Submitted 11 months ago by curse4444@kbin.social to [deleted]
https://kbin.social/m/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world/t/191143
I migrated from reddit like a lot of folks. I'm using kbin.social, but it seems I can also see posts from people at places like lemmy.world. How many different instances are there? How does the federated model work? So far I like what I see, but I'm also just trying to understand how things are integrated here.
Wrote this once so I’d never have to write it again. lol Here’s how I word it:
That's the fun part, it doesn't.
Joking aside it's my understanding that instances grab new content from communities/magazines it knows about, as much as possible. From what I've been seeing, federation in both Lemmy and Kbin can be a bit wonky though, I've gone back to Lotide.
Oh cool! I didn’t realize lotide federates with the latest version of Lemmy again.
I know it was pretty frustrating for a while there, but it became clearer that everything was having federation problems.
Instances are like subreddits where the mods are top level admins, and there is no central admin above them. Anyone who wants to create an instance can host their own server. The cost of hosting is paid by the admins of an instance or by donations. Sponsors and ads are not currently feasible.
Unmoderated instances allow any new instance’s content to be displayed for their users.
Instances are like Reddit, Twitter, instagram, etc. Each instance has certain rules that may vary from the parent they forked from (see beehaw vs Lemmy.ml). Those instances will then have a structure like subreddits, posts, comments, etc.
Lemmy is similar to Reddit. Communities (c/*) are subreddits
Mastodon is similar to twitter. Microblogs are tweets.
Kbin combines Lemmy and Mastodon.
CaptObvious@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Instances are like smaller Reddits. Communities (lemmy) and magazines (kbin) are like subs. You can subscribe and participate in any c/ or m/ as long as their instance is federated with yours.
To add to the fun, we can also interact with users on Mastodon (similar to Twitter), Pixelfed (like Instagram), or any other ActivityPub-enabled instance that federated with us.
To my mind, a better analogy is email. It doesn’t matter which platform (provider) you use, you can interact with anyone on almost any other email platform. Make sense?
utopianrevolt@lemmy.world 11 months ago
This was a great explanation, thank you.
CaptObvious@lemmy.world 11 months ago
No problem. Enjoy the new world :)