The New Stack Makers

In the early days, the internet was a decentralized space created by enthusiasts. However, it has since transformed into a centralized, commerce-driven entity dominated by a few major players. The promise of the fediverse, a decentralized social networking concept, offers a refreshing alternative.Evan Prodromou, OpenEarth Foundation's director of open technology, has been advocating for decentralized social networks since 2008, starting with his creation, Identi.ca. Unlike Twitter, Identi.ca was open source and federated, allowing independent networks to interconnect.Prodromou, a co-author of ActivityPub—the W3C standard for decentralized networking used by platforms like Mastodon—discusses the evolution of the fediverse on The New Stack Makers podcast. He notes that small social networks dwindled to a few giants, such as Twitter and Facebook, which rarely interconnected. The acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk disrupted the established norms, prompting users to reconsider their dependence on centralized plat