So, lemmy is a project I have been following since the beggining. With federation here, it seems like everything is aligned for it to become the reddit killer, pardon my expression.
What do you think is missing from lemmy for it to have a massive engaging community?
I’m on lemmy, but I’m still not too sure to still understand what a federation is. Sometimes I feel like I’m missing a lot of content…
This is honest of you and a fair point: federation can sometimes be invisible. The basic idea becomes clear if you think about how you access websites. Think of Facebook. When you go to it, you type “facebook.com” in the address bar. And you go there. Notably, if you want to use Facebook, you can only go to “facebook.com”. This is different with federated systems.
Federated systems make it possible to go to, for example, “fb.com”, which will have its own version of Facebook, different to “facebook.com” or “facebookfed.com” or “333.com” (if someone decides to call their version that). Each one of these websites will have their own servers, their own logins (so you’d have to create different accounts), rules, and mods.
Sometimes, those websites talk to each other so that content is shared between them. That way, you can publish once in fb.com and another person can see your post in facebook.com. Other times, depending on the service and the version/instance, you’ll have a sort of private Facebook.
So federation here means that there are many different servers (‘instances’) that run the same software. These servers talk to each other so that you can see the content of the rest of the instances, in the case of the Fediverse. The Fediverse is a federated (hence the name) network of different services including Lemmy, Mastodon, and PixelFed. I’m not entirely sure, but I think the idea is to be able to share content in between all of those (someone plz correct me or explain this to me? hahahah).
Federation is also tied to certain values, like owning your own data. For example, Facebook’s servers hold all of your Facebook data. But, in the case of Lemmy, if you were to run your own Lemmy instance in your room, you would own your data (assuming no hacks or other shenanigans). This autonomy and privacy goes along well with the values surrounding Free and Libre/Open Source Software, where anyone can copy, modify, and run their own versions of code.
So you get this synnergy of FLOSS and federation that brings a bunch of people who are pumped to share stuff on websites like Lemmy, a FLOSS and federated link aggregator!
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Donations. For example, the Mastodon instance that I’m in sometimes publishes its financial situation. Most of the time the donations cover the server fees comfortably. But since the amount of users keeps growing and people post more, those donations are sometimes not enough. Only once has it been at a point in which I was worried.
Note that since there are less metrics being systematically hoarded from users, the servers need less power to make similar services work. For example, I bet Reddit’s servers have to account with every little movement I do there. But here, in Lemmy, you can see the source code and notice that there’s very little tracked.
Lemmy in particular is powered by Rust. This makes it more efficient than running a server in, for example, Ruby, which is what Diaspora does. But this is specific to Lemmy and not to the Fediverse, since different Fediverse instances can run their servers using different languages.
Thank you very much kind stranger for this explanation. The structure is now clear for me. I understand the usefulness of having different servers/websites. However as a user, how can I retrieve content from a server in which I might have interest but don’t know it exist?.. Also, it’s going to be a nightmare remembering of all password/account… Hopefully the fediverse, as you explained it, will make it more and more user-friendly. I had heard about it before, but did not get what it was all about. Now I do! Thanks again and all the best