I noticed many new individuals joining following the Reddit API news. Do you have any questions about this website, Lemmy, or the fediverse?

  • peachykeen
    6·
    2 years ago

    Is there a crash course on how the federated stuff works? I never really used twitter, so mastodon didn’t hold much draw, but with the reddit API sillyness, i’d be interested in trying to wrap my head around wtf i’m looking at.

    • TheTrueLinuxDev
      6·
      2 years ago

      Best analogy for Federated Stuff is to think of it like hosting an email server. You have many different email servers all talk to each others and route one email to the next. That essentially the idea with federated, just more robust and more focused on social aspects.

      Essentially on Lemmy server, it can choose to talk to other lemmy servers to get contents, but each Lemmy server could moderate on their own. It’s possible to make a “clone” of a content from another server and you can make a new blank thread on this server even though on other server, there were already ongoing discussion about it.

      Federation is right in the middle of peer to peer and central server like Reddit.com, it just server-to-server rather than person-to-person.

      • miah
        4·
        2 years ago

        Another way to think about it is through Graph Theory / Connectivity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectivity_(graph_theory)

        In a federated network, what you see depends on your connections, similarly, what others see depends on their connections. Lemmy/Fediverse operators can defederate with nodes that are ‘bad actors’ (however their moderation team / operators define that), eventually the defederated node may not see much or be able to interact with much because of the limits of their connectivity.

        Graph theory / connectivity is also how social networks figure out who you might be friends with, and how the NSA figures out who might be bad apples.

        Math is cool =)

      • Pulptastic
        3·
        2 years ago

        Is there a way to subscribe to other servers or do I need to make a login at each one?