I never got confused by the circles

sjonsvenson: I wonder if the concept was ahead of its time? Touch screen tech wasn’t as developed or as common. Today, sliding circles around on a touchscreen would be easy and intuitive.

Hmm… nope. The Fediverse mycelium network went online in 2008. The first protocol was OpenMicroBlogging. Then the next upgrade was called OStatus.

In 2018, the next upgrade was the #ActivityPub protocol, which was approved by the W3C (World Web Consortium) as a web standard for Social Network Services.

Basically, think of the Fediverse as email. If #Plurk is fediverse-enabled, you will be able to follow, like, be liked and be followed, by anyone who is not using Plurk… provided their platform also supports the web-standard ActivityPub protocol.

Like in email, it doesn't matter if your provider is Gmail, Zoho Mail, ProtonMail, you can email and communicate with anyone.

The ActivityPub is not strictly for social networking only. Wordpress have a plugin support for it. If a WordPress use publishes a new content, anyone in a platform with Fediverse/ActivityPub support will see that content directly on their chosen platform.

There are a lot of uses for it. For example, as a photo uploading platform (see pixelfed.social). Imagine being able to follow someone from Flickr or Instagram without the need to create yet-another-account.

There is also BookWyrm.social, imagine Goodreads but anyone can follow you, see your book reviews, without forcing them to create yet-another-account just to see your content updates.

And that's just the Fediverse network.

There is also the ATmosphere mycelium network powered by the ATproto protocol. The flagship server is bsky.app

There is also the NOSTRich mycelium network powered by the Nostr protocol.

Other developers created bridges between the Fediverse, ATmosphere, and NOSTRich, allowing users of these three networks to interact with each other.

https://Threads.net, Instagram's answer to Twitter, also offers integration with the Fediverse, although limited currently as they are still perfecting it.

If you want to give the Fediverse a try, I recommend the following servers:
1. disclosure: I'm a volunteer moderator - for microblogging
2.pixelfed- for photos
3. Catodon Social - for macroblogging
4. WriteFreely - for blogging (or aBlog Tool, Publishing Platform, and CMS - WordPress....blog with the Fediverse plugin enabled)