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40 lines
2.6 KiB
Markdown
40 lines
2.6 KiB
Markdown
# Why Federation?
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GoToSocial uses the [ActivityPub](https://activitypub.rocks/) federation protocol.
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Federation means that you can hang out not just with people on your home server, but with people all over the [Fediverse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse). Your home server is part of a network of servers all over the world that all communicate using the same protocol--they speak the same 'language'. Your data is no longer centralized on one company's servers, but resides on your own server and is shared -- as you see fit -- across a resilient web of servers run by other people.
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Not all of the servers you 'federate' with will be running GoToSocial: popular implementations of ActivityPub include software like [Mastodon](https://joinmastodon.org/), [WriteFreely](https://writefreely.org/), and many others. GoToSocial communicates seamlessly with these other servers.
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This federated approach also means that you aren't beholden to arbitrary rules from some gigantic corporation potentially thousands of miles away. Your server has its own rules and culture; your fellow server residents are your neighbors; you will likely get to know your server admins and moderators, or be an admin yourself.
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GoToSocial advocates for many small, weird, specialist servers where people can feel at home, rather than a few big and generic ones where one person's voice can get lost in the crowd.
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## Glossary
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Some commonly-used terms in discussions of federation, and their meanings.
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### `ActivityPub`
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A decentralized social networking protocol based on the ActivityStreams data format. See [here](https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/).
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GoToSocial uses the ActivityPub protocol to communicate between GtS servers, and with other federated servers like Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc.
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### `ActivityStreams`
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A model/data format for representing potential and completed activities using JSON. See [here](https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/).
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GoToSocial uses the ActivityStreams data model to 'speak' ActivityPub with other servers.
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### `Actor`
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An actor is an ActivityStreams object that is capable of performing some Activity like following, liking, creating a post, reblogging, etc. See [here](https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#actors).
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In GoToSocial, each account/user is an actor.
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### `Dereference`
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To 'dereference' a post or a profile means to make an HTTP call to the server that hosts that post or profile, in order to obtain its ActivityStreams representation.
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GoToSocial 'dereferences' posts and profiles on remote servers, in order to convert them to models that GoToSocial can understand and work with.
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