Random

For me, the analogy that I find most helpful for intuitively grasping the way this "fediverse" thing works is a system where everyone can see your emails. There are a bunch of different servers out there that all handle email, like gmail.com or hotmail.com, and you sign up to one of them and get yourself an account there - facedeer@gmail.com, for example (not my actual email address, this is just for this example). I can post my "emails" for other people on gmail.com to see, but since the email standard includes methods for sending emails to other servers as well people on hotmail.com can also see my emails.

So you're @TheCreatureAnswered@kbin.social because you have an account at kbin.social, and you've posted a comment in this thread here. But someone with an account at lemmy.ml can also see this thread. They can respond to it, and you'll see their response from @someone@lemmy.ml show up here on kbin.social.

It's actually not much like Discord. Discord is more similar to Reddit, in that it's all being done on one giant server that everyone has an account on. That's simpler, but it has the downside that everything is under the control of just one organization and if they decide to do something you don't like (such as this API thing with Reddit) then there's nowhere you can go to escape from it.