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What's fediverse?
It's the collection of various softwares/sites/platforms that are all able to interact due to operating on the same underlying technology.
Lemmy is part of the Fediverse. Mastodon is also and users there can follow and post in Lemmy communities despite being a totally different thing. Kbin is another Reddit-like, it and Lemmy coexist pretty seamlessly.
And there are so so many more. Fediverse alternatives to FB, Insta, YT, Linktree, etc etc etc.
You'll also hear "Threadiverse" which is what people have taken to calling that part of the Fediverse that focuses on forum thread type discussions (ie Lemmy and Kbin mainly).
Thanks for the explanation. How connected are the platforms? As a new Lemmy user, if I search for a particular community to join, am I seeing the same content that someone from Mastodon would? Or is it more that Lemmy is capable of reading Mastodon content but we're not sharing the same content by default?
I'm finding it a little hard to find the words to even ask this question haha, I'm still a little confused. This all looks nice so far though!
No worries at all! Gotta get you settled in somehow 😄
I'm not sure what you know about Mastodon but it's a microblogging thing (think Twitter).
So, Mastodon users can search for Lemmy communities, which appear to them just like a regular Mastodon user account. They can post to the community by tagging that account. If they follow the community they'll then see new posts and comments show up in their feed like regular "toots" (tweets). As you can imagine if they follow a busy community that gets spammy fast, but it does work.
From the Lemmy side, we can't follow Mastodon accounts yet afaik. But we can reply to posts and comments coming from Mastodon users, which from our side are formatted just like regular posts and comments in our communities.
Hmm I better add something Futurama-ey so I don't get in trouble.
...Sexlexia!
Amazing thanks! I had made the assumption that everything in the Fediverse is just a fork of Reddit style platforms or something, all competing yet somehow connected, but I guess they can all offer significantly different experiences (I must have glossed over your reference to FB, insta etc).
So, if I want, I'm about to discover alternatives to not just Reddit but a bunch of platforms?
Hot diggity daffodil!
Yup! This Threadiverse stuff is honestly just the tip of the iceberg! Truly is the world of tomorrow.
This is a good wrap up https://fediverse.party/en/fediverse/
That was really helpful, thanks!