Hihi! I'm Lety! I do all sorts of stuff, and this is my self-hosted Mastodon server! This entire site is just for my ramblings, so unfortunately you won't be able to make an account here...
Er, then how do I follow you?If you don't have one already, go make an account on any ActivityPub-powered platform. I suggest
Mastodon Social!
Then search for and
follow my main account (@lety@doesstuff.social). Or if you're only interested in seeing my videos, you can just
follow my PeerTube channel (@letydoesstuff_channel@peertube.doesstuff.social).
You'll be missing out though, cause I only post shitty jokes and dumb photos onto Fedi from my main, and I retoot all my PeerTube videos there anyways.
Fedi? ActivityPub? Mastodon? Heck do these words mean???Fedi is short for the Fediverse, which is what some people unofficially call the entire community of ActivityPub-powered platforms that can talk to each other.
ActivityPub is, as Mastodon defines it...
ActivityPub is like the language Mastodon speaks with other social networks.
It lets you connect and interact with people not just on Mastodon, but across different social apps too.
In slightly more complex terms, ActivityPub is kinda like email in that they're both communication protocols. Only instead of inboxes sending and receiving messages,
ActivityPub is a protocol that allows websites to send and receive social media posts from one another.
Any platform can use the ActivityPub protocol, in the same way that Gmail and iCloud both use the email protocol. We don't send "gmails" or "iclouds"-- we all just send "emails".
A key difference here is that there's no unified branding for ActivityPub, at least none that everyone agrees on. What Twitter called "tweets" and "retweets", the Mastodon software officially calls "posts" and "boosts", though you'll see a lot of people say "toots" and "retoots" instead. You know, like the sound elephants make!
This changes from platform to platform.
Threads uses "posts/comments" and "reposts" while
Misskey uses "notes" and "renotes". It's kinda wonky, but you get used to it the same way people got used to juggling "stories", "snaps", and "tiktoks".
And then Mastodon is a couple of things.
Mastodon is the company that makes Mastodon, the social network software, which anyone can use to run their own version of Mastodon, the platform. They even run their own at
Mastodon Social.
Mastodon is powered by ActivityPub, which means anyone with a Mastodon account can connect to accounts on other ActivityPub platforms, such as
PeerTube,
WordPress, and soon, maybe even
Tumblr!