Hey! I know things can be a bit confusing if you're just coming from Reddit, so allow me to do my best explaining. Welcome to the Fediverse (federated universe), a decentralized social media community run by people, not companies.
A good analogy for the Fediverse is moving. If you're moving to a new town, you want to pick a neighborhood to move to. If you have pets, you'd probably want to move to a pet-friendly neighborhood. If you're religious, you probably want to move to a neighborhood with a church.
Each website that makes up the Fediverse (also known as an "instance") is like its own neighborhood, and they each have their own pros and cons depending on what you're looking for.
Going back to the analogy, no matter what neighborhood you move to, you'll be able to visit other neighborhoods, meet people there, and use their businesses and services. The same goes for instances on the Fediverse! No matter what instance you sign up to, you can interact with accounts on other instances, without having to have an account on every instance.
Of course, instances can choose to cut others off if they're acting unruly, but for the most part everything's interconnected! So all you have to do is pick a place to sign up, search for this community on your "home instance", and you're golden!
You might have a different experience depending on where you sign up. There's tons of Fediverse-compatible software and tons of instances, so feel free to shop around and find one that works best for you!
If you want an easy place to sign up, the following instances allow you to log in with existing accounts (Google, etc.)
(The above list was last updated: Feb 03 2026)
The Fediverse Observer provides a comprehensive list of instances, with statistics, uptime, software filtering, country filtering, and much more! (if that's your thing)
Please don't hesitate to reach out if you have any problems or questions, we're here to help!
Thanks! :)
-GroupNebula563