LemmyNZ

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About the Fediverse ​

The Fediverse is a network of connected sites. With traditional social media, you can only interact with users from that website, such as facebook. You cannot go to Youtube and follow a facebook user.

However, with email, you can send an email to anyone regardless of if they use Gmail, Outlook, or their work email address. Email is a federated service.

The Fediverse refers to a network of social media sites that are federated, there are many nodes (instances) connected together. Anyone with technical skills can host an "instance", and join the network, though most people join an instance that someone else is hosting.

LemmyNZ is one instance that runs the Lemmy software, of which there are hundreds of other instances all connected together. By logging in to LemmyNZ, you can see all the posts from other users, even if those users are logging in to a different instance. While we'd encourage you to create separate accounts for different types of services (for example a Lemmy account for threaded Reddit style conversation, and a Mastodon account for Twitter/X style microblogging), many people choose not to do this, so while on LemmyNZ it's likely you'll see posts or comments not just Lemmy or Threadiverse users but also from other platforms like Mastodon - though you might not realise.

The Threadiverse ​

Not all Fediverse services are similar in nature. For example, Mastodon is a micro-blogging platfrom similar to Twitter / X, where as Lemmy is a link sharing service similar to Reddit. The Threadiverse is a sub-catagory of the larger Fediverse, with the term used to refer to platforms with structured, threaded conversations similar to Reddit, Ycombinator news, or for those of us old enough to remember, PHP Bulletin Boards. The Fediverse has multiple services that fit this structure. Lemmy. Piefed, and Mbin are typically considered to make up the Threadiverse, and together have many hundreds of instances with tens of thousands of users in total.

In Lemmy each node in the network is called an instance. Content is organized into communities, which are the same concept as a subreddit if you're familiar with Reddit. There is no central directory of anything, so all communities belong to a certain instance. You join an instance such as LemmyNZ and have access to communities on hundreds of other instances. But you always access the community on the instance your account is on. Here are some communities from across the Threadiverse, visible from LemmyNZ:

Your lemmy.nz account is a passport to all these large and small groups. Post and converse and everyone will see where your heart is!

The Fediverse is a decentralized network of social media services owned and run by the people. Not corporations. There are platforms to replace all of your more traditional social media sites.