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What is the Fediverse?
In the info tag of many of these platforms you probably noticed I mentioned the Fediverse. It's still a new concept, so I thought I'd include an overview here, both explained by me in text, and a video from someone else that was helpful to me when I was learning about it.
Text Explainer
The Fediverse is a collection of independent social platforms, including but not limited to PeerTube, Mastodon, Pixelfed, and Loops. These services all speak the same language (a protocol called ActivityPub), so they can talk to one another. Instead of one company owning the whole thing, anyone can run their own server. I run my PeerTube and Loops servers out of my garage and someone else hosts my Mastodon and Pixelfed accounts.
My favorite analogy for how the fediverse works is email. Emails are hosted by a bunch of different providers, like Google, ProtonMail, Yahoo Mail, etc. All of these email providers use a shared protocol, so you can email someone on Yahoo mail from a Gmail address. The fediverse is just like this, you can view, like, and interact with posts from Mastodon on Pixelfed and vis-versa. Pixelfed is an images only platform, so you just won't see non-photo posts from other platforms while using it - it's up to the developer of the paltform to decide what types of posts their platform will see. Just like with, for example, Google and Yahoo mail, the interfaces differ, but the information is the same. Anyone can develop a port into the fediverse, and they all work roughly the same under the hood, with signifigant differences to the stuff you interact with.