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Chapter 1. Welcome to the Fediverse

I’m so glad that I get to be the person to welcome you to the social web. I’d like to use this opportunity to explain why we’re here, what we’re doing, and maybe where you can fit in. Let’s start with the first steps: understanding social networks.

What Social Networks Do

What is a social network? At its most basic, a network is a collection of objects with distinct connections between them. A railway network, for example, is a set of railway stations connected by train tracks. A computer network is a potentially very big set of computers, connected by wires or electromagnetic waves to one another.

A social network is a group of people and the connections they form with one another. Like computer networks or television networks, information travels along these connections.

People often talk about social networks as the apps and websites that model our social connections and convey information that we send, although that’s probably better thought of as social-network software, social-network services, or just social software. I’ll be using social network to mean either the people or the software interchangeably in this book, but I’ll try to be clear when I mean one or the other.

As of 2024, as I write this book, social-network services have become an integral part of modern society.¹ We use them for our intimate social connections, for our civic and political life, for entertainment, for news. We use them to hold our memories, maintain contact ...