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let's say that we have two people. one's an instagram user, the other one likes twitter.

they post a lot for their audiences there! the instagram user loves sharing their photos with their followers there, and the twitter user always has something to say for theirs.

now let's say that they become aware of each other. maybe they met at a party, maybe they saw the other's profile in a screenshot, et cetera. neat! maybe they should follow each other.

EXCEPT. they can't really do that. instagram is instagram, twitter is twitter. they have nothing in common, if person A wanted to follow person B then they'd have to make a new account just to follow a single person! if only there was a way to connect these two...

that's where the fediverse comes in! it basically details a commonly agreed upon way for both sites to talk to each other, in this case ActivityPub. if you have an account on one site like this, you can follow someone on another just like that!

the way it works, boiled down to its basics, is simple: you post like you would on any other site...

...and the site that you're registered on automatically beams it out to every other site that it knows about! neat.

and, well, that's the gist of it really! bigger sites can talk to smaller sites and smaller sites get posts from bigger sites. think of it as one massive social network of social networks that anyone can be a part of. there are caveats, but what we have now is really impressive!

what this means, essentially, is that if you have a mastodon account, you can follow someone on pixelfed just like that, and start getting their posts without ever having to switch accounts. it's super cool, even if it might need more time in the oven.

if you have any questions or comments feel free to let me know! you might need to follow @ap.brid.gy first if you're on bluesky so that I can see you (it's complicated) but I'm hoping that this clears up at least a little of the confusion around this entire thing

@eblu @ap.brid.gy@bsky.app here is one thing I still don’t understand. Let’s say I’m using Mastodon and now I want to follow someone on Pixelfed. If I can follow them directly from my Mastodon account and I can see their posts in my Mastodon timeline, then does it mean that Pixelfed is just another Mastodon instance?

@botolo86 Technically! It's better to say that Pixelfed is compatible with Mastodon. Pixelfed instances are still Pixelfed instances, they just send posts to and receive posts from other websites in the same way as Mastodon does. It's also why you might see something from Sharkey or Akkoma or even Peertube or Lemmy on here, for example. Different software but they speak the same language.

Bluesky in particular is excluded from this because they chose to build out their own standard after determining that the one that Mastodon uses didn't fit the vision that they have for it. This is why you can't directly talk to anyone on Bluesky, and why anyone on Bluesky can't talk directly to you here.

@eblu got it but in practice, if my Mastodon username can get Pixelfed posts by User X and I can comment on those, as well as he can comment on my Mastodon posts, why should I ever create a Pixelfed account?

@botolo86 that's the point! you don't have to. there might be a bit of discontinuity because pixelfed only accepts posts with photos attached, but for the most part your posts will show up there.

now, there is a case where you might want to guarantee that your post shows up exactly how you want it to, or you might want to take advantage of a feature that only pixelfed has. that's when you make another account for it