This is the best summary I could come up with:

It’s an interconnected social platform ecosystem based on an open protocol called ActivityPub, which allows you to port your content, data, and follower graph between networks.

You know how everyone online is like, “Give me your email, it’s the only stable thing on the web, and so it’s the most important tool for building a lasting audience” now?

And the places where you connect with your friends, or make a living as a creator, couldn’t be irrevocably destroyed by a billionaire with a sink and a bunch of weird ideas about financial products?

The ActivityPub protocol I mentioned a minute ago is a little like email: it has specifications for senders and receivers and supports lots of different kinds of content.

You can always have different accounts for different things, but I think many people will end up having one main identity — your Threads username, or your Mastodon handle, or even a domain you hook up to all of these services individually — that ports across all of these systems.

A lot of folks I’ve talked to say that, basically, if we’d built social media like this 20 years ago, the world would be better and smarter and we’d all be richer and better-looking.

The original article contains 2,713 words, the summary contains 204 words. Saved 92%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

Great to see he’s enthusiastic about it, not sure genpop is though.

/Edit post from Nilay on the comments

It’s more like - what if I just posted here on The Verge, and you could follow me on Mastodon natively? That’s way bigger than ICQ, I think.

The idea you could post from your own business/personal/group website and not have to run through social an intermediary that holds you hostage is a killer feature.

seen some internet oldhead talking on their blog about [the fediverse]

Oh fuck, is that what the kids call me behind my back? Oldhead?

How the hell had I not heard of Bookwyrm before. This is a fantastic goodreads equivalent.

Is there a dark mode though? Can’t find it and my eyes are starting to hurt.