this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
258 points (97.1% liked)
Fediverse
28547 readers
604 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Newbie here and apologies if these are FAQs but just want one line answers
What's an instance?
What's a community?
What are federations?
Whats the difference between all these?
What's mastodon?
What's Kbin?
What's ActivityPub?
Just jargon I'm trying to get my head around, I'm still confused on signing up to different communities?! I guess and yeah.. a bit lost I suppose. If there are FAQs to all this please direct me to them, thanks!
What’s an instance?
An instance is a server running the Lemmy software (or some other federation software such as Mastodon, Kbin, Pixelfed, and others). Instances can talk together (similarly to how you can send email from gmail.com to outlook.com), so you can sign up on one instance and subscribe and comment to communities on other instances
What’s a community?
A community is to Lemmy what a subreddit is to Reddit. on
What are federations?
Federation is the machanism allowing different instances (servers) to talk together. Federation is automatic, so two instances becomes federated, when you as a user on one instance subscribe to a community on a different instance
Whats the difference between all these?
Many instances are general but have somewhat different values and rules for what you can post or not. "lemmy.world" is a good choice for a general instance. There are also topic specific instances, such as "mander.xyz" that is science focused.
What’s mastodon?
Mastodon is like twitter but is part of the federated universe (the "fediverse").
What’s Kbin?
Kbin - like Lemmy - is like Reddit. The impelemntation is different and focuses on different fetures. Some (myself included) like Kbin more than Lemmy - others the other way around.
What’s ActivityPub?
ActivityPub is the common technical protocol that allows all of the software in the Fediverse to talk together. Both Mastodon, Kbin and Lemmy (and others) are build "on top" of the ActivityPub protocol.
Hope this helps
I'm just not sure about how much I like that on kbin, upvotes and downvotes are publicly viewable. I don't mind publicly viewable comments of course... but your votes? Eesh.
Sorry about the reddit link. It's old.reddit though: https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/14gyay8/on_kbin_upvotes_downvotes_are_public/
I tend to agree, though it should be noted that the public access to vote information is part of the current backend and Kbins frontend just makes it available for everyone to see. WefWef for example also shows your point totals ("karma") on Lemmy and I'm sure many other 3rd party apps will too.
Someone raised this issue on the Lemmy GitHub today but it's unclear what stance the Devs will take.