social media.

a platform to connect to different communities. but while there are multiple communities, there's only one platform. you are trapped in a bubble along with some other people. you can't talk to other people in other bubbles, unless you get out and move to the other bubble, but in turn you can't talk to the people in the previous bubble. these bubbles, in this case, are the various different social networks. twitter, instagram (which has become more of an advertising network than a social network), youtube and the like.

this has been solved, for quite a while actually. enter the fediverse. a network of different platforms, which are hosted on various different instances. but the thing is, they all talk to each other. every instance (as long as that instance is federated) is capable of talking to a different instance, and the different platforms can talk to other platforms as well! im on vivaldi's very own mastodon instance and i can connect to people from other mastodon instances, for example mastodon.social. and from this instance (still vivaldi's), I can look at accounts from completely different platforms, such as peertube. you're still in bubbles, but more of a 'bubble cluster' instead of just a bubble on its own. you can talk to other people in other bubbles, without moving from your own bubble. it's very interesting stuff! all powered by the ActivityPub protocol.

seeing how social media networks look like at the moment — facebook becoming more data farm than social network, twitter getting bought by elon musk, instagram morphing into an advertising platform, et cetera et cetera — looks like more people might come over and join the fediverse.

oh and there's matrix but I can't begin to talk about that; basically the fediverse, but just to connect existing chatting platforms.