Ttrpg.network, which you joined, is one of many websites that can all communicate together with a common web protocol. This process is called federation and all of those sites together are called the fediverse. So for example, I’m logged into slrpnk.net right now but because both of our sites (called instances) are federated, I can view and comment here, and you’d be able to do the same on any communities hosted on slrpnk.net. You may have heard of mastodon which is more of a twitter alternative but it’s also part of the fediverse, so you should be able to use your account here to view and interact with mastodon content as well if you wish.

It’s a pretty clever system and while there are hiccups here and there, for me it has been a good replacement for Reddit. We just need more users and content to really get things going.

This is the fediverse. It’s a bunch of different instances federating with each other, sharing content but remaining individual. That way, no one instance can pull a reddit and go mad with power.

Imagine hundreds of Reddit sites with hundreds of communities (subreddits) each, that’s the fediverse (federated servers).

They are called federated servers/instances because they are connected, their uses can interact (vote and comment) between each other.

For example, you are @[email protected] commenting on the RPGMemes community on the ttrpg.network, but I’m from the lemmy.world instance commenting on this community. This also means I can have a RPGMemes community back on my instance.

You’re building a town on Mars, while I’m building a town on Jupiter, and we both have telescopes that can look at each other’s towns

One explanation that really helped my grasp this I saw a while back was that this is very similar to how email works: Lots of different domains/providers/websites, but ultimately they are all connected and interact with each other.