1. Quick Overview - What is the Fediverse?
  2. Quick Overview - What is the Threadiverse?
  3. Quick Overview - Communities
  4. Community Building
    4.1. Community Reach
    4.2. Sustainable Posting
    4.3. Getting Interactions/Comments
    4.4. Helpful Knowledge

1. Quick Overview - What is the Fediverse?
Fediverse: a collection of social networking services that communicate with each other using a common protocol (ActivityPub).

  • Relative Example (email): users of one email service such as Gmail can still send emails to users of another service such as Outlook. Likewise users on one instance of the Fediverse may still view content and interact with users on any other instance in the Fediverse.

Decentralized Structure: allows any individual or organization to host a Fediverse software using their own servers.

  • There is no form of centralized governance or moderation.

Instances: a server that runs a Fediverse software.

  • Every instance is independent, and can set its own rules and expectations.
  • Each Instance is run by an administrator/admin or a set of admins.

De-federation: Generally considered an option of last resort, where a select instance is removed from an instance’s allowed interaction list. Users can no longer see or interact with users or communities of the select instance. Visualization of Threadiverse Defederation.

Text: Fediverse Wikipedia Entry
Text (w/ additional links): Diving into the Fediverse
Video (4min): The Fediverse - Explained by Common Craft
Video (4min): Introducing the Fediverse: a New Era of Social Media

2. Quick Overview - What is the Threadiverse?
Threadiverse: a collection of social news aggregation software that federate with one another.

  • Main Threadiverse software: Lemmy, Piefed, Mbin
  • Pylova: Piefed soft-fork with additional features
  • Catodon: “A Fediverse platform that combines the best of Mastodon, Misskey and Lemmy”

Text (110 categories): Differences between Threadiverse software (Lemmy vs Mbin vs Piefed)

3. Quick Overview - Communities
Community: user-created forums for discussion where users submit relevant posts with links, text, or pictures.

  • Each software may call its communities something different (Lemmy: sub-lemmy, Piefed: sub-pie, Mbin: magazine).
  • Communities are local to each instance, however users may subscribe to communities, create posts and leave comments across instances.
  • Each community is controlled by a moderator or a set of moderators. Admin have higher authority on the instance than moderators (can add and remove moderators).

4. Community Building
Community building is often difficult, which is why !fedigrow@lemmy.zip built this wiki to help.

4.1. Community Reach
Due to storage limitations, instances generally only retrieve posts and comments for communities that one of their users has subscribed to. This can severely limit the potential reach of your community.

  • !fedigrow@lemmy.zip sidebar has some links to help grow your community and increase post reach/federation (signed up instances will have a bot follow your community).
  • Cross-posts to a larger community, on another instance. I’d suggest spreading this out to not appear spammy (Piefed has grouped cross-posts, Lemmy and Mbin do not).

4.2. Sustainable Posting
Creating posts can often be difficult, time consuming, and if a post you spent a large amount of effort on doesn’t get a significant response, it can be demoralizing. One step to minimize that potential demoralization is posting sustainably.

  • If you have a dozen post-worthy images along the same theme, they don’t need to all be uploaded to Imgur or PixelFed, then collected in to a single post. Instead, they can be dribbled in to twelve different posts over time.
  • Utilizing past Reddit posts and their most useful user comments along with the image itself. Description, Example.

4.3. Getting Interactions/Comments
Depending on the person, the most rewarding part of posting can be the interaction with commenters.

  • Loads of people love to offer their opinions or jump in to correct or answer something, and those make for popular posts, too. Suggestion of types of posts: opinion requests, question-answer.
  • Post regularly (weekly or a few times a week) with cross-posts to a larger community to see if it gains the traction you are looking for. I’d suggest only 1 cross-post per post, so it doesn’t come across as spammy.

4.4. Helpful Knowledge
Linking to a community can be done a few ways, examples:

  • !fedigrow@lemmy.zip, (!) allows users to view the selective community from their home instance.
  • https://lemmy.zip/c/fedigrow, (web address) will have users view the selective community from that community’s home instance.
  • https://piefed.zip/c/fedigrow@lemmy.zip, (web address with @instance) will have users view from your home instance.

Know your people:

Let us know if we should add or change anything :)

Special thanks to users who helped contribute their thoughts to this wiki: stuartml@piefed.social, JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social, Blaze@lemmy.zip, Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com, GreatWhiteBuffalo41@slrpnk.net, ImmortalColeSlaw@lemmy.today, vicinus@piefed.zip

Link to the same text in the actual Wiki

Edit: Some light wording changes.

Edit 2: Light formatting.