I’ve begun to wonder about this question. There’s nothing implied in the existence of the fediverse that it will include every site, and there’s nothing implied in the existence of every non-fediverse site which would stop them from forming their own fediverse. One could technically say email providers have already achieved this, though this only really applies to email providers which doesn’t make it as useful as the fediverse we know and love. Are there actually other fediverses out there?
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Email federates across providers. As do voice calls, texts, and RCS. The telecom industry was forced to do some kind of federation the moment different countries (with different monopolies) started needing to call each other. The terrible, terrible signalling systems that made this federation possible still allow for foreign governments to track human rights activists and journalists across the border today. The modern telecoms federation system is better, but it’ll only protect you when everyone in the world stops doing 2G and that’ll take another decade at least.
Back when newsgroups existed in serious numbers (not for piracy reasons) they were a major federated discussion forum. IRC chats were and still are federated, though not many interconnected IRC channels remain.
There used to be this “OpenID” standard that was designed to be federated. Basically, you registered an account with any identity server, and with the URL to that server you could log in to any service that used federated OpenID. That way, websites didn’t need to bother registering passwords and such, and you only needed to enter your password with an identity server of your choice. Great concept, never got any real interest, died out slowly, now you can’t even find information about it any more. OAuth2 rose from its rotting remains at some point.
RSS is a semi-federated protocol, as are Atom feeds, its successor. You don’t really send much data to these servers, but it does allow you to follow arbitrary web pages or people. If you’ve ever subscribed to a podcast using a third party app or website, you’ve probably accidentally used either Atom or RSS.
WordPress had this network of pingbacks that would share when one blog mentioned another, which worked across servers and domains just like a federated system.
In the 00s there were these special walkie-talkies that would set up an independent mesh network to communicate without cell service or internet connectivity. That was more peer to peer than federation, I guess, but it’s a pretty cool invention that was only used to send messages between Barbie coloured pieces of plastic.
Modern federated networks you may not know about include XMPP and Matrix for messaging, probably a system of interconnected patient databases if your government deals with healthcare, and I think the EU system that’ll let you log in to foreign government websites using your own government’s digital IT system could also be considered federated.
Bluesky is technically federated over ATProto and through bridges like bridgy fed you can set up bidirectional communications between the Fediverse and the ATProtoverse.
In the 00s there were these special walkie-talkies that would set up an independent mesh network to communicate without cell service or internet connectivity. That was more peer to peer than federation, I guess, but it’s a pretty cool invention that was only used to send messages between Barbie coloured pieces of plastic.
Meshtastic is trying to do something similar right now, I’m not sure how much Barbie colored plastic is involved though. I wonder what kind of tech those were using, I’ve never heard of it before and Google isn’t being helpful.
… Wait, are you taking about Cybiko? I wanted one of those when I was a kid even though I didn’t know anyone who had one and didn’t live somewhere with the density to really use the tech.
Smolweb
ActivityPub is not the only nor the first distributed/federated social network, but it has come to be rather dominant at the moment, largely thanks to Mastodon’s popularity. Some others seem to have faded into the background, like for instance diaspora.
Before the fediverse we already had the IndieWeb with Webmentions and microformats. And before that we had the Tent protocol. And before that we had the blogosphere with webrings, Pingbacks, Trackbacks and RSS.
I’m not an expert on this, but the fediverse is just a collection of things that can all communicate on a federated standard. It’s just like email, you can use whatever mail provider you want but you can email anyone else using email.
I guess your question is kind of like “are there other emails?” - and yeah, I guess there are other platforms where you can communicate and send messages, but they aren’t email.
Fediverse to me means a protocol, the technical term would be ‘ActivityPub’ protocol, which all these servers use to share data between themselves… In that sense yes… there are countless fediverses/protocols… one that quickly jump to mind is the Blockchain based protocols, another is Bittorrent protocol, however non of them comes close to what ActivityPub has achieved, I would say the only one that did come close, and actually surpassed activitypub in some aspects is the Nostrverse which is really technical in comparison, it has it’s drawbacks… both of them does…
another is the hypertext transfer protocol… (?!)
