fediverse?
Once upon a time, people thought that it would be fun to have a place to learn and play and talk together, and the more people that came, the better they would all learn from each other. So they got together and built this place in one fixed spot. And they DID learn from each other, and it was fun and amazing. But some people were greedy and wanted to control all of it so that they could feel like they were better than everyone else. These greedy people forced the people to give them more and more money to be able to use the spot. The bad guys would treat the people who wanted to have fun badly, and use information about them against them. This made people sad.
Then one day, somebody said, “Hey, why can’t we just have a bunch of little spots, so that nobody can hold us hostage?”
But the other people were afraid they wouldn’t be able to play with some of their friends or learn from other people if everybody was separated. Until some people came up with the idea that all these small communities could agree to share everything they were doing with each other, small spot to small spot. Nobody owned all the spots now, and people were free to choose spots that were more convenient for them, without having to be afraid that others wouldn’t be there, because all the small spots still made one big spot!
And that dear, is basically the fediverse in a nutshell. Now go to sleep, you have a big day tomorrow. tuck tuck
This is how I’m explaining the Fediverse to everyone from now on. This is perfect.
Really? Cause this explanation doesn’t actually explain anything, but certainly provides us with an enemy ‘evil money guys’.
The more I think about it, I think this dumb talking-down explanation just muddies the water.
I mean, this is Explain Like I’m Five. I feel the goal would be to dumb it down as much as possible and I feel that this is a very good, if somewhat cheeky, way of explaining the very very basics of the Fediverse.
Is this missing a lot of nuance? Of course. But everyone having a bunch of different spots that can’t be held to some “bad guy’s” standards while all those spots are still able to share and talk to each other, is a very good way to explain to someone who has no understanding of instances and servers and especially if you needed to explain it to a 5 year old.
I don’t necessarily have the best understanding either, but I’ll give it a shot.
The fediverse is a federated universe, which means lots of servers can talk to each other (like a federation of people) instead of all being centralized in one company and their servers. It’s like how email is a common way to talk to each other, even though there are different groups with different versions.
Lemmy is the Reddit like portion of the fediverse. There are other parts, such as Mastodon, which is like Twitter. These can talk to each other a bit too, but right now they mostly talk within themselves.
Servers like vbin, sh.itjust.works, Lemmy world, Lemmy.ml, and many others are computers that store the information on Lemmy. They keep track of how many upvotes, text, links, and sometimes content hosting. But because there are a lot of them, and anyone can easily make their own, it’s harder for a company like Reddit to just ruin it all for profit.
@JohnDClay @s804 as with so many things, Wikipedia is a great place to start. It can be over whelming to wrap your head around, until you realize oh #ItWorksLikeEmail
Do 5 year olds have email? Because it’s kind of like that. You have an email address “someone@gmail.com” and you can send a message to “person2@hotmail.com”. You don’t both have to be on Gmail.
Well fediverse apps are kind of like this. Imagine lots of little reddits with their own communities and user bases.
You are your_name_here@kbin.social. You can talk to otherguy@lemmy.ml. Same goes for magazines/communities (subreddits). If you want to join a magazine on another server, you can do that like @technology (notice the leading @ symbol which tells Kbin that it’s a magazine and not a user).
This is what is most important for the average user to understand about the fediverse. There is a ton more than this like interoperability with different apps that aren’t thread based like Kbin and Lemmy like Mastodon but that’s a different discussion.
Edit: The community link should probably start with an ! as suggested by @fu but there is a known issue with formatting presently: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/199
Ok, I had to play with this a bit to try to see what’s going on because I have seen the ! notation elsewhere as well. It looks like if I type !community@instance ( !technology@beehaw.org ) it creates a link automatically but it takes me to /m/!community instead of just /m/community. If I use @community@instance ( @technology ) it takes me to /m/community. Interestingly though, the @ notation looks like it also works for users but also has the odd problem of including the @ symbol in the link when the address isn’t expecting it @jonefive@kbin.social ( @jonefive ) takes me to /u/@jonefive but it should be /u/jonefive
Edit: There’s an issue logged for this: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/199
@JonEFive @s804 I know Mastodon doesn’t recognize the !. Using the @ will let you comment on posts from a community you are following, (and all posts to the community show as if the community “user” re-tooted them all in your feed), but posting original posts from Mastodon doesn’t work well. It used to not work at all, since Mastodon implemented the ActivityPubl implementation for Title “wrong” (a title from another instance shows as a Content warning on Mastodon, and posting a Content warning on mastodon doesn’t show like a title anywhere unless they have software specifically designed to recognize its from mastodon and handle it differently) I know there had been a lemmy change to specifically use the first line of a toot from mastodon to @communityname@instan.ce as a title to a new post, but I have only seen it ever look like garbage. Even though Mastodon is by far the most popular platfrom on the 'verse its really the least feature rich. Even the granddaddy of them all (GNU Social) has more features, though the code isn’t regularly maintained (v3 being released feels like “when Covid is over” level of never).
@s804 it’s a cool protocol that many platforms use in order to allow any user on them to communicate with each other. Kbin is one of them. Friendica is another one. Hello from Friendica!
Disregard what I said, I didn’t really see which magazine I was in. Basically it is a term describing multiple social media platforms, with various use cases, that can talk with each other using ActivityPub - a web protocol (kind of a language in layman terms) that allows them to do it.
- Here’s an image showing you how that would look like (And here’s the source of it. It has a really simple, but comprehensive explanation).
- A great website if you want to learn more and discover more platforms in this regard is this one.
As I said in the strikethrough text above, I am on such a platform myself. Hello from Friendica! 😁
If your house is your local computer, the place that you’re accessing from (kbin.social) is like the post office in your town. You know how email addresses follow the format <user>@<hostname>? The same kind of thing is taking place here - kbin.social is it’s own place, you log in there, and it has a local ability to moderate your posts and what you see.
The difference with ActivityPub is that instead of only seeing the mail that was delivered to you and knowing nothing about what other people’s email looks like, you see the whole “town square” of kbin, and events in cities that it’s connected to as well. Depending on what software is being run, that can be presented in different ways, because ActivityPub is flexible and focuses mostly on the idea of “sharing and subscribing to events” - it doesn’t say what the interface has to look like.
kbin makes it look like reddit, but things happening on kbin are also represented on, for example, Mastodon. When I look at kbin’s “Microblog” tab it shows a lot of accounts that I am familiar with from Mastodon. They don’t live here, they aren’t posting here, but they’re “federated” here and you can interact with them.