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 X (Twitter), Threads, Tumblr, Mastodon and Instagram can be viewed as collections of microblogs.
identi.ca was a free and open-source social networking and blogging service based on the pump.io software, using the Activity Streams protocol. Identi.ca stopped accepting new registrations in 2013, but continues to operate alongside several other pump.io-based hosts provided by E14N which continue to accept new registrations.
GNU social is a free and open source microblogging server written in PHP that implemented the OStatus and ActivityPub standard for interoperability between installations. While offering functionality similar to Twitter, GNU social seeks to provide the potential for open and distributed communications between microblogging communities. Enterprises and individuals can install and control their own services and data.
OpenMicroBlogging is a deprecated protocol that allows different microblogging services to inter-operate. It lets the user of one service subscribe to notices by a user of another service. This enables a federation of new communities, as potentially an organization of any size can host a service. OpenMicroBlogging utilizes the OAuth and Yadis protocols and does not depend on any central authority.
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.
WebFinger is a protocol specified by the Internet Engineering Task Force IETF in RFC 7033 that allows for discovery of information about people and things identified by a URI. Information about a person might be discovered via an acct: URI, for example, which is a URI that looks like an email address.
Diaspora is a nonprofit, user-owned, distributed social network. It consists of a group of independently owned nodes which interoperate to form the network. The social network is not owned by any one person or entity, keeping it from being subject to corporate take-overs or advertising. According to its developer, "our distributed design means no big corporation will ever control Diaspora."
OStatus is an open standard for decentralized social networking, allowing users on one service to send and receive status updates with users from another. The standard describes how a suite of various standards, including Atom, Activity Streams, WebSub, Salmon, and WebFinger, can be used together, which enables different microblogging server implementations to communicate status updates between their users back-and-forth, in near real-time.
The O'Reilly Open Source Award is presented to individuals for dedication, innovation, leadership and outstanding contribution to open source. From 2005 to 2009 the award was known as the Google–O'Reilly Open Source Award but since 2010 the awards have only carried the O'Reilly name.
JSON-LD is a method of encoding linked data using JSON. One goal for JSON-LD was to require as little effort as possible from developers to transform their existing JSON to JSON-LD. JSON-LD allows data to be serialized in a way that is similar to traditional JSON. It was initially developed by the JSON for Linking Data Community Group before being transferred to the RDF Working Group for review, improvement, and standardization, and is currently maintained by the JSON-LD Working Group. JSON-LD is a World Wide Web Consortium Recommendation.
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.
pump.io is a general-purpose activity stream engine that can be used as a federated social networking protocol which "does most of what people want from a social network". Started by Evan Prodromou, it is a follow-up to GNU Social, and is designed to be more lightweight and usable for general data instead of just microblogging. The largest StatusNet instance at the time, Identi.ca, which was the largest StatusNet service and was run by Prodromou, switched to pump.io in June 2013.
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.
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".
Micro.blog is a microblogging and social networking service created by Manton Reece. It is the first large multi-user social media service to support the Webmention and Micropub standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium, and is part of the Fediverse, supporting ActivityPub.
ActivityPub is a protocol and open standard for decentralized social networking. It provides a client-to-server API for creating and modifying content, as well as a federated server-to-server (S2S) protocol for delivering notifications and content to other servers. ActivityPub has become the main standard used in the fediverse, a popular network used for social networking that consists of software such as Mastodon, Pixelfed and PeerTube.
Christine Lemmer-Webber is a software engineer, best known for her lead authorship and co-editorship of ActivityPub. She is currently the Executive Director at Spritely Institute.
Misskey is a free and open-source social networking service. Created in 2014 by Japanese software engineer Eiji "syuilo" Shinoda, Misskey was originally developed as bulletin board software. A microblogging feature similar to Twitter was added to the platform, which eventually became the main format of the service. The name Misskey comes from the lyrics of Brain Diver, a song by the Japanese band May'n.
