Let’s go!

I’m shocked, really

But Israel are the fascists in this scenario, yet they are doing the electricity curtailment…

Canada are the supposed “good guys”, and they are refusing electricity trading with the fascist Americans, not the other way around

Definitely Skateparkge on this one

Think of instances like Discord servers. Then each instance has communities that are like Discord channels.

Another way to think of instances is like email providers: you can select Google or @Gmail, Microsoft or @Live, etc. The same is true for the fediverse, where you can make Lemmy.World your “provider” of Lemmy content, etc. Each community in this analogy might be folders or labels you apply to your emails so you can sort them efficiently.

What’s cool about the fediverse though is that no matter which instance you sign up to, you can see the content from communities of other instances as well. So if you have an account on Lemmy.World, you can see content from my instance, dbzer0, and all other instances.

Well, sometimes. Each instance allows federated relations in which posts, comments, upvotes, etc. are only shared between other federated instances if both the sending and receiving instances agree to that channel of information flow. If say Lemmy.World doesn’t allow that information flow but dbzer0 does, then Lemmy.World won’t see any data from dbzer0 while dbzer0 will see all data from Lemmy.World.

Think if someone posts a meme on Lemmy.World, if L.W federates with db0 and vice versa, Lemmings can see comments and upvotes from both servers to that meme post. If L.W. defederates but db0 doesn’t, then L.W doesn’t see db0 comments/upvotes but db0 sees L.W’s and db0’s. Also, db0 can respond/upvote L.W. users, but L.W. users won’t see that data. Then if both L.W and db0 defederate from each other, neither instance sees content from each other, effectively blocking the entire instances from each other.

Federation is 2-sided. Both parties must agree to information flow in order to interact.

Defederation is 1-sided or 2-sided. If 1-sided, one party sees nothing from the other, while the other party sends data that will never be seen. Kinda pointless! If 2-sided, neither party sees anything and so they don’t interact at all.

Hope that helps! Federation is an amazing tool when dealing with issues like xenophobia/racism and corporate shills like Meta’s Threads trying to take over the FediVerse.

Welcome!

Welcome!

Welcome! I’ll leave this comment explaining Lemmy that I’ve previously left for new users:

Welcome to Lemmy! I’m glad you joined. There are tons of tutorials out there for how to use the platform, but if it helps, here’s my advice:

I use the Android app Sync For Lemmy. Reminds me a lot of rif is fun from before Reddit shut down 3rd party API access about a year ago.

Lemmy.World is the name of the biggest instance on Lemmy. Think of it as a discord channel with different sub-channels except those are called communities here (and instead of r/ for subreddits we have c/ for communities).

There are still trolls here. What’s nice about Lemmy is that you can block individual trolls, communities of trolls, or even instances of trolls (if you deem them so). Conversely, if you get banned from any of the above, you can make a new account on any other instance (like dbzer0 or shitjustworks) and still have access to the content from those people/places. The same is true if certain communities/instances change their policies on things like Luigi, which happened on Lemmy.World recently. I switched over to dbzer0 to avoid that censorship and to also see stuff about pirating - that which is banned on Lemmy.World.

Lastly, we can see posts/comments from other people on the Fediverse, like from Mastodon (Twitter alternative) and others.

Hope you enjoy your stay here! Lemmy is primarily tech- and politics-focused rn, but a lot of people draw parallels to Reddit’s early days, which is good!