Hey all, long-time Lemmy user who spotted this community on my All feed.

So, first of all, welcome to the fediverse! I hope this isn’t information overload, but I thought it’d be useful for you if I went over a few basic terms here, what they mean, and a big overview of how all this works.

First of all, your “instance” is lemmy.ca. An instance is kinda analogous to how an email server works. A Gmail user can email a Yahoo user just as easily as another Gmail user: same idea here. I’m on sh.itjust.works, a different instance run by a different admin, different mod team, different rules. But that doesn’t stop me seeing communities (the equivalent of subreddits) and being able to post/comment/reply/vote in any of your stuff!

The fediverse takes this concept one step bigger. Mastodon users can see/reply/post/etc into Lemmy as well from their own accounts on very different platforms. Same with Friendica, Kbin, Diaspora, Soundstorm, Peertube, etc. All of these different platforms with different features and focuses, but we’re all connected via an underlying protocol that allows us to all talk to eachother.

And the best part? Because of the separation of instances, no one person or organization can single-handedly make gigantic platform ruining decisions. A hypothetical Lemmy version of Spez would just end up killing their own instance as everybody migrates their user accounts to instances that aren’t run by crazy people. There’s even quite a few people who run their own tiny one person instances so they are quite literally their own admins.

As someone who put in many many hours answering questions and getting people acclimated during Reddit’s APIocalypse, please don’t hesitate to ask if there’s something you’d like to know about Lemmy or the fediverse as a whole.