Microblogging is a form of blogging using short posts without titles known as microposts. Microblogs "allow users to exchange small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images, or video links", which may be the major reason for their popularity. Some popular social networks such as Twitter, Threads, Mastodon, Tumblr, Koo, and Instagram can be viewed as collections of microblogs.
A distributed social network or federated social network is an Internet social networking service that is decentralized and distributed across distinct service providers, such as the Fediverse or the IndieWeb. It consists of multiple social websites, where users of each site communicate with users of any of the involved sites. From a societal perspective, one may compare this concept to that of social media being a public utility.
The tables below compare general and technical information for some notable active microblogging services, and also social network services that have status updates.
OStatus is an open standard for federated microblogging, allowing users on one website to send and receive status updates with users on another website. The standard describes how a suite of open protocols, including Atom, Activity Streams, WebSub, Salmon, and WebFinger, can be used together, which enables different microblogging server implementations to route status updates between their users back-and-forth, in near real-time.
Construct is an HTML5-based 2D video game engine developed by Scirra Ltd. It is aimed primarily at non-programmers, allowing quick creation of games through visual programming. First released as a GPL-licensed DirectX 9 game engine for Microsoft Windows with Python programming on October 27, 2007, it later became proprietary software with Construct 2, as well as switching its API technology from DirectX to NW.js and HTML5, as well as removing Python and adding JavaScript support and its plugin SDK in 2012, and eventually switched to a subscription-based model as a web app.
Friendica is a free and open-source software distributed social network. It forms one part of the Fediverse, an interconnected and decentralized network of independently operated servers.
Distributed social network projects generally develop software, protocols, or both.
Proton Mail is a Swiss end-to-end encrypted email service founded in 2013 headquartered in Plan-les-Ouates, Switzerland. It uses client-side encryption to protect email content and user data before they are sent to Proton Mail servers, unlike other common email providers such as Gmail and Outlook.com. The service can be accessed through a webmail client, the Tor network, Windows, macOS and Linux (beta) desktop apps and iOS and Android apps.
Matrix is an open standard and communication protocol for real-time communication. It aims to make real-time communication work seamlessly between different service providers, in the way that standard Simple Mail Transfer Protocol email currently does for store-and-forward email service, by allowing users with accounts at one communications service provider to communicate with users of a different service provider via online chat, voice over IP, and videotelephony. It therefore serves a similar purpose to protocols like XMPP, but is not based on any existing communication protocol.
PeerTube is a free and open-source, decentralized, ActivityPub federated video platform powered by WebTorrent, that uses peer-to-peer technology to reduce load on individual servers when viewing videos.
Vivaldi Technologies AS is a Norwegian software development company, most known for its creation of the Vivaldi Browser. Headquartered in Oslo, Norway, it was founded in 2013 by Jon von Tetzchner and Tatsuki Tomita. Tetzchner was one of the founders, and formerly the CEO, of Opera Software, a software company which developed the web browser Opera. About 20 former Opera employees joined him at Vivaldi Technologies. In January 2017, the company had 35 employees. As of September 2021, the company has listed 54 employees.
Framasoft is an education-oriented social network created in November 2001 by Alexis Kauffmann, Paul Lunetta, and Georges Silva. Since 2014, it has been supported by a nonprofit organization of the same name based in Lyon, France. Mainly focused on free software valorisation, it is divided into three main branches of activity based upon a collaborative model: promotion, dissemination, and development of free software, enrichment of the free culture movement, and online services.
Mastodon is free and open-source software for running self-hosted social networking services. It has microblogging features similar to Twitter, which are offered by a large number of independently run nodes, known as instances or servers, each with its own code of conduct, terms of service, privacy policy, privacy options, and content moderation policies.
Brevo, formerly Sendinblue, is a SaaS solution for relationship marketing. The company was founded in 2012 by Armand Thiberge, and offers a cloud-based marketing communication software suite with email marketing, transactional email, marketing automation, customer-relationship management, landing pages, Facebook ads, retargeting ads, SMS marketing, and more.
The fediverse is a collection of social networking services that can communicate with each other using a common protocol. Users of different websites can send and receive status updates, multimedia files and other data across the network. The term fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".
ActivityPub is an open, decentralized social networking protocol based on Pump.io's ActivityPump protocol. It provides a client/server API for creating, updating, and deleting content, as well as a federated server-to-server API for delivering notifications and content.
Pixelfed is a free and open-source image sharing social network service. The platform distinguishes itself from other image sharing services through its decentralized architecture, meaning user data is not stored on a central server. It uses the ActivityPub protocol, allowing users to interact with other social networks within the protocol, such as Mastodon, PeerTube, and Friendica. Pixelfed and other platforms utilizing this protocol are considered to be part of the Fediverse. The network is made up of several independent sites that communicate with one another, which is roughly comparable to e-mail providers. The parties involved do not all have to be registered with the same provider, but can still communicate with each other. Thus, users are able to sign up on any server and follow others on the other instances.
Sepia Search is a video search engine for PeerTube. It is developed by the French association Framasoft.
Eugen Rochko is a Russian-born German software developer, best known as the creator of Mastodon, a decentralized open-source social networking platform consisting of a large number of independently run nodes, known as instances, each with its own code of conduct, terms of service, privacy policy, privacy options, and moderation policies.
Lemmy is a free and open-source software for running self-hosted social news aggregation and discussion forums. These hosts, known as "instances", communicate with each other using the ActivityPub protocol.
