Joke’s on them. I just put games in my library and never install them.

All software BlueSky uses is open source and self-hostable and already a bunch of different implementations have started to pop up independently.

Oh that’s cool. So where can I sign up to interact with BlueSky users if I don’t want to sign up to BlueSky?

Interesting, that never occurred to me. I said that about the wheelhouse because I have a Mastodon account I read from time to time and I can’t recall ever seeing any Lemmy content show in my feed. I never did Twitter though so I’m kind of lost, it might be I just don’t know what I’m doing. I followed like 40 hashtags but I still don’t get a huge amount of content.

Not a stupid question at all. Loosely, I think, it’s any site that trades information using the ActivityPub protocol. Because they use the same underlying protocol, they can easily trade content/posts with each other and yes, Lemmy is part of the Fediverse for that reason.

This is also why you can see posts from lemmy.ca or piefed.social or whatever.domain users while browsing lemmy.world - anyone who sets up a site with the Lemmy software can participate in the network and trade posts with all the others - these are individually called instances. These sites can decide that they don’t want to trade posts with certain other sites (ie: trolls set up a farm on their own instance) and exclude them from their users being able to see them, this is called defederation.

In theory, a Mastodon instance could see content from a Lemmy instance (and Pixelfed and Loops and so on) as they all use the same underlying protocol to trade information, but in practice, it seems that sites basically stick to trading with other sites in their wheelhouse.

BlueSky also started with ActivityPub but I believe they did something to their software to make it proprietary.

The usefulness of all this is: no member site can get a monopoly on content. The largest Lemmy site is lemmy.world and I have an account on there. I switched to dbzer0 because I disagreed with some of the actions taken by lemmy.world (they defederated from some content that I wanted to see) so I came over here and now I can see that content.

Anyway, that’s my understanding of it.