Perfect no notes mama-miba

  • DinosaurThussy [they/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    6 months ago

    You know someone who uses gmail.com can email someone who uses aol.com? That works because email isn’t a service that exists on a single server somewhere. Instead, email uses a protocol, a way that computers have agreed to talk to each other. This works because both servers have their own copies of the email, which they do their best to keep in sync with one another.

    Lemmy, Mastodon, Peertube, etc are all pieces of software that do the same thing (keeping multiple copies of something in sync) except instead of message threads, the thing it’s keeping in sync is social media posts.

    You don’t need to know the specifics of how federation works because that’s getting into the specifics of how the servers have agreed to talk to each other. You don’t have to understand SMTP to use gmail. You just use it. Similarly, you don’t need to understand ActivityPub to use Lemmy (thank god). It just works.

    Of course, by “just works”, I mean thousands if not millions of human hours have gone into making it work.