Reposting to the threadiverse
Original credit @lucaswerkmeister@wikis.world
Even more original credit: https://xkcd.com/2501/
this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2026
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Fediverse memes
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Memes about the Fediverse.
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General
- Be respectful
- Post on topic
- No bigotry or hate speech
- Memes should not be personal attacks towards other users
- We are not YPTB. If you have a problem with the way an instance or community is run, then take it up over at !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com.
- Addendum: Yes we know that you think ml/hexbear/grad are tankies and or .world are a bunch of liberals but it gets old quickly. Try and come up with new material.
- This is not the place to start flamewars between Lemmy, Mbin and Piefed.
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- !fediverse@lemmy.world
- !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- !lemmydrama@lemmy.world
- !fediverselore@lemmy.ca
- !bestofthefediverse@lemmy.ca
- !fedigrow@lemmy.zip
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Basically like e-mail, if that helps.
You sign up on Protonmail, your buddy signs up on GMail. You can send mail to yourbuddy@gmail.com from youremail@protonmail.com. Proton Mail sees the address and sends the message over to GMail/Google. Despite there being 100s or 1000s of EMail services they all work together to form a singular service we call "email".
That's a lot of how it works basically. I'd add on community subscriptions to make it more complete. For example a user on piefed.social subscribes to !asklemmy@lemmy.ml. Once the first piefed.social user subscribes, lemmy.ml will begin sending piefed.social a message every time something happens on !asklemmy@lemmy.ml. So let's say a lemmy.world user upvotes a comment in !asklemmy@lemmy.ml. lemmy.world sends that message to lemmy.ml, the host of the community. lemmy.ml then sends a message about the upvote to all servers with someone subscribed to the community, including piefed.social. In this way all servers show the same thing.
But yeah, the important part is that it works. How it works isn't always something the end user needs to know.
I see the email analogy all the time but I don't think it's the best one.
The fediverse is literally like Usenet or IRC. You log into a server and the servers talk to each other and sync messages behind the scenes.
It's not a new concept. In fact it's going back to the olden way of doing things.
Most people out there don't know how IRC and the Usenet work. So even if this analogy is more accurate, it's less useful.
In the meantime most people on the internet use email.