Actual photo of me trying to explain the fediverse to myself
I’ve had a small breakthrough here in a way that helps people understand, especially if they are Reddit users.
Have them pull up r/all, and just scroll a few posts and tell them to imagine that every subreddit is interestingasfuck@reddit.com, pics@reddit.com, gaming@reddit.com, etc
Then explain that Lemmy works the same way, except the content doesn’t all come from one website. It’s part of a network of sites that have agreed to an open protocol so everybody can share information freely.
You can explain the pros and cons if they’re still listening lol. But this seems easier for people to conceptualize, for whatever reason.
Lots of smaller social media sites that all work together as one large one?
sms is technically a decentralized network like the fediverse and xmpp
Email is probably the closest parallel for explanation purposes
I genuinely don’t understand this parallel, but I would like to. It feels like I’m missing something. Email has to go to a specified recipient every time. A post is avail to everyone in the community + federated instances.
The parallel is that email is built on a standard (well, two; RFC-5321 and RFC-5322), and it doesn’t matter what email server you use, whether it’s Gmail or Hotmail or a box in your basement running postfix, they’re all supposed to follow the standard and talk to each other; that is, they form a federated network. In the fediverse, we mostly use the ActivityPub standard, but the idea is the same.
XMPP is probably a technically better comparison, but try making that comparison to your parents. The point of the email comparison, even if it’s slightly less technically accurate, is that people have actually heard of email
Thanks! Good summary.
To be fair it’s extremely confusing and some design aspects of Lemmy seem odd at a surface level. For example, if you join a new instance, you won’t see any comments/posts from a community on anither instance unless you or someone else on that instance searches or subscibes to that community. Confused? Yea, same here.
Is it designed like this to avoid overwhelming small instances? Does it motivate people to join larger older instances instead of newer small ones? Yea, seems like it. Seems odd as shit to me. Maybe I’m dumb and am missing something obvious.
What do you guys think?
For anyone familiar with forums it makes sense to describe it like connected forums.
You sign up for a forum, and most of them have decided to share posts with each other. Because of the vast number of forums someone on your forums needs to look at other forums and add them to your forum so that they show up so that the traffic is limited to what the people on your forum are interested in. Like discovering new forums, but without needing to go to each forum separately.
The reason not all of the forums talk to each other is that the people who run the forum don’t want spammers and assholes cluttering up the place, so they don’t let people link to those forums.
Plus you can always sign up separately for the asshole forums or create your own forums if you want to. If you create your own, you have to maintain it just like any other forum.
As Ling as they don’t focus too much on forum structure it at least covers the connection part with a familiar context.
