Hello world, I have been using (and am enjoying using) mastodon for a couple of days now but remain a little confused by some things. Many things, but... WELL how does other things in the fediverse like interact? I understand that different servers can passively "bleed" into each other through interaction, but that's just for mastodon. I've seen people advertise for things like Firefish or Calckey but what's the purpose of those? Isn't mastodon the same?
@clueless_capybara I'm sure someone else can explain it better, but my understanding is that Mastodon and non-Mastodon servers can interact in much the same way that different Mastodon servers interact. If you follow an account on a non-Mastodon service (like Pixelfed or Bookwyrm or Peertube), then those posts will show up in your Mastodon feed kind of as if they were toots: you'll see the post author, the time, the text of the post, and any associated content (images or video or whatever) as links.
I'd suggest following an account on another service to see how it works!
You can also compare it with email. Users can communicate with each other regardless of using different email services, due to a common ground. In the case of Mastodon and several other fediverse platforms, said common ground is a networking protocol called ActivityPub. Furthermore, administrators of specific instances/servers of a platform can enable/disable interconnection with other instances in the same platform.
The best I've come up with is to analogize #fediverse to the web with cell phones and desktop computers:
Each individual program, like #mastodon and peertube and whatever else, all display the same fediverse in different ways that are optimized for their particular usages.
Think of your cell phone and your desktop computer displaying the same web but in ways that can look completely different because the interface through your phone and through your computer really need very different touches.
It's all the same fediverse, just with different interfaces optimized for microblogging or video sharing.
(I hope this makes sense, I feel like I'm having trouble with wording today :) )
@volkris @robertoqs @diazona @clueless_capybara Great explanation if I can understand it. 😂