Most of the time you're talking about platforms that share the ActivityPub protocol (shortened to AP), everything that uses AP can talk to everything else that uses AP (ie. Mastodon, Lemmy, Friendica, Threads).
Bluesky is starting up their own protocol, AT (I forget what it's short for). So it can't talk to anything that's AP and vice versa, at least not without some sort of translation layer inbetween.
Right now the Bluesky addon is a "puppet" addon, meaning it just mirrors and controls a separate Bluesky account... Friendica plans to incorporate AT support more directly which would remove that step. Also, there's things like bridgeyfed that are making bridges. A bridge sits on two networks and translates calls between two protocols (ie. an AP server asks it for posts from an AT user, it just sees the bridge as an instance with that user on it)
The biggest reason to have multiple accounts is just for different experiences. Ie. Friendica (Facebook/Myspace style) is very different from say Pixelfed (Instagram style experience) and Lemmy (Reddit style experience)
@shiri thanks so much for the detailed explanation.
Yes, read about the AP / AT protocols before and that there is some poor guy under fire now for trying to bridge the two, though it’s probably inevitable either way. (BridgyFed?)
Basically just curious to see the smaller abilities and limitations between all the Fediverse tools out there.
Have written a post just now with a table. Just a very basic test, but after many hours of back and forth between the different tools, a pattern emerged.
Using different tools for different uses makes sense, like photos or videos or threads, music, etc.
Though very little posting anywhere is done from this side. Just want to be able to follow, like and comment.
So thought maybe there is something like that, and Friendica / Mastodon and others work fine for that with posts and media.
It’s the aggregators that become an issue when following from a different tool.