What is the fediverse and why do people care about it?
The fediverse is a decentralized network of social media services often using free software.
Decentralized meaning not all the data is held by one company in one place. Free, meaning using code that is freely available to the public so it can be shared, used, and reviewed by anyone. (This doesn't mean anyone'll be able to draw any useful conclusions from it if they don't code, but it's better than it having no public oversight or accountability.) People care about these federated spaces because it allows more control of our own data. To really get this you need to know that all digital information exists in a physical place. Like you may know that, but there's a lot of "live service" and "storage in the cloud"...etc BS out there, and I just need everyone to know that means either all the data is on a specific company's physical servers or the 'service' rents space from some big server farm(Amazon usually), and they allow you access to it conditionally.
A single company may not have our best interests at heart(lol) or might just take its ball and go home leaving us with nothing. Or another company might buy it and take all the data and shut the service down. Or they had a power outage so they can't verify you're allowed to play the game you 'bought' and have installed on your own computer. Or you can't afford the subscription after the third price-hike. Or their AI called you a baby and has to protect you from the content you've already watched for several years... Also, all their code is proprietary meaning everyone working on it has an NDA... so if it dies we can't even rebuild and host it somewhere else. That's the, 'Why?' In a reblog I'll add the 'How,' with links to more information.
