Hello. I still don't know the meaning of this concept, and at this point I'm almost too afraid to ask.

What is Federation in terms of this Lemmy instance (chapo.chat)?

I have seen people really excited about this idea, and it came up a number of times when Our Platform was still in development / nascent. I have just seen the concept brought up again in a post in the context of expanding the userbase to include those who may take issue with certain positions within ML/MLM ideology. What is the fediverse? Is it a decentralized "reddit clone" that would shift chapo.chat from being one site to a "subreddit" of independent yet similar forums, functionally? How would instances interact with one another to let users move between them? What do? How work?

Thank you for your time

  • VHS [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    If you want to see federation in action, Mastodon instances (along with those of GNU Social and Pleroma) already make up a federated twitter clone today. Each user's profile and posts (including replies they make) exist on their home instance (website), but from the client website they can see posts made on any (federated) instance and reply to them. Each website can have its own moderation and rules, and can choose not to federate with certain other sites. In the broad sense, it's email-like federation for a twitter-like social network.

    For a reddit clone, it would have to be a bit more complicated and I'm not sure how exactly the details would be worked out, because there are subcomms within each site, and because I'd expect comments within a thread to "live" on the instance where the thread is hosted, rather than the user's home instance. Also, I wonder if a user could submit a post to a instance other than their home one.

    I think I'm probably just as confused as you are. I'm sure the Lemmy devs have thought more about this, I should see if they've written an overview of the subject.