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 bobjones@gmail.com can email mainstreetflowers@yahoo.com 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!

My recommendion is not think to hard about federation, inter-instance interactions and so on...

Best to just contribute/read communities that interest you and you'll figure things out as you go along.

Lemmy itself is also part of the larger "Threadiverse" ecosystem: the part of the fediverse that deals with threaded content in a forum-like structure (like Reddit basically). Lemmy is one software interacting with this, but there are also other alternatives like Piefed and Mbin. Since they all use the ActivityPub protocol they are interoperable - which software you chose doesn't matter. The common analogy people tend to use is email providers: Hotmail and Gmail and Proton are all different, but you can register to any of of them and talk to people from all the others.

The instance you choose does matter, as each one will have its own moderation policy and defederation list. Defederation is a tool instance admins can use to shut off communication with another instance - for example blocking dedicated NSFW instances or instances that have different philosophies on content and moderation.

For the most part the biggest instances are all federated, so it's not something you need to worry too much about for now. Down the line, it's a good idea to shop around for an instance that suits your personal preferences.

Correct! You sign up here but it lets you post on any site that runs Lemmy (or a software that support's Lemmy's protocol like mbin and PieFed) and is connected to here.

If you are coming from Reddit, the communities are like subreddits except that they might be here or they might be hosted elsewhere, but you interact with them without leaving the site you signed up with (lemmy.ca in your case). The way you do it is instead of going to https://lemmy.world/c/news (the News community on lemmy.world, you go to https://lemmy.ca/c/news@lemmy.world. Community mentions (the equivalent to r/something) are in this form: !news@lemmy.world. Remember you are subject to the rules of the community you post to in addition to the server (just like a Reddit user would have agreed to Reddit's terms and follow subreddit rules).

It is otherwise pretty seamless, the main thing is you have three feed groups: Subscribed, Local and All.

Subscribed works like you'd expect: you go to communities you like and subscribe to them, then that feed shows only posts from those communities.

Local shows only posts from communities hosted where you signed up. On Lemmy.ca that means Canadian city and Province communities, !Canada@lemmy.ca, !pcgaming@lemmy.ca, !fairvote@lemmy.ca, !mehmes@lemmy.ca, and a bunch of others. You will still see posts and comments that people from outside lemmy.ca publish to these communities.

All shows you that plus stuff from every other community from servers we are connected to, which tend to be bigger and more populated. Sometimes a big news story from !canada@lemmy.ca makes it to near the top of All. You can block annoying users, communities or entire servers to clean up any of the feeds above.

Thanks for joining Lemmy, hope you have a good time.

I have my Voyager app set to show the full names of users, so it shows up like username@instance. You can really see the scope of how many instances their are.

goes beyond even that. both piefed and mbin show the same feeds as well so you will this comment is from piefed but my other account is on the mbin instance catsweat.