ELI5

Once upon a time, people thought that it would be fun to have a place to learn and play and talk together, and the more people that came, the better they would all learn from each other. So they got together and built this place in one fixed spot. And they DID learn from each other, and it was fun and amazing. But some people were greedy and wanted to control all of it so that they could feel like they were better than everyone else. These greedy people forced the people to give them more and more money to be able to use the spot. The bad guys would treat the people who wanted to have fun badly, and use information about them against them. This made people sad.

Then one day, somebody said, "Hey, why can't we just have a bunch of little spots, so that nobody can hold us hostage?"

But the other people were afraid they wouldn't be able to play with some of their friends or learn from other people if everybody was separated. Until some people came up with the idea that all these small communities could agree to share everything they were doing with each other, small spot to small spot. Nobody owned all the spots now, and people were free to choose spots that were more convenient for them, without having to be afraid that others wouldn't be there, because all the small spots still made one big spot!

And that dear, is basically the fediverse in a nutshell. Now go to sleep, you have a big day tomorrow. tuck tuck

I don't necessarily have the best understanding either, but I'll give it a shot.

The fediverse is a federated universe, which means lots of servers can talk to each other (like a federation of people) instead of all being centralized in one company and their servers. It's like how email is a common way to talk to each other, even though there are different groups with different versions.

Lemmy is the Reddit like portion of the fediverse. There are other parts, such as Mastodon, which is like Twitter. These can talk to each other a bit too, but right now they mostly talk within themselves.

Servers like vbin, sh.itjust.works, Lemmy world, Lemmy.ml, and many others are computers that store the information on Lemmy. They keep track of how many upvotes, text, links, and sometimes content hosting. But because there are a lot of them, and anyone can easily make their own, it's harder for a company like Reddit to just ruin it all for profit.

Do 5 year olds have email? Because it's kind of like that. You have an email address "someone@gmail.com" and you can send a message to "person2@hotmail.com". You don't both have to be on Gmail.

Well fediverse apps are kind of like this. Imagine lots of little reddits with their own communities and user bases.

You are your_name_here@kbin.social. You can talk to otherguy@lemmy.ml. Same goes for magazines/communities (subreddits). If you want to join a magazine on another server, you can do that like @technology (notice the leading @ symbol which tells Kbin that it's a magazine and not a user).

This is what is most important for the average user to understand about the fediverse. There is a ton more than this like interoperability with different apps that aren't thread based like Kbin and Lemmy like Mastodon but that's a different discussion.

Edit: The community link should probably start with an ! as suggested by @fu but there is a known issue with formatting presently: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/199

@s804 ~~it's a cool protocol that many platforms use in order to allow any user on them to communicate with each other. Kbin is one of them. Friendica is another one. Hello from Friendica!~~

Disregard what I said, I didn't really see which magazine I was in. Basically it is a term describing multiple social media platforms, with various use cases, that can talk with each other using ActivityPub - a web protocol (kind of a language in layman terms) that allows them to do it.

• Here's an image showing you how that would look like (And here's the source of it. It has a really simple, but comprehensive explanation).
• A great website if you want to learn more and discover more platforms in this regard is this one.

As I said in the strikethrough text above, I am on such a platform myself. Hello from Friendica! 😁

@s804 #ItworksLikeEmail libranet.de/display/0b6b25a8-1…

If your house is your local computer, the place that you're accessing from (kbin.social) is like the post office in your town. You know how email addresses follow the format <user>@<hostname>? The same kind of thing is taking place here - kbin.social is it's own place, you log in there, and it has a local ability to moderate your posts and what you see.

The difference with ActivityPub is that instead of only seeing the mail that was delivered to you and knowing nothing about what other people's email looks like, you see the whole "town square" of kbin, and events in cities that it's connected to as well. Depending on what software is being run, that can be presented in different ways, because ActivityPub is flexible and focuses mostly on the idea of "sharing and subscribing to events" - it doesn't say what the interface has to look like.

kbin makes it look like reddit, but things happening on kbin are also represented on, for example, Mastodon. When I look at kbin's "Microblog" tab it shows a lot of accounts that I am familiar with from Mastodon. They don't live here, they aren't posting here, but they're "federated" here and you can interact with them.

The Fediverse is a collection of websites running different kind of social media software that are able to communicate with each other similar to email via a protocol called ActivityPub (and a few others).

Hope this helps. Beautifully illustrated:

https://vis.social/@janeadams/110550051059894412

Fediverse is based on a distributed protocoll, where everyone can join. It gives alternatives to most known "social media" service silos like:

• pixelfed : instagram
• mastodon : twitter
• Lemmy : reddit ...

Go ahead and use a search engine ;)

You can send a letter OR a package OR pictures OR a birthday card, etc through the standard mail.

Big corporations lead you to believe that only MAIL could go their service X or PACKAGES go through service Y. Both could NOT go through the same, because they wanted to make MONEY.

Fediverse is the open service that proves them wrong. And it needs YOUR help to survive and thrive by putting your content into the fediverse and not those walled gardens.

• Lemmy & KBin - Reddit alternative
• Owncast - Twitch alternative
• Mastodon & Pleroma - Twitter alternative
• Peertube - Youtube alternative
• Funkwhale - Music Spotify like alternative
• Pixelfed - Instagram alt
• Diaspora - Facebook

And you could build and host your own. It's open for EVERYONE.

It's the backend a bunch of smaller social media sites use, allowing them to all communicate. For non-technical users, you shouldn't have to worry about it too much, but it's useful in allowing all these small sites to have far more content then they would if they couldn't communicate.

I'm just wrapping my head around it myself.

From what I got Kbin is an instance of Lemmy and Lemmy part of the Fediverse. The Fediverce is made up of a bunch of different types of social platforms.

eg:
Microblogging: Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey
Blogging: Write.as, Read.as
Video hosting: Peertube
Audio hosting: Funkwhale
Image hosting: Pixelfed
Link aggregator: Lemmy

Instances are those platforms being hosted by a user. It's like their own personal reddit. They get to make their own rules and stuff. The cool thing is all the instances can talk to each other. And you can choose to communicate the other instances.

There's more to it but I don't really understand everything.

Watch this: https://savjee.be/videos/simply-explained/mastodon-and-fediverse-explained/