, one big user base could give the others (many of which are still pretty small) a boost.

• A bigger boost, however, would come from Meta’s Threads, which took its first steps toward ActivityPub integration last week.

Zoom out: For users, the promise of the fediverse is the ability to access online content from different platforms using just one account. Users on similar services like Mastodon and Threads can follow each other and use the interface they prefer, while apps that seem unrelated can pull in content tailored to their platform, like long reads on Flipboard or images on Instagram competitor Pixelfed.

• Think about it like email: You can send emails to any address, instead of setting up separate Gmail, Outlook, and ProtonMail accounts. And some providers have different features that present content differently, like Gmail’s integrations with YouTube and Google Drive.
   
• Each service owns its own data; ActivityPub is merely a pair of APIs that facilitate secure transmission of the data a service needs.

Yes, but: A lot of federated services have to compete with a larger, more established competitor. That will make it hard for any of them to pick up the groundswell of momentum needed to get users on board and change the fediverse from a fringe concept to an experience most people accept in their online experiences.