This is just a reiteration of a comment I left on an earlier, probably more useful article, but I’m posting as its own article for visibility. I hope it can help make sense of the fediverse to at least a few more of my fellow migrants.

Basically, rather than having one Reddit with a bunch of subreddits, you have a bunch of Reddits each with their own set of subreddits. Each Reddit operates with its own admin, features, UX, etc. so you just join any Reddit that feels good to you.

Let’s say you make your account on “Reddit.one” because not only do they have killer memes, they also have a dark mode!

What makes the fediverse so great is that you don’t have to worry that “Reddit.two” actually has a far more active r/gaming community than Reddit.one, or that “Reddit.three” has the only r/catsatwork subreddit on the fediverse, because you can actually just subscribe to those subreddits from Reddit.one anyway. Now you can have r/memes as well as r/gaming@reddit.two and r/catsatwork@reddit.three all in your feed at Reddit.one with dark mode on!
Some reddits even let you follow your favorite twitter personalities as well!

It would be like being able subscribe directly to 4chan’s /b/ and then follow elon musk’s Twitter account directly from Reddit and vice versa. I don’t know why you would actually want to do those terrible things, but you’d have the freedom to do it at least.

Now imagine if Reddit.one’s administrator goes all u/spez on everybody and you just can’t even anymore. You can easily jump ship over to Reddit.two, or any other Reddit you prefer, and resub to all your favorite subreddits again. it would be like you never left.

Hope this helps. Feel free to set me straight on some points or just post your own explanation in the comments.

TLDR: Lots of different Reddits. You join the Reddit you like, but you can subscribe to any of the other Reddits’ subreddits as well!

  • olrik@kbin.social
    0·
    1 year ago

    Thanks for the explanation, this was useful but I still can’t grasp how to see posts or articles from other instances in the fediverse. Is it through tags? How exactly similar content created on lemmy.world for example can appear on a magazine devoted to the same topic over here?

    • Deref@kbin.social
      0·
      1 year ago

      It doesn’t appear automatically on related magazines (would be a nice feature though) but you can link magazines from other instances like this: /m/lemmyworld@lemmy.world. You can subscribe to them and see them in /m/all like they’re part of Kbin.

      • olrik@kbin.social
        0·
        1 year ago

        Thanks, but I was asking as a creator of a magazine, I would like it to be populated by posts from other instances who already have a community or magazine relevant to the one I created here. How do I do that?

        • Eggyhead@kbin.socialOP
          0·
          1 year ago

          I’ve only been aware of being able to subscribe to the magazines from other instances, not pulling articles posted in magazines from various other instances into a single local magazine. I really like that idea though.

            • SamurottX@kbin.social
              2·
              1 year ago

              A magazine on kbin is roughly equivalent to a community on lemmy.world, so I’m 90% sure that’s not possible. You as a user subscribe to a magazine/community, regardless of which instance it is on. You’re essentially asking how to automatically re-post from one community to another, right? That can turn into stealing other’s content really quickly so not sure if that’s the best solution.

              A possible solution to your situation would be creating multi-communities a la Reddit where you can view multiple communities at the same time. So while it wouldn’t be in your community, it’d still be visible for you to interact with and the actual location doesn’t matter.