this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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This analogy should be the top comment. Fediverse services are like email services. They’re basically interchangeable. If your email service starts to suck, you get a new email address. It’s a huge pain to move all your old email, copy your contacts, set up redirections, and then change your contact info everywhere, but what’s the alternative? Are you not going to have an email address?
If ActivityPub services become the kind of de facto standard that email did, unless you’re a server admin the instances will fade into the background noise of the internet, just like your email server has. Once we establish the standards on how a server should be maintained and moderated, it will become easier to see and ban rogue operators, just the way we do with email spammers now.
Does anybody worry about the political leanings of their office Exchange365 administrator?
Yes, I worry about whoever controls the spam filter. I check my spam folder often. I've caught many mistakes, but haven't noticed any clear political bias. Yet. But the great thing is, if I ever do, it's possible to switch. If I'm especially masochistic, I can even be the one controlling the spam filter.
With lemmy, it's even better than that. Anyone can check the instance's mod logs and see what was deleted, who was banned, and what for.
Ok, that explains all these different instances. But this analogy relates ActivityPub protocol to simple email protocol. Then, it should mean that all different federated services like Lemmy, Mastodon, Kbin are various servers (similar to Gmail, yahoo) and have to be owned by someone who regulates them. So can you make it bit more clear!
Kind of, but there is one more layer.
ActivityPub allows more than one type of data (or rather it's all just data, it's the medium in which the user uses it?). MSTDN.ca, Lemmy.ca, lemmy.world, et al are the equivalents of an email server. Lemmy, kbin, Mastodon are different services running on the ActivityPub backbone. There is a fair amount of cross-compatibility, since they are all using ActivityPub. You can easily subscribe to a Lemmy community with your Mastodon account, or a kbin magazine with your Lemmy account. It just might be a little messy.
Remember when Microsoft started pushing "rich" email? If you were using a text based email client, you'd get all the HTML formatting tags. It was still email, you could still read it, it was just messy. Likewise, my experience with Lemmy via Mastodon was that you loose the threading and grouping. Comments tended to show as random messages out of context. Absolutely works, just less nice than using Lemmy for Lemmy and Mastodon for Mastodon. I will say that kbin magazines seem fine on Lemmy, but I haven't really played with kbin yet, so I may not know what I'm missing.
So the email analogy has it's limits. BeeHaw.org, Lemmy.ca, sh.itjust.works are like email servers that all focus on one format of email. MSTDN.ca, mastodon.social, mas.to, Universeodon.com, etc. are also all email servers focusing on a different format for email. They can all talk to each other, but emails from the wrong format won't fit in as well.
I think your question and my answer strain the limits of using an an analogy to simplify a concept. Might be almost ready to abandon analogy and just directly learn about Federation.