Hi, welcome! Sooooo, maybe this is new info. Maybe this you already know. Either way, as a Lemmy newbie, allow me to fill you in on some lingo and details around here.

So, subreddits are called communities, but it’s the same thing.

What’s not the same is the core functionality. Lemmy has potentially an infinate amount of servers. I say potentially because you can start your own Lemmy server right now.

These servers are called “instances”. It’s just a server where you can host your own lemmy account, or your own communities.

So, you can do whatever you want on your instance. You can tell all your friends to join your instance. I could sign up for an account and be hosted by your instance.

Now I’m not saying you need to do that, or even that you should do that. I’m just saying you can. It’s possible.

Now, let’s talk federation.

Think of each instance as a circle. Now imagine a line connecting two circles. That connection between the two circles means they are “federated”, or connected. You as a user on an instance can interact with all other federated instances. This is why you’ll see topics on lemmy.world and users hosted lemmy.ml.

Lemmy.world and Lemmy.ml are two different instances, but they are federated. So Lemmy.ml users can interact with Lemmy.world communities/topics/users.

Your instance is ani.social. I’m not firmiliar with which instances you’re federated with. Clearly federated with Lemmy.World.

But imagine you found a problematic instance. Like what if you found somethink like nazis.online for an instance. You might want to cut ties with them.

So now imagine that line between ani.social and nazis.online is cut. You don’t want to talk to nazis, and neither does anyone on your instance. So ani.social defederates from nazis.online, and now the nazis can’t see, nor interact with you, or any communities on your instance.

However, [email protected] can still ineract with Lemmy.ml, and ani.social can still interact with lemmy.ml. So you still may see users on other instances that you’re both federated with. In that case, you can block [email protected].

And Lemmy.World, and Lemmy.ml are both Lemmy. But you may see users from an instance called piefed. What is piefed? Well it’s a totally different service, with its own instances, with its own communities, run by different people that can still federate with Lemmy and other instances within the fediverse. But how is this possible?

Well, the fediverse is all services that use something called activitypub. Now, I’m a bit out my own element in knowing the finer details, but the over simplified version is that if a service uses activitypub, it CAN be part of the fediverse. I say “can” because I’ve been told that bluesky does run activitypub, but they choose to limit their own federation to just bsky.app. Meaning there are no other bluesky instances, and no other service is federated with bluesky, even though they totally could federate with mastodon.

Bluesky is almost a 1:1 carbon copy of pre-musk twitter. Mastodon is more pre-musk twitter inspired, but also fully part of the fediverse.

Bluesky has limited interaction with mastodon. I’ve never tried it, despite having both a bluesky and mastodon account. I’ve heard you need to bridge the accounts, and it’s a whole thing. So I never bothered. I hear it’s clumsy, and not worth it.

And there’s a whole bunch of fediverse services.

Lemmy/piefed are like reddit.

Peertube is like youtube.

Loops is like tiktok.

Pixelfed is like instagram.

Friendica is like facebook.

And when I say all this, there’s one giant elephant in the room we haven’t addressed yet. Corporate interests.

Lets say you’re still on X for some god awful reason. Well, you probably notice that they push their own agenda on you. They make money by getting you to follow the agenda. On the fediverse, there are no owners.

Like I said earlier, you can run your own instance. If Sony wanted to advertise on Lemmy, it would be damn near impossible. Because they could advertise on Lemmy.World, but only Lemmy.World users would see the ad. Because when you interact with Lemmy.World, you personally are not on Lemmy.World. You’re on Lemmy.World via Ani.social. So you’re actually browsing all this from Ani.Social. You never actually leave there. And if you try to go directly to Lemmy.World, you’ll find you’re not logged in. Because they have no login credentials for you. But if you go back to Ani.Social, you’ll find things just as you left them. Still able to interact with Lemmy.World but still technically browsing Lemmy.World via Ani.Social.

I know thats a lot to throw at a newbie, but I promise it’s only complicated in the begining. Once you get it, it’s like second nature.

One last thing, despite being called the “fediverse”, there’s no need to worry. It has nothing to do with Kevin Federline.