What is an instance? what is a federation? what is a server? can someone please describe in simple terms how this all runs and how we as users navigate it?
Welcome to Lemmy/the Fediverse! It’s 95% Reddit ant 5% email.
What is a server?
A server is just a computer that runs software that is always standing ready to do something for a user. For the purposes of our discussion, a server is the computer that runs an instance of Lemmy.
Let’s start with something we’re probably all familiar with: Reddit. The way Reddit works is, it’s a big company that owns (or rents) a bunch of servers. All of the data anyone has ever posted to Reddit, plus the software that makes Reddit go, is stored on these servers. Users open an account with Reddit, and they’re given access to these servers. Reddit controls ALL of them so it doesn’t matter much exactly which server you attach to. They might all be in one location, they might be scattered all over the world, it’s fairly transparent to users. The various websites or apps we (used to) use to connect to Reddit were simply front-ends which allowed us to access the server.
Lemmy is software that does a lot of what Reddit does. It’s software you run on your server which keeps track of users, communities, posts and comments. Unlike Reddit, which keeps its “back end” software a closely guarded secret, Lemmy is open source. Anyone can read the source code or run it on their own server.
What is an instance?
When someone runs a copy of Lemmy on their own server, that is an “instance.” Each Lemmy instance is its own little Reddit. You can sign up for an account on an instance, and the experience is very much like Reddit; “subreddits” are called “communities” here. The owner of the server is the admin, individual members can make posts to communities, comment on those posts, create new communities and moderate them…it’s its own little Reddit. lemmy.world is its own little reddit, sh.itjust.works is its own little reddit. Well what good does a bunch of little Reddits do?
What is a federation?
A federation is a group of independent organizations that work together as a group. Think of the United States of America: 50 states that each have their own constitutions, codes of law, legislatures, executives, courts etc. which are united under one common Federal government. Lemmy works this way; each instance is a member of the Fediverse, a federation of servers that run software which uses the ActivityPub protocol–a standardized way for servers to transfer various kinds of social media data between them.
Every instance of Lemmy is its own website, run on its own hardware, with its own communities, members, admins and such. Each instance will have its own house rules; some allow political discussions, some don’t. Some allow pornography, some don’t. Some restrict community topics to a broad field, like music or video games. Some are general purpose instances. It’s up to the admin of each instance. But, each instance is able to communicate with all of the others, so having an account on one instance allows you to communicate with all the others–with some caveats I’ll talk about later.
In fact, the ActivityPub protocol is used by other services besides Lemmy–another similar service is called Kbin, which is functionally similar but the software is written by different people. Lemmy instances can communicate with Kbin instances and vice versa.
So where every instance is its own little Reddit, all of the instances kinda voltron together to make one big Mega Reddit.
(continued from above because of character limits)
ActivityPub is used for more than just Reddit-likes. Mastodon has a similar micro-blogging format to Twitter, and PeerTube is similar in function to Youtube. There are alternatives to Facebook and I believe Snapchat as well.
You can kind of think of it like email–there is no central email.inc that all emails go through; gmail and protonmail and icloud and compuserve and hotmail and whatnot are all different servers that are capable of using the internet to find each other and send messages back and forth.
How all this runs.
You sign up for an account on an instance, say lemmy.world. This is your local instance; your local instance will handle all of the data going to and from you. If you create a community, it will be stored on your local instance. You may notice that instance addresses look a little like email addresses, ie !nostupidquestions@lemmy.world. That notes which instance that particular community is on. If you don’t see an instance name appended, it’s on your local instance.
When viewing lists of posts or communities, you are given an option to search for Subscribed, Local, and All. Subscribed will show you only communities you have subscribed to, it’s like your Reddit home feed. Local will show you only posts or communities made to your local instance. All will show you posts or communities from across the Fediverse. You can subscribe to, post and comment on communities from other instances, like I am doing now (my local instance is sh.itjust.works, I am posting to lemmy.world). It looks and works just like posting to my home instance.
A major difference users of Lemmy/the Fediverse should keep in mind: Reddit had platform-wide rules of conduct, which individual subreddits were allowed to expand upon. Lemmy does not have central admins or owners like u/spez to enforce platform-wide policy; those general rules come from the admins of each individual instance, which community moderators may add to. So rules and norms can vary between each instance, and when posting on an instance that isn’t your own, it’s a good idea to read the sidebar of that instance’s homepage to review them.
Thank you so much for the breakdown. I’m gonna reference back to this a lot while i try to wrap my head around this new space. I’m shocked at the amount of informative replies i’ve received and your guys’ good-spirited attitude towards reddit transplants like myself.
I was a long time reddit lurker but I feel compelled to post and it’s responses like yours that made me feel comfortable doing so.
TLDR: Thank you so much to everyone who broke it down for me. I’m having lots of fun in this space because of y’all and I am so excited to continue contributing to it.
Instance == server == each individual lemmy (Beehaw is its own instance, so is lemmy.ca, etc)
Basically, reddit was a bunch of communities on one server (the reddit servers)
Each lemmy instance has its own collection of communities, and each lemmy is connected together, so users from any individual lemmy can read and interact with communities and users from other lemmys (this is federation)
All of these lemmy instances federating makes up the greater lemmy network as a whole
Thank you for this.
How does one go about finding communities from other instances and connect with them?
Use your instance’s search feature. You can search
- Name of community:
No Stupid Questions - By using !community@instance syntax:
!nostupidquestions@lemmy.world - URL of the community:
https://lemmy.world/c/nostupidquestions
First option won’t work if your instance hasn’t federated the community yet. The last option is best in my opinion.
Some small addition to the last option:
If you want to browse a community from a specific instance on your home instance you have to add the ‘home’ instance.
For example your home instance (where you did register your account) is Lemmy.ml and the community you want to interact with is on Lemmy.world you would use:
Https://Lemmy.ml/c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
In order to be able to post, reply etc
https://lemmyverse.net/ is a great tool for searching for communities and instances.
https://browse.feddit.de is great and so is https://subs.rehab
Doesn’t this then make, a bunch of communities with same names like ‘iOS’. Then it feels fractured across a bunch of groups of same enthusiasts. Or what do I misunderstand about this or it’s benefits? I’m legitimately curious.
Yes, it is fractured, and that is by intention. The point is that no one single person can control the entirety of the Lemmyverse. Suppose a spez comes along and tries to ruin things. Then, at worst, he can only destroy 1 instance. Even if he destroys the biggest instance, then it’s a big loss, but it’s not the end of the entire platform. Lemmyverse lives on.
As for how the fracturing affects the user - not much. As mentioned in other comments, each instance can communicate seamlessly between each other. I can post to other instances, and other instances can post to mine. All information is shared.
One caveat, though, is that the Lemmyverse is still very much in its early growth stages. So you’ll find a bunch of communities spread out over a bunch of instances that do virtually the same thing. It’ll look like the community is fractured. But over time, users are probably just going to settle on a single community, we just don’t know which one yet. Think of it like subreddits on Reddit. There’s basically always 3 subreddits about the same topic, but there’s always the one major subreddit, which is usually the one that you’re looking for. We haven’t reached that point yet - we’re still waiting to see which is going to be the “major” community for most topics.
Yes, but technically no. The full name includes the instance, for example iOS@example.instance.
Similarly, you had multiple subreddits dedicated to a single topic, with slight variations in their name.
I recommend to subscribe to anything which seems interesting (including duplicates), then unsubscribing from annoying stuff.
Overall great explanation, accurate and short.
The one thing I dislike is the usage of ‘lemmy’, which you seem to use as a synonym for ‘instance’. That is both inconsistent (you already established terms for that; ‘instance’ and ‘server’), and inaccurate.
Lemmy is the whole, the network of federated and defederated instances.
Hello this is my first comment on Lemmy, so consider me an expert.
The idea of ‘federated’ websites is that you can use your login from one server to interact with another server. An analogy is email: you can have a gmail account that can send a message to a yahoo account via shared and open source protocols (e.g. SMTP).
One question I do have though; if I create my account on Lemmy.world and then for whatever reason that instance disappears; does my account disappear or is it recoverable on another instance?
Your account would disappear and unrecoverable from other instance, but your comment history can still be found in other federated servers, so it’s not a complete loss. For example, should lemmy.world disappear someday, a copy of your comment history is still preserved in my server at https://c.calciumlabs.com/u/jpgb@lemmy.world
What is an instance?
An instance is a deployment of Lemmy. sh.itjust.works, lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, ani.social are all instances.
what is a federation?
Federation is the ability for these instances to communicate with each other. I can make post in this community (!nostupidquestions@lemmy.world) using my account (@hitagi@ani.social), while you are reading it on another instance (sh.itjust.works).
It’s like how you can send email from gmail.com to yahoo.com or outlook.com.
what is a server?
In simpler ways, the same as instance, but technically it also means the computer/hardware that Lemmy is running on.
can someone please describe in simple terms how this all runs and how we as users navigate it?
-
Make an account in any server you like.
join-lemmyhas a long list of them. -
Subscribe to communities that you like. There’s a search feature above or you can search in
lemmyverse.net. -
Use it as you normally would use Reddit.
An instance/server is like an email provider but for your Reddit Lemmy account.
