They’re talking about lemmy, but you can basically ctrl F replace if you’re talking to someone about a different fediverse.


#Q:

So this is basically like making your own subreddits but with the differences that: 1) Subreddit owners have to pay to host their own subreddit 2) Subreddit owners can harvest private user data since they are the ones hosting the subreddit and the database 3) Site-wide rules don’t apply, only subreddit rules. 4) Crossposting between subreddits in the form of “interacting with other instances”

Idk man, this sounds like making your own website using premade libraries and code and then also paying for the hosting fees, but with extra steps.

#A:

Not exactly. An instance is more like a full Reddit than a sub-reddit. Communities can be created within an instance by the users. So the host is paying to host their own reddit, not their own subreddit.

  1. Any user of an instance can create their own community, so it is not necessary to host to have your own “sub-reddit”. The host of the instance pays for the hosting. You can create a community on any of the instances already available at https://join.lemmy.ml/ without hosting.

  2. Yes. The host of any online service can harvest user data if they want. This is one of the reasons to encourage users to host their own instances. When we use free services we are paying with our data, and we can choose to pay with money instead. It turns out that is cheaper than a monthly subscription to a video-streaming platform! Furthermore, isolated user data about a small group of users from an instance is not particularly valuable, so the incentive to collect such data is small. The data gathered by centralized social media websites is valuable because of its massive scale, which allows powerful analyses to be performed on it.

  3. Each instance is an independent site, so rules may be enforced over all of the subreddits within a particular instance, as well as rules for interacting with that instance. There are no universal rules applying to all instances.

  4. Not quite. I can create my own reddit, and you can create your own reddit. Perhaps one of your users creates a subreddit called /r/RedditAlternatives and one of the users in my instance (or me) is interested in it. The user can follow /r/RedditAlternatives, post to it, and comment, just as if it existed in the same website.

Idk man, this sounds like making your
own website using premade libraries and code and then also paying for
the hosting fees, but with extra steps.

Yes, this is precisely what it is. And the website is a federated Reddit alternative.