Documentation

Welcome to the Cookifed documentation!

What is federation?

Federation is a form of decentralization. There isn’t a single central service, there are many services that any number of people can use.

A Cookifed instance can operate alone. People can sign up to it, create their recipes, track their cooking activity. But unlike traditional websites, Cookifed instances can inter-operate and communicate with each other.

You can share a recipe with someone using a different Cookifed instance. And you can cook a recipe shared by someone whose instance is not the same as yours.

Just like email, where you can send and receive messages to and from people using any provider (GMail, Outlook, Fastmail, Protonmail, …), you can communicate and share with people using any Cookifed instance.

In fact, because Cookifed implements ActivityPub to inter-operate between instances, you can share with a lot more people than that.

What is ActivityPub?

ActivityPub is a standardized, open protocol for federation. Any software that implements it can communicate with Cookifed, just like Cookifed instances communicate with each other.

The fediverse (“federated universe”) is the name for all websites that can communicate with each other over ActivityPub and the World Wide Web. That includes all Cookifed servers, but also many other implementations, such as Mastodon, WriteFreely, Pixelfed, Lemmy, Peertube and many more.