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@SimplyJennifer@zirk.us

As a bit of a followup on the groups conversation earlier, I thought I'd add a bit more to the story now that I'm not on my phone :)

The fediverse has a few different group implementations.

Friendica's came first, and is built in to the friendica platform. And basically, it boosts any post that tags the account, so if you follow the account, you will see all of its boosts in your timeline. It is designed to overcome limitations of federation, and to help you avoid having to follow a whole heap of accounts you otherwise wouldn't follow, just to see their content on a particular topic.

Then gup.pe came along. It's a platform in and of itself, not part of Friendica or Mastodon. It only does groups, and works in exactly the same way that Friendica groups do.

And then there is chirp.social. It's the same concept as gup.pe, but unlike gup.pe groups, chirp.social groups are owned and moderated.

And finally, there is lemmy!

Lemmy is group based, but works fundamentally differently to the above groups. Lemmy is basically a federated equivalent of reddit. And because of the federation, you can follow lemmy communities from Mastodon etc, and even participate in them. But, all of that conversation ends up on a lemmy instance, in a lemmy community, where it can be viewed, just like a conversation in a reddit subreddit can be.

What all of the above have in common though is a "group actor", which is basically a federated activitypub account that you can follow from whatever fediverse platform you use. Follow the account, posts appear in your timelines, lists and searches! :)