Gregory's Server@haikushack hello! yes and yes, mostly. the servers are also known as “instances” (when people have names not ending with mastodon.social) and they are run by other people than eugen. instances can “defederate” from each other, which means that posts from one can’t reach another, but those are moderation decisions and not as common. mostly, all instances can talk to each other. for example, I’m posting to you from another instance! you could also move your account to another if you wanted
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 @haikushack that’s why it’s known as federated or decentralized social media! it’s very cool. means I can be on a small instance a friend runs and still talk to one run by someone else, or that I can find small communities specific to my taste but not be cut off from others. also means when there are influxes of users to mastodon.social that other instances continue on fine. also, fediverse isn’t just mastodon (which is the name of the software) - there are other softwares that talk together too @haikushack it does make it a bit confusing for newcomers, though! definitely a different paradigm than other services @haikushack sweet! there are also federated alternatives to many of those - pleroma is Instagram, bookwyrm is Goodreads, there’s been talk of building a federated event service, etc. lots of cool stuff built on the activitypub protocol, which links it all together @haikushack @christa here's a website I know that has soo many fediverses listed: https://fedidb.org/software @difwwh @haikushack @christa and another good list to know of, very complete IMHO: https://delightful.club/delightful-fediverse-apps/ @christa @haikushack minor correction, Pixelfed is the insta replacement :-) Pleroma is a different microblog platform that interoperates very well with Mastodon. Letting these sometimes quite different services talk to each other is the power of ActivityPub. I find it really impressive how this really works in practice, thanks to ppl like @Gargron getting it implemented and working well in real systems. |
@christa Thak you! What I find fascinating is the fact that I can follow people across different servers.