Hello, I’m sorry in advance if this is a noob question. I am new to Lemmy and the Fediverse.

As far as I understand, Lemmy is part of the Fediverse, but if I search for “Lemmy” here it will not find it. It seems to be full of instances from Mastodon.

Can someone help me understand why Lemmy isn’t there? Thank you!

  • PriorProject@lemmy.world
    3·
    1 year ago

    There’s no official fediverse anything, the fediverse is an unorganized collection of:

    • Applications that share a somewhat compatible protocol by which they transfer information (ActivityPub). Mastodon, Lemmy, Friendica are all examples of Fediverse applications that have varying abilities to interoperate with each other. These applications are often created by organized projects that have their own websites. Like there is a Mastodon project with an official website at https://joinmastodon.org/ and there is a Lemmy project with an official website at https://join-lemmy.org/.
    • Instances of one of these applications that are fully compatible with other instances of the same application. So you can think of all the lemmy instances as a Lemmyverse where users on one Lemmy instance can talk to users on a different Lemmy instance through federation. Instances pretty much always have websites like mastodon.social and lemmy.ml.
    • Individuals using accounts on those instances. User accounts often have a page on their instance, like mine is https://lemmy.world/u/PriorProject.

    The fediverse itself, though, has no official website. It’s the emergent collection of all of the above. There are websites that use the word “fediverse” in their name, but those sites are ABOUT the fediverse, or they might be PART OF the fediverse… but no one site IS the fediverse or can represent it or be the official home of it. It similar to the internet. There happens to be a website at https://www.internet.com/. But it’s obviously not like… the internet… or the official website of the internet. There is no official website of the internet, that’s just a random website that happens to be ON the internet. The fediverse works the same way, it’s an abstract idea used to describe a loosely affiliated collection of things that try to interoperate with each other in a variety of complicated ways.