If you go to lemmy.ml it's just a bunch of fucking redditors with their dogshit memes and like three lemme users. It's sad. I strongly encourage users of this site who are so inclined to take a break from infighting to bully neoliberals over there.

  • Elara [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Lemmy is a federated service. That means that there are many Lemmy servers and they can all share their content with each other. If you post something on lemmy.ml, all the servers federated to it will be able to see and interact with that post using their account even though it's not on the same server.

    • ilyenkov [she/her, they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      And what is supposed to be the benefit of that exactly? If I wanna go onto another site I'll just go there lol.

      • CriticalResist8 [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        It helps decentralise the web in an actual way (and not the technobro "everyone should be beholden to a few huge companies but it's okay because they use blockchain"). It works kinda like your phone plan, you can call anyone with a phone number even if you have a contract with AT&T and the person you want to call has a contract with Verizon. If it didn't work like that, you would need a different contract with every provider to call your contacts.

        Federation works on open protocols, which means you can also talk to Mastodon profiles directly from your Lemmy account.

        • ilyenkov [she/her, they/them]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Idk, maybe its just cuz I'm a luddite, but that doesn't seem like a great example. Because a contract with another provider requires paying money. Whereas signing up for a website doesn't. So its more like I sign up for one website because I want to talk to people on that website. And now I'll be able to talk to people on another website, which if I had wanted to do I would have just been signed up to it already. Just seems unasked for and annoying tbh. Like we are just going to have a bunch of reddit libs whos content I'm going to see cuz we are federated to them? Why? I don't want to talk to Mastodon profiles?? If I wanted to do that I'd be on Mastodon.

          • Elara [she/her]
            ·
            2 years ago

            You don't have to see it if you don't want to. You can just show local posts only. The point is if anyone wants to join and interact with a community on another instance, they can, and they can do so without needing 50 accounts. Also, each instance can have their own rules, their own ban lists, etc. which means you can choose your favorite instance with the rules you prefer as your "home instance", but that won't prevent you from talking to people on other instances.

            It's the same idea as with email. You can send an email from gmail to yahoo without needing an account on yahoo. This is because gmail's email server can talk to yahoo's email server and share the content.

            There are other platforms that are similar, such as Matrix. I run my own Matrix server which only has a space for me and my friends, but I can still join matrix spaces on other servers without needing an account on that server.

            That makes these services decentralized. Even if matrix.org goes down forever, I can still use Matrix without an issue, including the rooms that were on matrix.org. If matrix.org creates a rule I don't like, it doesn't apply to me. For example, matrix.org requires an email address for registration. My server doesn't, but I and everyone else registered on my server still has full access to the entire matrix network, including matrix.org.

      • Aceivan [they/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        The benefit is you can have a usable social media site without the centralized control of a reddit or a twitter. the content and users are distributed across many independently run servers. The idea is to have lemmy as a whole, no matter what specific instance you're on, act like one big site like reddit (or even bigger since it can also talk to mastodon), but still enable smaller communities to thrive within that, and make it more democratic because your specific instance can just defederate other instances that refuse to moderate hate speech or whatever.