Returning to the topic of clarifying what “the fediverse” means to each of us, I could sum up the wall of text about what it means to me in 3 sentences;
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The network of people behind the fediverse are part of a social movement that is passionate about decentralising social media, and tearing holes in the walls that keep netizens trapped in corporate DataFarms.
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That social movement came to a rough consensus during 2016/17 to work within a W3C standards process, creating a protocol standard for social web federation, and during 2018/2019, a rough consensus to use it(1).
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The technical implementation of the fediverse in certain protocols (and not others) is an emergent of the rough consensus of a social movement that coined the term, just like the implementation of Open Source in certain licenses (and not others) is a rough consensus of a social movement for software freedom.
Which leads me to three takeaways;
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The fediverse as a social movement includes anyone (anyone!) whose goal is to create a unified common carrier for social networks - akin to email and the web - that no one company or service can easily control.
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Anyone whose goal is to keep social networking fragmented, across a plethora of siloed platforms and incompatible protocols, is an opponent of the fediverse. Not part of our movement, nor even an ally. Whether they know it or not, they are working in the interests of the DataFarmers.
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While we might tolerate the presence of opponents within our community spaces, for the sake of robust debate and consensus-building, we must not let them disrupt our work. We need to be clear about who is opposing our shared goal (giant-killing of DataFarms), and hold them to the highest standard of respectful, good faith engagement.
(1) Whether by implementing AP in their software, by hosting instances of software that did on their fediverse servers, or by using accounts on those servers.