The Fediverse is like a country, and an instance is like a town connected to the other towns in that country. You’re free to travel, visit, and interact with people in all the other towns that have their roads connected.
Each town has its own rules and culture, but they generally get along with all the other towns in the country. You can even choose to build your own town with your own rules and have a road connected to the rest.
On the other hand places like Facebook or Twitter are like huge, walled cities where you can only interact with people inside that city. They also claim the rights to all of your data to sell off.
Cool, kinda makes sense. Still don’t understand what the federated / defederated stuff that was all the talk yesterday. But I got a slightly more nuanced understanding. Thanks homie
An instance is literally just someone’s computer with the software running. All your stuff lives on someone’s computer. Different computers can talk to one another to allow people who put their stuff on those computers to see each other’s stuff (federate) or they decide not to, like cutting off a computer with a lot of batshit insane people (defederate). They’re running the same software so the language is the same. Like your stuff lives on lemmy.today, I don’t know where and who owns that computer, while my stuff lives on sopuli.xyz, which is a computer that is owned by some random Finn, but those computers talk to one another, so we get to talk to one another.
A server isn’t necessarily all that meaningfully different from Joe’s laptop, it’s just that Joe’s laptop isn’t exactly practical for running big things. My website runs on a real server, but it doesn’t really act much different from a computer I have in my living room when I remotely log into it, I can access all the same files, run all the same software if I wanted to.
Federated is just jargon for “the posts and comments from here will display over there too because my computer knows yours exists and runs the same software and the software does the legwork of meshing all of that shit together with mine”
I still don’t fully understand what Fediverse and instance means.
The Fediverse is like a country, and an instance is like a town connected to the other towns in that country. You’re free to travel, visit, and interact with people in all the other towns that have their roads connected.
Each town has its own rules and culture, but they generally get along with all the other towns in the country. You can even choose to build your own town with your own rules and have a road connected to the rest.
On the other hand places like Facebook or Twitter are like huge, walled cities where you can only interact with people inside that city. They also claim the rights to all of your data to sell off.
I love great analogies.
I might even go one level up. The Fedeverse is like a network of connected countries like the EU.
Platforms like Reddit or Twitter are isolated countries like North Korea.
I’m glad I found my way out.
You’re right. Bringing it up to the country level instead of towns probably fits better.
Nice analogy, I might repost this to [email protected]
Fediverse = universe of federated instances.
Federation = many entities connected together and interoperating, etc
Instance: every individual Lemmy site with its own domain name runs an instance (a running copy of the software) on its server.
Those servers are talking to each other so users on one can talk to users on another server. That’s federation.
Cool, kinda makes sense. Still don’t understand what the federated / defederated stuff that was all the talk yesterday. But I got a slightly more nuanced understanding. Thanks homie
An instance is literally just someone’s computer with the software running. All your stuff lives on someone’s computer. Different computers can talk to one another to allow people who put their stuff on those computers to see each other’s stuff (federate) or they decide not to, like cutting off a computer with a lot of batshit insane people (defederate). They’re running the same software so the language is the same. Like your stuff lives on lemmy.today, I don’t know where and who owns that computer, while my stuff lives on sopuli.xyz, which is a computer that is owned by some random Finn, but those computers talk to one another, so we get to talk to one another.
You mean like a server? I hope it’s not just Joe blows laptop with a cracked screen and bulging battery.
So federated is basically “you’re allowed to post shit” within this list of other server?
If that’s it then thank you, it makes a lot more sense now.
A server isn’t necessarily all that meaningfully different from Joe’s laptop, it’s just that Joe’s laptop isn’t exactly practical for running big things. My website runs on a real server, but it doesn’t really act much different from a computer I have in my living room when I remotely log into it, I can access all the same files, run all the same software if I wanted to.
Federated is just jargon for “the posts and comments from here will display over there too because my computer knows yours exists and runs the same software and the software does the legwork of meshing all of that shit together with mine”
Yes, “instance” is the word used on Lemmy for what is usually called “server” elsewhere.