Summary:

Mastodon — all the privacy

Twitter — pretty bad privacy

Threads — we know everything about you

What’s an instance?

An instance is a specific website running Lemmy or another piece of federated software. For example, lemmy.world and lemmy.ml are two distinct instances

What’s a community?

A community is the “sub-reddit” of Lemmy. Kbin uses the word “magazines”, but these are the same thing.

What are federations?

A federation is a group of instances sharing posts and activity data with each other so that it can be displayed to their respective end users. For example, I can post to a community on lemmy.world and then you will be able to see my post when you are browsing feddit.de.

Whats the difference between all these?

Let me know if you have additional questions based on my answers above.

What’s mastodon?

Mastodon is a piece of federated software that is built to look and feel like Twitter, similar to how Lemmy is built to look and feel like Reddit.

What’s Kbin?

Kbin.social is a website you can use to browse posts from the Fediverse. From what I understand, it is similar to Reddit as well.

What’s ActivityPub?

ActivityPub is the underlying protocol that Lemmy, Mastodon, and other pieces of federated software use to communicate with each other. This is how they notify each other of new posts, comments, upvotes, etc so they can stay in sync with each other.

A combo of both. I group all my media apps like Sonarr, Radarr, SABnzbd, etc together in one compose since I consider each of them to be a part of the same “machine”, but most of my apps have their own compose.

I have an HP DL380 Gen8 and then a PC I bought from the local university and use as a server.

My DL380 runs ESXi. My PC runs Ubuntu on bare metal.

All of my apps are either fully VM-based (Home Assistant OS) or run in containers. Containers are far easier to build, upgrade, and migrate, and also make file management a lot easier.

I use Docker Compose. No Swarm or Kubernetes at this point.

Hopefully this is at least a good start! Let me know if you have any questions.