Most of the stuff we use is beyond our understanding. No one is supposed to be an expert on everything, so chill and just enjoy it!

Basically like e-mail, if that helps.

You sign up on Protonmail, your buddy signs up on GMail. You can send mail to yourbuddy@gmail.com from youremail@protonmail.com. 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 !asklemmy@lemmy.ml. Once the first piefed.social user subscribes, lemmy.ml will begin sending piefed.social a message every time something happens on !asklemmy@lemmy.ml. So let's say a lemmy.world user upvotes a comment in !asklemmy@lemmy.ml. 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.

You are here and that's what is important. Doesn't matter if you understand the nuts and bolts of Activitypub. We are glad to have you and need more people. Bring your friends!....(by any means necessary)

Not to make you dig even deeper into your skull with that baller, but in case anyone else wants to understand… Piefed.social is the website you’re on. Piefed is also the software that is running at that web address so that you’re able to chat to me, who is currently on the website Lemmy.world, which is using the software Lemmy to run.

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.

Fedi Facebook alternative. Never felt any need to look into it

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.

It's more of a Facebook alternative. It has almost all the bells and whistles of it, minus the ones that imply constant surveillance of the users (shadow profiles for instance) - you have a calendar where you can add events, or you can see the events you joined, you have a permission system on your posts, replies are seen as part of a post instead of being individualized, you have an activity log, etc.

They may know matadon, but don't know what a fediverse is and, frankly, disgusted by it. /s

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.

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

....once they've finished a conversation with me

Hmmm I suppose, but it is a derivative work, so perhaps I should attribute both?

Misskey is worse than mastodon because all instances I've seen require login

What is this "win" key you speak of?