Post #1461590

So, first off: Welcome! glad to have you here, and I hope you'll like this little corner of the web :) As you might've seen, people talk of "the fedi" or "the Fediverse" around here a lot, so I wanted to demistify that! What the hell is a "Fediverse"? Fedi is a place on the web, like where you are right now, but it's also a bit more than that. It's a network of people and communities, and the sites we use are also networked in of themselves. On the Fediverse, there's a bunch of different sites that pass letters between eachother. These letters are the posts, the likes, the follows you leave and pretty much any other interaction. When I follow-request someone, it's like sending them a letter from my home address (Wafrn) to their address (Mastodon.social) that says "Alexia would like to follow this person". When they accept it, I get sent a letter back that says "Your follow-request was accepted". When I like a post, I send a letter "I liked this post" to the person that posted. Posts themselves are also like this, but just sent en masse; When I post, I send a bunch of letters all around the internet, to every other site that Wafrn knows, that says "Alexia just posted!" that includes the post I just made. And the same goes for replies as well. And everyone else does all of this too! How does Bluesky play into this? Bluesky is quite different! There instead of passing around notes, I just kinda write down my post, put it into a little ring binder with my other posts, and then there's this collection agency that looks at my ring binder tells everyone else about my posts. All posts go through this collection agency, so to speak. very different in that sense! What does "Fediverse" stand for, actually? Fediverse is a combination of "Federated" and "Universe", where "Federated" is a word used to describe (in this case) how computers can work together with a common "language", or rather the proper term, using a common protocol. The details of what protocol aren't too important, but if you're a nerd of that kind you may look into ActivityPub :) #wafrn #new-to-wafrn #new-to-fedi