I’m mad at Reddit so I’m going to create my own reddit that works the exact same way. You can post, make subreddits, like and comment, everything. The only problem is I only have a userbase of 10 people. There’s kind of a catch 22 with maintaining a userbase on social media: if I don’t have enough users, no one will want to join, so I’ll have even fewer users.

One thing that can help is the fact that you have your own separate reddit clone that also has 10 users. We can work together and make our websites compatible with each other and speak the same language. Now my users can see your subreddits and posts and interact with your users like there’s nothing separating them. A community emerges of 20 people that transcends the boundaries of the individual websites.

Now say we take our code, call it Lemmy, and post it for free on the internet so anyone can copy it and make their own reddit clone to add to the network. These are all separate websites, called instances, but since they speak the same language (ActivityPub), all the users can interact with each other.