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.
Like, practically speaking, when we say "take the useful parts of Bluesky's experiments and port them over to the Fediverse" what I think people mean in practice is "port them over to Mastodon”.
I really don't think there is a Fediverse (i.e. an underlying network-of-networks speaking a common protocol of which Mastodon is _one_ application). There's just Mastodon. That's it.
I'm increasingly worried about a Mastodon monoculture and have been trying to figure out what to do about it and how to do those things.
There are no killer apps for ActivityPub (yet?), and to the extent that Mastodon *is* a killer app for ActivityPub, I'll say it's a niche and sustaining one.
Say what you like about the initial "ownership" or backing of the AT Protocol, it is much more from the place of "people who have done this before" than what I'll freely admit is a very successful open source hobby project with a bunch of contributions back _and_ that has a pseudo- bdfl.
jwz has it absolutely right at the end of his post on mastodos/mastodonts on him referring to "Mastodon" instead of “ActivityPub" or "the Fediverse”:
Right now, there is *only* the Mastodon application and Mastodon clients, and those clients speak the Mastodon API, not really ActivityPub. There is only a network of Mastodon servers, the amount of other-ActivityPub happening is negligble, which is super sad but understandable.
Perhaps we should make a Venn diagram or something of that sort, rather like we give to Americans, to help them with the taxonomy of the UK.
@tuban_muzuru @danhon Will require quite some effort to maintain, but it's a great idea
