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Lemmy resembles the old reddit experience so well that they even emulate the old reddit server performance
(self.showerthoughts)
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted, clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts: 1
Rules
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- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
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If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
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I joined a smaller instance that more fits my interests, but is still federated with the "popular" ones I like. So far it works great.
I still haven’t got a clue what this means. Goddamn it.
Lemmy is not one big application like reddit. Instead everyone can download Lemmy and host their own >instance<. Each instance can have their own users, their own communities/subs and admins.
Since Lemmy is part of the >fediverse<, it means that each Lemmy instance can interact with each other, and can even interact with other applications of the fediverse (like mastodon, which is more similar to twitter).
Because everyone can make their own Lemmy instance, it is also possible for bad faith actors to make one. They could create many accounts on their own instance, and try to mess with the other Lemmy instances by either posting a lot of comments, reporting a lot of content, or a number of other things. To prevent that from being an actual issue, each instance has the option to >defederate< other instances. (I am not 100% sure on the following so please correct me if I'm wrong) Defederating means that users of instance A cannot interact with the content or users of instance B, if instance A defederated instance B.
Since the performance of website is dependent on the instance you use, you can try to find another instance with less users and a more stable server. As long as it is not defederated by many other servers it will be effectively be the same experience as being on another instance.
Could I think of the federation as like nations giving each others' citizens a visa, or is that too off the mark to use as a metaphor?
I think it kinda works, but it misses the mark in that you don't need to 'travel' to another server to see the communities and posts from that server.
It's more like every instance is a post office, and when you make a post or comment at your local post office, they also send it out to a bunch of other post offices. So when you rock up to your local post office (instance), you can see all the activity at that post office, but also all the activity that has come in from federated post offices.
I think it's too far off. It's more like countries joining European Union - they are still individual countries, but they share stuff with all other countries that are part of the union/federation.
I think the original analogy works better.
If an EU country goes rogue, other EU nations can't just isolate it and bar it's citizens from entry. There is no expulsion from the EU AFAIK. But Lemmy instances can block another instance fairly easily and unilaterally - like how nations can refuse visa to citizens of a rogue nation. And Lemmy instanced are expected to federate with most other instances, just like countries are expected to grant visas to most other countries - unlike joining the EU, which is a whole big process and all EU members have to agree (there are no vetoes in Lemmy federation).
But most importantly, the EU members are required to act as one in many circumstances - most laws apply across all EU members, EU negotiates trade deals as a block, etc. That is not true for Lemmy instances. Each is completely independent and makes its own laws - and must only comply with some very loose principles (which boil down to "don't be a total jerk") to not be isolated from other instances. This is much closer to the kind of independence countries have, than EU members.