No worries! It is ok to be confused, it can be very bewildering when you first come in.

In the end though, remember you don’t need to understand the way everything works beyond this simple metaphor, the fediverse is like email, you have an email account at a specific place.

An email account [email protected] can email [email protected] just fine even though accounts from two seperate places are interacting.

The reason people call it the “fediverse” is it twist on the word “federated” or “federation” . It is meant to evoke many different communities willingly deciding to connect so that their users can interact, post, and like eachother’s stuff even though those users have accounts at different locations.

The fediverse logo is meant to evoke that

The specific thing that makes this possible is a standard of agreed upon formats and protocols called ActivityPub.

Lemmy.ca runs the lemmy reddit-like software which allows lemmy.ca to “federate” with other communities running not just lemmy software, but any other kind of software that also adheres to the ActivityPub standard. That could be another reddit-like like mbin, piefed or it could be actually liking a post from a user on mastodon (a twitter-like) from your reddit-like lemmy user interface.

Federation isn’t just about technically making everything happen behind the scenes though, federation also happens according to shared core values between communities. Communities may defederate from one another if there becomes a difference that cannot be bridged. Additionally while different communities routinely share info about block lists to prevent spam attacks and such, every community has its own moderation team that moderates according to its own policies. Which I actually think is very important and very beautiful.

There is no central control agent on the fediverse, which hopefully will allow it to flourish without falling under the control of any one overpowering entity!

One final note, in your lemmy feed you can choose between “subscribed” “local” and “all”, this is actually a great simple way to think about the fediverse. Your “subscribed” feed is posts from all of the subreddits you follow. Your “local” feed is posts from all the subreddits at the same location/community as you (where your account is @). Finally, and this is my favorite, your “all” feed is a feed of all of the subreddits that people from your community (where your account is @) follow from ALL over the fediverse! It is a wonderful way to discover new stuff!