Introductions

9 readers

1 users here now

This is the community for users to introduce each other, talk about their interests and hobbies, and potentially create new connections!

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Can someone explain how lemmy works? (mander.xyz)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

11 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm new here. travelled all the way from reddit, I don't get why i get browse remmy on different servers... do they all call the same api?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

so they're all linked to the same database technically?

I am a programmer so feel free to get into technical details if you can.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

No - it's more like email. ActivityPub is the protocol (I think loosely equivalent to sftp or http). Each fediverse "app" (mastodon, lemmy, pixelfed, etc) is a layer of API built on top of ActivityPub. I'm not a web developer so I don't know the exact analogue here, but it's maybe like different flavors of webmail, or like different message boards that are email based.

Basically, every "instance" is running the lemmy application. Different lemmy instances communicate with each other using the lemmy API and the ActivityPub protocol. In principle, a lemmy instance could communicate with a mastodon instance because they use ActivityPub under the hood, but someone would need to translate the API - mastodon has no concept of upvotes or downvotes for example, and lemmy doesn't seem to know what a boost is (boosting, formerly "retooting" is analogous to a retweet on Twitter).