Here’s a fine article from Voices of Open Source about the present benefits and future potential of the ‘federated’ internet model offered by the Fediverse: The Fediverse unlocks a world of composable distributed apps

There’s an old story about someone in the dark feeling the trunk of an elephant and believing it’s a snake because they can’t see the whole animal. It’s happening again, as people spooked from the Twitter crash try to feel their way around the Fediverse.

One of the benefits of the Fediverse is that I can use my preferred system to post things and you can follow and interact with any ActivityPub-compatible system you prefer. Your choice of, say, a photo-sharing platform doesn’t dictate that I have to sign up to the same site, or even to another photo sharing thing. It’s all powered by the ActivityPub standard – which is like RSS you can reply to. But there’s the potential to end the reign of monetized surveillance (AKA advertising) with a switch to user-owned applications.

If I’m honest, I’m not convinced that I entirely understand “composable” in this context, but I’m sure that I’ve got the gist: the Fediverse enables users to genuinely be users of internet services, not the products that are being sold by them.