Fediverse

Short for “federated universe”. In the first decades of the Internet, it was decentralized. In the 00’s the Web became increasingly commercialized and centralized, largely thanks to social media websites. Fediverse users and services seek to combine the social elements of the modern Web with the dencentralization of the old days.

Threadiverse

This is the subset of the fediverse which uses platforms similar to webforums or sites like Reddit and Digg. These services host threaded discussions in various communities. The two main services in the threadiverse are Lemmy and KBin.

Lemmy and KBin

Properly speaking, these refer to the entirety of their respective projects; the codebase, all instances, and userbases. To avoid ambiguity, refer to an instance by its entire URL (kbin.social, lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, etc.)

instance

Fediverse projects have multiple independent installations on different servers accessible at different URLs. These instances federate with one another, allowing users to read and post to other instances.

home instance

The instance on which a user has registered an account. Users posting to a community on their home instance will simply have their username displayed, users posting from another instance will have their username followed by the URL of that instance.

federation and defederation

Federation refers to the connections between instances that allow users to read and post to other instances. Federation also occurs between projects such that Lemmy users can post to KBin and vice versa. Mastodon users can also post to Lemmy and KBin. Some instances choose to defederate from others. If Instance A defederates from Instance B, users of B will still be able to view posts from A, and even can post comments on its threads, but these comments and anything else posted by users of B will not be seen by those of A.

community or magazine

Communities and magazines are topical forums on an instance, comparable to subreddits. “Magazine” is the KBin-specific term.

devs, admins, and mods

Devs maintain the Lemmy and KBin projects. Admins maintain an entire instance and usually one or more also maintain its server. Mods maintain communities. Some instance admins may mod most or all of their instance’s communities, others may take a more hands-off approach. Devs maintain their own instances: lemmy.ml and kbin.social .

Mastodon

One of the oldest and most widely-used fediverse projects. It is a microblogging service similar to Twitter.