Ancestors

Written by Zeh Fernando on 2025-01-18 at 15:36

I like that the Fediverse is getting some momentum, with Pixelfed's newfound popularity and such. But I think the true acceleration of adoption (regardless of whether it becomes truly mainstream or not) will be when people realize something: Fediverse domains have a real, usable API.

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Written by Zeh Fernando on 2025-01-18 at 15:39

Most people don't realize (they don't know, or forgot), but when social media started exploding (~2009), every system out there had an API you could integrate with. Websites would deeply work with Facebook, Twitter, and others like Digg or Del.icio.us (IIRC). It wasn't just the usual "share to" functionality - you could post, read, really use the APIs.

Eventually that died for various reasons and we're left where we are today: no real APIs, every network is a silo.

Not so with the Fediverse.

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Written by Zeh Fernando on 2025-01-18 at 15:41

So I think once people start realizing they can use the APIs - not just for "alternative clients", but for true integration, and niche use cases like creation tools - it'll be a sort of a wake up call: that things COULD be better. That social media networks don't have to be a silo - they can be part of the Internet, to enhance it rather than capture and divide.

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Toot

Written by Zeh Fernando on 2025-01-18 at 15:44

Personally I expect to see

• creation tools that post directly to the fediverse. Like, say, image editors.

• multi clients for managing social media presence like classic Tweetdeck and its multi-protocol alternatives

• aggregation tools for following lots of feeds

• individual site integrations like comments from Mastodon, etc

• useful bots

To some extent most or all of these already exist, but I expect to see more.

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Descendants

Written by Zeh Fernando on 2025-01-18 at 15:46

Anyway like I said before, I used the Mastodon API for something simple recently and it was a breath of fresh air.

And I think lots of people don't realize what we lost when the wild west of the APIs died.

Mainstream social media networks like to pretend they're the only world that exists. To keep things contained inside them. In some cases you can't even link to outside URLs, let alone integrate with them.

They want us to forget it didn't use to be like that.

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