I have LOT of experience hosting and working with a broad variety of Fediverse services. They are a 'parallel open universe' of social networking services that are community-run, decentralised, open, libre, and (usually) non-profit. The Fediverse contains analogues to the many well-known proprietary corporate-run centralised for-profit social media services. The huge difference with the Fediverse is that they are all tied together by a common protocol, ActivityPub. That is the killer feature.
I participate and host (and have hosted) platforms like
- Mastodon - https://mastodon.nzoss.nz (since 2017), https://mastodon.oeru.org, https://social.fossdle.org, https://mastodon.milll.ws (replaces Twitter/X or BlueSky or Threads)
- Peertube - https://vid.fossdle.org (replaces Youtube)
- Pixelfed - https://pic.fossdle.org (replaces Instagram)
- Write.Freely - https://write.fossdle.org (replace Medium)
- Kbin - https://link.fossdle.org (replaces Reddit)
- Lemmy - recently decommissioned in favour of Kbin (also a Reddit replacement)
- Mobilizon - https://events.nzoss.nz, https://events.oeru.org, https://events.magnificent.nz (replaces Facebook events)
- Takahē - https://activity.fossdle.org (a multi-domain Fediverse server, like many Mastodons in one. Mastodon-client-compatible)
- OwnCast - https://stream.fossdle.org (replaces Twitch or Facebook Streaming)
- BookWyrm - https://read.iridescent.nz (replaces GoodReads)
In addition, I run a number of WordPress sites with the ActivityPub plugin, which allows people in the Fediverse to follow your blog posts in their feed!
For a (fairly) current list of the Fediverse services I run, see https://nzoss.nz/services or https://tech.oeru.org (latest roll call: https://tech.oeru.org/updating-oer-foundation-web-services-february-2023).
I run all of these services via Docker Compose, which provides huge flexibility and very cost/time-efficient maintenance over time.