The fediverse is the network of federated decentralized social media using activitypub to connect. Lemmy (the software on which chapo.chat is based) will be in some months part of this network.
What do you think about fediverse ? Are some of you using Mastodon as a twitter replacement ?
See but we already are decentralized, just by the very fact that chapo.chat is its own DNS name, running on its own infrastructure, as opposed to being a community run on someone else's infrastructure (like it was on Reddit).
Federation is not decentralization. You are conflating terms.
Maybe I played a bit fast and loose with those words, but federation enables decentralization while allowing these services to talk to each other. I know you find the latter part pointless, but yeah.
Federation does not enable decentralization. Federation enables the sharing of resources across different independent systems. This is used to remove duplication of resources. Identities, for example.
Federation, in super simple terms, is like interconnecting different platforms doing similar things, like crossplay does for games, right?
Everyone keeps saying it's like e-mail, which makes sense to me.
In some ways, yes, in other ways, no.
SMTP is a protocol laid out by the IETF in RFCs. Everyone got together and hammered out the protocol, and everyone agreed to abide by the RFCs so that data could be interchanged between all the independent systems. That's why you can send an e-mail to a Gmail account from an MSN account and it will transit the network and end up on the other end, still able to be processed and displayed.
So, to me, that means that there is interoperability. That's what the IETF strives for.
Lemmy is talking about using ActivePub, which is is being developed by the W3C. It's sort of like the IETF, but at a higher OSI layer. So, that's why they talk about "federation" - so that different lemmy instances can exchange data via ActivityPub. Since I work at a lower layer in the OSI model, that's why I am focusing on the identity federation part of Lemmy, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_identity - and why I don't think it's all that useful to have identities persist across lemmy instances.
Yes crossplay is a good example of federation, when it comes to identity management. Each network (xbox live, PSN, PC) has their own identity providers (steam, xbox, psn) and crossplay allows people from different networks to play on the same game session.
This is seperate from the discussion around interoperability, meaning the sharing of gamestate between different versions of the same game, running on these different platforms. It's an important distinction, that I think sometimes people take the interoperability concept and roll it up into the term federation.