If you're new here, you may be wondering what the Fediverse is.
The Fediverse is a collection of alternative social networks which share a common technical standard called ActivityPub.
The importance of this is that it lets people on one network interact with people on another network. For example, if you're on Mastodon you can follow and interact with people on PixelFed and vice versa.
This is a very powerful concept in social media, and something you cannot do on commercial centralised networks like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.
The reason this is possible is because the Fediverse uses co-operative free open standards instead of trying to trap people in "walled gardens".
This collaboration means that whenever one Fediverse network gets more users, it also increases the audience for all the other Fediverse networks too.
This allows tiny community-based servers run by volunteers to reach millions of people around the world. It's giving us back control.
Each network on the Fediverse is made up of lots of independent servers, called "instances".
You can see all the latest public posts and boosts on your home instance by clicking "Local" at the side of the screen. It can be a good place to find new people to follow.
However, on larger instances this Local feed may be an unreadable firehose of posts that scrolls far too quickly. This is why a lot of people prefer being on smaller instances that match their interests.
The "Federated" feed at the side of the screen shows all the public posts by all the accounts that people on your home instance follow, including accounts on other instances.
This is a lot, even on relatively small instances, and in most cases it ends up being pretty much unreadably fast and random.
You probably won't want to use this feed to be honest. I'm only posting this explanation in case you were wondering what this feed is 😆
(I am guessing it is a left-over from the days when the Fediverse was much smaller and there were fewer posts overall?)
@trinsec
Great point!