Craig Hockenberry, creator of Twitterrific and other awesome software, recently wrote "The **** Show and mentioned "It feels like the time is right for a truly universal timeline."
And I 100% agree! For the longest time, users have been used to having multiple timelines - on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram - which means having an account on each one and visiting each site or launching each app to check for updates.
Personally, I used to do this, until I ditched Facebook and Instagram because of their unethical behavior. Twitter was the last man standing for me… until Elon Musk happened. If you have been living under a rock, then now is time for you to evaluate what Twitter is offering. Changes that are happening since the takeover are questionable at best.
Are the changes really to make Twitter better for its users or for its new owner? If it is for users, which users? Ask yourself - is it still worth your attention? How can a universal timeline happen? The answer is federation and it is already here!
Craig Hockenberry explained it simply "Federation exposes a lot of different data sources that you'd want to follow. Not all of these sources will be Mastodon instances: you may want to stay up-to-date with someone's Micro.blog, or maybe another person's Tumblr, or someone else's photo feed.
There are many apps and servers for you to choose from." Federation, in this case, is powered by the ActivityPub protocol. Using one app that supports ActivityPub and subscribing to one provider (or running your own), a truly universal timeline can be achieved. Currently, I personally subscribe to social.lol and follow others on different Mastodon, Calckey and Misskey services.
I also follow bloggers on Micro.blog, Write.as and even Wordpress (with ActivityPub plug-in). For photos and videos, I follow several accounts hosted on PixelFed.social and different PeerTube.org instances. Updates from users I follow from these different services are available on my universal timeline! This is *impossible* to do with Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
What's next? Users, individuasl or organizations or even governments, need to *stop* their reliance on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and embrace the federated universe, a.k.a. fediverse. No need to pay someone else to "verify" your account.
Organizations and government agencies can spin up their own instances, too. Personally, I am still waiting for Manila Bulletin's presence on the Fediverse. Will it spin up their own instance for their journalists? Medium.com has already started with their me.dm, what's next? --- If you are on the fediverse, ping me at https://social.lol/@rom.