With social media platforms like Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter, all of the infrastructure belongs to one company and they can do whatever they want. A lot of people don't like this, and have set out to create their own alternative social networks, but many of these have failed because they couldn't overcome the network effect. Federation aims to strike a middle ground, where communities can be operated independently with their own infrastructure, rules, and staff, but remain compatible with each other and aggregate into a large scale social network which isn't dominated by any particular organization.

The two most successful examples of the concept are Mastodon and Matrix. The idea is, anyone can set up their own Matrix or Mastodon server, and the users on that server can interact with users on any other server (unless the server becomes such a nuisance that administrators refuse to federate with it.) Lemmy aims to do the same thing with a Reddit-style link aggregation message board that Mastodon does for Twitter and Matrix does for instant messaging. In theory, Lemmy users on one instance will be able to subscribe to communities on other instances, upvote/downvote content on other instances, comment, create posts, and PMs to users on other instances, etc.

This is not working yet though, but that has been the long-term objective of the project since the beginning. It should be noted that Chapo.chat took Lemmy in an unfinished state and banged on it with a bunch of hammers (made thousands of changes) until we could make it suit the needs of this particular community, and that may complicate things down the road. Lemmy was only about a year old when the subreddit got banned, and in a very alpha stage. The flagship instance had about 5000 users at the time and kept a low profile. We got to 5000 users in a matter of weeks, and had such a high profile that the ban was mentioned in the New York Times.

Hopefully in the long run, these differences will be reconciled. Chapo.chat has added a bunch of features, but in terms of the mechanics of how federation works, we're letting upstream make those decisions. As for the political fissures, naturally we hope this wouldn't lead to division, but having independent infrastructure and staff committed to an ideological project is a good thing. This is one of the reasons we chose to set up an independent platform instead of joining an existing alternative. I think federation is a good solution for this. There can be red Lemmy and black Lemmy, each with their own forums, each under their own independent management, but capable of interacting with one another. The politics of inter-instance diplomacy in a federation is one wildcard that I am interested in seeing play out when the time comes.

(disclaimer: I've been a deadbeat and haven't contributed anything in the past month or so, so when I say "we," I don't mean to steal clout from the people who are still putting in serious work)