Eh I'll bite:

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Lemmy, is in fact, a part of the Fediverse, or as I've recently taken to calling it, the Threadiverse. Lemmy is not a protocol unto itself, but rather another free software server of a fully interconnected Fediverse, made useful by the ActivityPub protocol as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium.

Many computer users interact with a version of ActivityPub every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of ActivityPub which is widely used today is often called Mastodon, or Lemmy, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the ActivityPub system, developed by several independent projects such as Mastodon, Lemmy or Kbin.

There really is a Lemmy, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the Fediverse they use. Lemmy is the implementation: the program in the server that allocates the messages to the other servers that run in the Fediverse. The implementation is an essential part of the network, but isolated by itself; it can only interact in the context of a complete federated network. Lemmy is normally used in combination with either instances of itself, or of similar projects of the Threadiverse such as Kbin: the whole network is basically ActivityPub with Lemmy as a node. All the so-called Lemmy servers are really nodes of the Fediverse!

#Lemmy #Kbin #ActivityPub #Threadiverse #Mastodon #Fediverse

Tech Press don’t understand the #Fediverse, so how can they understand its growth?

To hear them talk, most of them believe that #Mastodon and the Fediverse are one and the the same. Some of them go so far as to call the Fediverse the “Mastodon network”.

Which means that they don’t have a clue about what the Fediverse entails, nor how it has grown.

Case in point: between Jan-May 2023, #Misskey and its forks grew by 300,000 accounts. No one in the Tech Press reported this.

Okay, perhaps they didn’t know because the bulk of growth happened in Japan. But still, this is fairly important to know since Misskey is now responsible for generating the bulk of Fediverse content. Even so, Tech Press think the Fediverse is about Mastodon.

And now, #Lemmy and #Kbin are experiencing lots of growth, with both collectively gaining 100,000 users in a week. This is quite a noteworthy event since the #RedditMigration is part and parcel of dissension on #Reddit – a pretty major Big Social platform.

Does the Tech Media report on this? Nope. But again, that’s because they don’t understand the Fediverse nor what it entails.

Then Meta signal that a new project they’re making, #P92 (a.k.a., #Barcelona), will be joining the Fediverse. There’s even screenshots that show this app interacting with remote Fediverse servers.

But instead of reporting about how this will affect the existing Fediverse, press such as the #BBC say this is an altogether different social network than Mastodon.

That’s right! Tech Press don’t even realize P92 will be joining the Fediverse – a social network that already exists!

Is this all ridiculous? Yes.

But this is why we have to be forthright about what the Fediverse is, what it entails, and why it all matters.

We, on the Fediverse, must be our own Press.

@fediversenews