It became the only reliable source of information I had. People posted links with a minimal amount of commentary, picking and choosing the best content from other social media networks. They’re not doing it to “build a brand” because that’s not a thing in the Fediverse. It’s too disjointed to be a place to build a newsletter subscription base.

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[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 7 points 8 hours ago

You asked five questions, none of them are stupid.

What exactly is the fediverse? What's included in it.

I have heard two definitions in use. The first is narrower, it refers to the collection of servers running compatible Reddit-alike software including Lemmy, Mbin and Piefed which are pretty much 1 to 1 compatible and communicating with users on one from another is more or less seamless. The big, distributed Reddit alternative that allows you to post from lemmy.ca onto lemmy.world and me to read it from sh.itjust.works.

The second is the broader, simpler definition of "anything that runs on the ActivityPub protocol and is federated with something else." Which includes all of the above plus the likes of Peertube, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Loops etc. They are technically cross-compatible, I'll get to that later.

Is Lemmy part of it or not?

Yes it is, Lemmy runs on ActivityPub.

Are other systems like Bluesky part of it or not?

Some are, some aren't. A few examples:

BlueSky. Not part of the Fediverse, it uses a different protocol, their own thing. It is sort of designed to federate but not really in practice.
Diaspora. Similar concept of federated social media, but not compatible with ActivityPub. The Coke to our Pepsi.
Truth Social. It is my understanding that The Church Of Trump is basically a fork of Mastodon. They don't federate though, they turn that feature off thank a long list of random deities and WWE wrestlers.
Threads. Meta/Facebook's Twitter clone. IS part of the Fediverse, it uses ActivityPub and has federation turned on, though a lot of instances defederate with them on principle. You can interact with Threads from a Lemmy instance. ...If it still exists. Is Threads still a thing?

Do I transparently see posts from all those different systems?

Yes and no. You can kind of think of the Fediverse like the Universe itself in that there's nowhere you can stand and see the entire thing. You and I are from neighboring star systems in the same galaxy, we're both on servers running Lemmy, so we can communicate completely seamlessly. I see a comment immediately above you from someone on piefed.social, they're on a server running Piefed, not Lemmy. That's another Reddit-alike, they can communicate with us pretty easily. You might occasionally see someone on Mastodon chime in. You can usually spot this because they @ the users they're replying to. It would be really cool if a Mastodon user could reply to this message to demonstrate. As you get farther afield, it kinda stops working. It's difficult to interact with Peertube from Lemmy, for example. I have commented on a Peertube video from a Pixelfed account though.