Linux

That would make posts "sublemminal messages"

I think part of why it's confusing is that we don't have defined names for these things. This is so early in a social media "product" life that there isn't a common understanding. You're now part of making those names. It's a bit exciting but mostly confusing while everyone uses their own terms to mean the same fundamental things. Embrace the chaos!

My brain will never not read that as "communications," I'm gonna think everyone here is real serious about HAM radio lol.

yeah, over on hexbear comms is the usual parlance anyway. the wider lemmy population with the new reddit people might change that though

If the official name is magazines, then why not use "mags"?

You can kindof think of the fediverse stuff as being similar to email. You and I both signed up to create an account with kbin.social. This is where our account lives and it will show up in our full username (hover over any username) after the second @. You are @[email protected] and I am @[email protected].

OP created their account with reddthat.com so that is where their account lives.

Unlike email however, we aren't sending messages directly to each other - we are instead sending them to a particular "community" which happens to live on the lemmy.ml server. This is possible since each of these hosts are running software which can communicate in a common manner (this is what ActivityPub defines the rules for). You probably got to this thread from kbin's general "threads" page which is able to list posts from other hosts due to them being federated (can communicate what posts they have to each other).

As for kbin.social being put next to the right of the title for this thread, I'm not sure. I think that might just be part of kbin's UI showing where we are viewing the thread from?

This is a post to linux community (@[email protected]) by user falcoignis (@[email protected]). You're reading it on kbin since it has federated this post. The default "front page" shows federated feed (Threads).