I’m really getting tired of this obnoxious cycle of explaining the fediverse in kindergarten terms.

Only to get “I don’t get it” as a response and a refusal to elaborate.

“What don’t you get?” “I dunno”

Like at this point I can only assume:

• You weren’t listening.
• You don’t understand anything about this.
• You don’t care, despite the fact you asked.

So for the sake of being as petty and obnoxious, my explanation will be as such:

The fediverse is like spaghetti, and each string of spaghetti is what we call an instance. Each string touches the rest of the strings and can hear the other spaghetti strings talking. Some strings are so mean and rude that other strings decide to put their fingers in their ears and go “LALALALALALA” so they can’t hear or see them.

Now, each string of spaghetti has a name, like this one which is yummyicecream․com. And then there’s this other string cottoncandydelicious․xyz. If you, a spaghetti user like icecream a lot, then you probably will go to yummyicecream․com and make an account. Let’s name this account rockyroad. You are the user @rockyroad and since your spaghetti strand is yummyicecream․com, The user name everyone can see is @rockyroad@yummyicecream.com. Now lets say another user licoricelover is on cottoncandydelicious․xyz then they would be @licoricelover@cottoncandydelicious․xyz.

NOW STOP!! STOP!! WOAH PUT THAT SPAGHETTI STRING THERE DOWN BUCKEROO!! Why are you going to cottoncandydelicious․xyz? You don’t need to do that, you just need to go to the string you made account on, yummyicecream․com and log in to your account, rockyroad. Now you see a post from @licoricelover@cottoncandydelicious.xyz on your feed.

“Wha wha wha, buh buh buh” you say as you drop your fork and start throwing your bowl on the floor. Calm down! It’s okay, this is the FEDIVERSE! Users from one string of spaghetti can talk to users in almost every string of spaghetti in the rest of the bowl. Now as I said earlier, not all strings can hear the other strings of spaghetti, because they decided some other strings of spaghetti are yucky. Like ihatepizza․net. What meanie hates pizza? Well many of the other spaghetti strands decided that particular strand was gross and they didn’t want to show their posts and users on their string of spaghetti.

But lets say, the string your own made an bad decision and decided they didn’t want to show their users posts from users on “peasaregross․org” and they blocked them. But your best friend nerfornothin is on peasaregross․org. Well you can decide to take your account from the yummyicecream․com string of pasta to the cottoncandydelicious․xyz string of pasta. cottoncandydelicious․xyz will let you see posts from users on the peasaregross․org string of pasta.

Mastodon is not all that different from twitter. But mastodon is a bowl of spaghetti, and Twitter is a big pasta shell. You can still block users, you can still make posts and have conversations. But when the fork comes to eat up some of the spaghetti, then some strings of spaghetti might be gone, but the bowl of spaghetti still exists. But if the shell gets eaten by the fork, it’s all gone! 😢