I’ve had a small breakthrough here in a way that helps people understand, especially if they are Reddit users.
Have them pull up r/all, and just scroll a few posts and tell them to imagine that every subreddit is interestingasfuck@reddit.com, pics@reddit.com, gaming@reddit.com, etc
Then explain that Lemmy works the same way, except the content doesn’t all come from one website. It’s part of a network of sites that have agreed to an open protocol so everybody can share information freely.
You can explain the pros and cons if they’re still listening lol. But this seems easier for people to conceptualize, for whatever reason.
I still don’t get it. What’s the point of instances and why are things “federated”. I use mastodon and lemmy - how does “federation” between them changes anything?
The way it was explained to me is that every Lemmy instance is basically a full on “reddit” in that it’s a link aggregator, supports user made communities (ie: subreddits), commenting, etc. You can run Lemmy in private mode and this is exactly how it functions!
On the side of what “federation” is, it’s that all the instances can (theoretically) communicate with each other and share posts and content amongst themselves. So let’s say you make a post on lemmy.world, because my instances “federates” with lemmy.world I am able to see your post and comment on it from my instance. Lemmy.world and my instance periodically update each other with posts our respective users make. Your post lives on Lemmy.world, my comment replying it to lives on mine, and when I post my comment Lemmy.world receives a notice that I’ve done so, which then creates a notice for you that I’ve made the comment blah blah.
The benefit to federation mainly is that it gives a lot of control to users on how the platform functions. Firstly it doesn’t congregate the entire userbase to a single company and/or site. No single instance should remotely be as large as reddit. But because they communicate together, you can approve/deny what instances (as an instance admin) you’re “federating” with. Don’t like the users and moderation policy of another instance? You can “de-federate” with them and block their content from showing up on your instance.
For me, when I learned the basics of the Fediverse it is not that complicated to navigate through. And I happened to learn a lot here.
Actual photo of me trying to explain the fediverse to myself
To be fair it’s extremely confusing and some design aspects of Lemmy seem odd at a surface level. For example, if you join a new instance, you won’t see any comments/posts from a community on anither instance unless you or someone else on that instance searches or subscibes to that community. Confused? Yea, same here.
Is it designed like this to avoid overwhelming small instances? Does it motivate people to join larger older instances instead of newer small ones? Yea, seems like it. Seems odd as shit to me. Maybe I’m dumb and am missing something obvious.
What do you guys think?
For anyone familiar with forums it makes sense to describe it like connected forums.
You sign up for a forum, and most of them have decided to share posts with each other. Because of the vast number of forums someone on your forums needs to look at other forums and add them to your forum so that they show up so that the traffic is limited to what the people on your forum are interested in. Like discovering new forums, but without needing to go to each forum separately.
The reason not all of the forums talk to each other is that the people who run the forum don’t want spammers and assholes cluttering up the place, so they don’t let people link to those forums.
Plus you can always sign up separately for the asshole forums or create your own forums if you want to. If you create your own, you have to maintain it just like any other forum.
As Ling as they don’t focus too much on forum structure it at least covers the connection part with a familiar context.
That’s a problem that will solve itself as instances and communities grow and mature.
I hope so! It motivates people to all join a large old instance like lemmy.world, rather than a smaller one. I hope it is fixed sooner rather than later!
Ironically, lemmy.world isn’t old at all, it’s just big.
It was created at the beginning of June.
