How NGI is supporting internet applications through projects like Mastodon – BBJ

However, Twitter is not an isolated case. The original decentralized vision behind the Internet and the Web has suffered from large-scale industry consolidation. The Next Generation Internet Initiative has worked towards alternative futures for the Internet to create a resilient, reliable, and sustainable environment. the Internet. These alternative futures have one thing in common: they are based on common technologies: open standards, free and open source software and hardware, and open data. They are ideal ingredients for restoring the health of the Internet, as they allow individual users and the community to operate their own Internet services rather than elevating a single business entity into a dominant overlay.

A key ingredient of the social space is a standard called W3C ActivityPub, produced by the World Wide Web Consortium. ActivityPub makes it possible to have your own presence on the so-called Fediverse and in fact to own your presence as a user – you can configure under your own Internet domain, determine your own community policies and rules, establish your own privacy and use the same account everywhere to interact with others.

One of the best known Fediverse projects is Mastodon. In a short time, Mastodon gained over 500,000 new users, reaching over a million active users not too long ago. The number of independent servers for Mastodon has also doubled recently. Unlike traditional social media, Mastodon is not a single website or service. To use it, you choose an account with any provider implementing the ActivityPub protocol (or run this software yourself), which allows you to connect to the entire ecosystem on your own terms.

Users can post text (500 character limit), images, links and videos, and their so-called “Toots” are posted strictly in chronological order (there is no algorithm ranking the “Toots”) without advertising

Building the Next Generation Internet with Open Standards and Free and Open Source Software

The goal of the European Digital Decade for 2030 is to empower businesses and people in a human-centric, sustainable and more prosperous digital future; decisions to support digital commons become relevant to preserve the original vision of the internet as non-monopoly and non-privatized.

By offering citizens an alternative to major commercial players, ActivityPub delivers the conceptual bricks of cross-functional cooperation. It also opens the door to widespread adoption of Fediverse – again making the Internet a decentralized infrastructure capable of accommodating diversity, forming a free and more democratic alternative to the current situation.

NGI supports many different Fediverse tools such as Mastodon, PeerTube, Pixelfed, GoToSocial, Lemmy, and Owncast, each catering to their own use cases. The power of the Fediverse lies in its diversity: Mastodon instances are websites, as are the servers serving PeerTube, PixelFed, etc. From the user’s side, the Fediverse can be considered “just another class of web pages”. PixelFed is more photo sharing oriented (like Instagram). Lemmy is a great alternative to Reddit. And Owncast allows live streaming, just like Twitch. Each of them is already valuable in itself. Together, they provide a realistic alternative for users looking to move away from big business online social networks.

• Castopod is an advanced open source podcast hosting solution for anyone who can connect to Fediverse.
• Corteza is a low-code platform for building cloud-based web applications.
• Funkwhale is a free, decentralized and open-source audio streaming and sharing platform.
• Inventory is a free web application for sharing books, sharing knowledge about books and helping people connect to discuss, donate, share and sell them.
• Lemmy is an open-source, easily self-hosted link aggregator that you can use to share and discover cool new ideas – and discuss them with the world. You can also access it with the Lemmur
• Mobilizon is a federated tool for finding, creating and organizing events – allowing community events to benefit from wider visibility and participation.
• Owncast is a self-hosted open source live streaming platform allowing users to easily host and manage their own live streams.
• PeerTube is a free, libre and federated video platform. Video is a very popular class of content and meanwhile accounts for a significant portion of internet traffic, PeerTube greatly expands the choice of hosting options.
• Pixelfed is an open-source, decentralized photo-sharing platform, in the same vein as services like Instagram. You can also use the PixelDroid mobile client.
• XWiki is a modern and extensible open source wiki system that tracks individual wiki pages and allows people to comment on them without having to create a new account.

Additionally, there are many other tools and libraries that allow your site users to interact with other Fediverse users, including Drupal and WordPress ActivityPub plugins, bridges between ActivityPub and other protocols (like the vendor-independent standard for instant messaging XMPP, or the Matrix protocol).

ForgeFed is preparing to use ActivityPub to federate software forges. There are also other interesting methods and protocols to federate such as Hubzilla and Spritely. There are many other projects in the NGI portfolio that create federated services that use standards like XMPP, SIP, and others.

The next-generation internet engages with citizens and voters directly through the established European juggernaut, part of the Fediverse – the largest alternative to central platforms – based on federated, open source and standardized technology.

People involved in a project contributing to the development of the ActivityPub and Fediverse tools can apply for an NGI open call. More information about NGI solutions can be found here.