Yeah, no way does the average person not know what Lemmy and Voyager are…

…once I’ve finished a conversation with me

Basically like e-mail, if that helps.

You sign up on Protonmail, your buddy signs up on GMail. You can send mail to [email protected] from [email protected]. Proton Mail sees the address and sends the message over to GMail/Google. Despite there being 100s or 1000s of EMail services they all work together to form a singular service we call “email”.

That’s a lot of how it works basically. I’d add on community subscriptions to make it more complete. For example a user on piefed.social subscribes to [email protected]. Once the first piefed.social user subscribes, lemmy.ml will begin sending piefed.social a message every time something happens on [email protected]. So let’s say a lemmy.world user upvotes a comment in [email protected]. lemmy.world sends that message to lemmy.ml, the host of the community. lemmy.ml then sends a message about the upvote to all servers with someone subscribed to the community, including piefed.social. In this way all servers show the same thing.

But yeah, the important part is that it works. How it works isn’t always something the end user needs to know.

I’m a software dev and don’t think I fully have a handle on it. Basically the Fediverse proper is all of the servers networked to each other via the ActivePub protocol, which is to say that they have agreed to share activities (or rather posts with each other) on a peer-to-peer basis. Where it gets a bit more complicated is that there are applications like Mastodon and Lemmy that use activitypub in a particular way to create a specific flavour of social network, so most Fediverse instances are one of these - same executable, many machines - and these only connect with other nodes that are either the same, or compatible with the activities they share.

In principle this means that power over the network is not concentrated in the hands of a few, as instance owners who cause trouble, or fail to moderate their hosted users, can simply be blocked and routed around. An instance can be public and host to anyone who wants to sign up, invitation only, a self-hosted individual, or any kind of organisation (this is where the email metaphor is strongest).

Other people have explained it mostly, but piefed is the software your server (called an instance in the fediverse) is running. Confusingly, your instance is piefed.social, but that’s just an address, like any other address. It could theoretically be anything.

Piefed uses a protocol called Activitypub, which allows other software the implements Activitypub to understand each other. Often they can be interoperable. For example, I’m on an instance running Lemmy, which is different from piefed, but we can interact. They happen to be similar enough (Piefed being created from Lemmy) that it’s basically seemless. However, both of these also can interact with Mastadon too, but it’s less seemless. If you see someone starting a comment with an @[user] then they’re probably from Mastadon, which works like Twitter.

As for what to call this? Your home is called piefed.social. The larger thing I call Lemmy, but at this point it’s Lemmy and Piefed. Sometimes it has Mastadon mixed in. At large, all federated services are called The Fediverse, but that includes ones not interoperable with ours too. Just this set of interoperable software should probably get a name, but I don’t know of one.

It was one of the original attempts at federated social media. With a more Facebook feel. There was a Frendica, Identica, Diaspora. Frendica (well Mistpark as it was called back then) was the first to implement other protocols, connecting to the other platforms.

Pump.io was really the first to implement ActivityPub to my knowledge.

I’ve been hanging around these spaces a long time.

Yeah, my mother who is like 70 knows mastodon.

The rest would make her annoyed at me to ramble about. I’d love to get her into something better than threads, but I doubt it’s as active as she’d want.