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Can someone please explain federation? (kbin.social)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hello all! I'm one of the original reddit users, and before that a long time Digg user. I want to enjoy and participate in the fediverse.

Can someone please explain federation, and to what degree the content from other platforms / instances will appear for a user who only visits kbin.social? I understand that federation is currently broken. What happens when it gets fixed?

I tried searching, but no luck. If there's a fan or link, all the better :D

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[–] BecomingTheFalcon 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Best analogy I’ve heard is to think about email. I’m using gmail, maybe someone else uses yahoo, and maybe a third person has their own mail server set up at home. We can all send each other emails, and the content of the emails will largely look the same, despite that none of us are accessing it through the same site.

Another example; since you’re over on kbin; I’m on Lemmy.world right now. I can still see your posts and comments and you can still see mine as though we’re both browsing the same website.

Why is that important? Basically it keeps any one person like Spez from having complete and total control over the entire “site”. Since the “website” is actually a lot of websites made to act like one big one; each individual site has its own server, admins, etc. and if one goes down, or has admins that go on a power trip; it won’t totally ruin the experience for everyone on the fediverse; just that one server.

[–] BecomingTheFalcon 8 points 1 year ago

All that is to say, it sounds complicated, but none of that stuff really matters unless you care about the tech behind it. For the end user like you and me, you just gotta pick a site and make an account, and it works pretty seamlessly. At least it should, the devs are seeing some growing pains right now as registrations ramp up and cause things to break. But hopefully that stuff will get worked out with a little time.