this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Explain Like I'm Five
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Think of an email address. Accessing a community is like accessing an email address (that's why communities have handles @ a server.
So unlike Reddit where you could have r/memes in the Fediverse you can have [email protected] or [email protected] each host can host a bunch of communities and a bunch of users and we all connect to one another in a similar way that email works.
The plus side of this is that no single company has all the power like a walled garden, rather the whole system functions in a decentralised manner. It is also run open source by a community of developers. So while the whole system works in a very similar way to Reddit, you cant just search for the official memes community, rather you can subscribe to many, some may be large and some may be small and niche. Hopefully the downsides of this will get ironed out, organising communities into super communities or sorting by tag or something, but on the bright side, being open source and decentralised, development of Lemmy will likely proceed at a rapid pace and soon catch up and overtake corporate sites in useability, as they increasingly look to stifle useability and freedom for profit.
So if I have an account on lemmy.world, can I post on lemmy.ml without creating an account there? If not, I don't understand how all the instances "communicate" if I have to have multiple accounts to interact with each one.
George, who uses gmail ([email protected]) can send emails to onno, who uses outlook ([email protected]).
George sends the mail via gmail, which sends the mail to outlook, which sends it to onno.
This is only possible because gmail and outlook share the email protocol. They are "federated".
If a lemmy.world user submits a comment to a lemmy.ml thread, the user sends it to the lemmy.world server, who will pass it along to lemmy.ml, which will show the comment to lemmy.ml users.
In theory, this should keep everything in sync. In reality, mismatches in protocol implementation and differences in blocked users/instances, create different views on the same thread when viewed from lemmy.world and lemmy.ml
For example: lemmygrad.ml could be blocked/defederated by lemmy.world, while lemmy.ml is still federated to both. When viewing a thread from lemmy.ml, you can see content from both lemmy.world and lemmygrad.ml, while the views from lemmygrad.ml and lemmy.world lack each others content.