You’re so over X/Twitter and can’t quite seem to entirely leave. You’ve got a few friends on Threads and a few on Bluesky. You’re pretty sure you also have accounts on at least five other social media networks and have forgotten most of them. And once in a while you hear the words “fediverse” and have a friend on something called Mastodon, but you don’t know where to start. Let me help!“Fediverse” is a portmanteau of “federation” and “universe.” In this context, “federation” means that individual parts of the social network are separate, but they can talk to each other. Threads has even said that they intend to integrate with the fediverse, and in that feature doc, they explain pretty well what that means.
Source: Getting Started With Mastodon and the Fediverse – GeekMom
