I am not familiar with the term, "federated" or its meaning... I'm hoping to get some serious answers and perhaps even some comedic answers....
Edit: thank you to all who answered my call for enlightenment. I'm even more confused (and hopeful) than I was before!
We made everything look and perform worse so we can talk to Libs who hate China and Marxists who hate anarchists and sex-work and consider us Libs.
we moved to mainline lemmy, away from what we used to have, which was a bunch of custom stuff built on top of a now ancient version of lemmy
now the devs can add features and stuff from lemmy way easier
including federation, which as far as i know is not turned on yetRather than recognize the universal failure of web 2.0, the mods and devs have made the site slower and buggier so we can talk to people on other slow buggy sites.
I'm going off of memory here and did not do any research at all, so expect errors:
Hexbear is based on Lemmy, a reddit clone whose cool special feature is supposed to be federation, which I'll explain at the end. Early on in the site's history, the devs decided to use a forked version of the code so they could change it to handle things we wanted like pronouns, and also rewrite the frontend in React for some reason. All the changes meant Hexbear wasn't able to federate anymore.
After three years of Lemmy getting better while Hexbear's devs were a constantly changing group of people without enough time who spent what little time they had putting out fires, being on a forked version stopped making much sense. So the developers decided to move everything back to a normal Lemmy (I don't know how much customization we have now, presumably still some). Moving all of that around was why the site was down yesterday.
Now Hexbear is able to federate, but it has not yet done that. We are not federated. You can't do federation stuff right now. I assume the devs are going to wait for things to be slightly less on fire before they try.
Once Hexbear federates, there will be a specific set of other Lemmy websites (starting with Lemmygrad.ml only), where you can find and subscribe to their coms, from Hexbear, if you go to the communities tab and go out of your way to find them. Additionally, commentators from both sites will be able to comment on posts from the other site.
a specific set of other Lemmy websites
So almost the opposite of a "sub" reddit, or a "sub" community... maybe a "super" something or other...?
It works verbally, I suppose, but its more appropriate to describe them as adjacent than vertical.
We're doing a big social media commune.
Short answer, the software that runs Hexbear was updated to the newest version. The site was previously running on a very modified and old version. Now that it's updated, it's likely going to be easier to stay up to date in the future.
That means it's easier to get new features and performance and security fixes for "free" thanks to work of developers of the original software.
And equally importantly, it might be easier for the admins/devs to let us all keep
.Everything else is just people debating over some of the new features in the latest version.
The federation part is the next big step allowing hexbear to interact with other lemmy instances and vice versa.
My ex CTO referred to that kind of thing as, "neat". "Hey gang! Listen up, we've got some neat changes coming!"
Yeah I'd like a FAQ that would explain like... how to use one account to see all the lemmy instances, or just use the hexbear to see all of lemmygrad, or lemmygrad to see all of hexbear. I'd like to use as few separate accounts as possible.
not a thing yet, we upgraded to a version of the software that can federate, but we want to be stable first before we consider actually federating
We are now part of the glorious United States of Amerca's federal government. Your blue FBI jacket is on the way in the mail
(I don't really know what we just did either lol)Pretty sure an external entity hacked into the website and replaced all of you with bots because something feels wrong with the site. This isn't my sanctuary. You aren't my people. This is wrong.
Edit: If there's another real human on this site, check the modlog. My truth is being swept underneath the rug by this external entity.
Haha that is so funny but I think that you may be on to something. Replacing users with bots is a very serious breach of trust and should be avoided in any attempt to run a successful forum with a flourishing community.
finally succeeded
