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?
Think of it like email. Email is a protocol that people can use, but email isn’t “owned” by anything. Instead, different mail servers (like outlook, Gmail, proton, etc) use that protocol to talk to each other.
Lemmy uses a protocol called activity pub, and different instances like lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, etc can all talk to each other using that protocol.
You’re on the instance sh.itjust.works, while I’m on lemmy.xylight.dev, but you can still see my comment!
An instance/server is like an email provider but for your Reddit Lemmy account.
Federation is a bunch of websites that agreed to share their content between themselves. They use an agreed upon protocol for threads, posts (or whatever you call it) and other websites can fetch these posts. These websites are called “instances”. That also works for users who can comment, upvote or whatever on any post and their comments and upvotes will go to all other websites that are in the federation.
For anology, you probably know how tweets are usually posted as screenshots on reddit. Imagine you could have that tweet just show up in reddit as a regular post. That can be done if Twitter and Reddit would agree to federate with each other and use one protocol.