Candelestine

Why YSK: Because intuitive explanations are few and far between, and the technical explanations often present too many "trees" and not enough "forest", which is just how technically-minded people are trained to approach things. Forests are, after all, made of trees, and it's not their fault we don't care about individual "trees". This then, is my unprofessional attempt to consolidate everything I've read over the past three days into one, easy-to-understand explanation of how all this shit works in lay-person's terms. Due to my amateur background, I may have details incorrect, and I would request that anyone who catches anywhere where I have made a mistake, even a small detail, to please correct me. I will also include a few links to my best sources at the bottom. tl;dr style explanations will be included after every paragraph in parenthesis. So, let's begin:

Imagine you have reddit. Fantastic, it's a giant forum composed of a whole bunch of smaller, sub-forums. But let's take this one step further. Why have just one reddit? Why can't we have lots of reddits, each capable of having its own complete set of subs, where each reddit is independent of every other one and has its own web address? Okay, let's do this, and push it to the extreme. Let's make it so everyone can make their own reddit, even individuals. So you, if you wanted, could set up your own complete reddit, with just you in it. You could have all the subs, r/TIL, r/TIHI, r/pics, etc etc, all with just you in them. You have total control! But you have no content and are probably pretty lonely, right? We'll get to that. Let's call this Self-Hosting though.

(So, we now have a situation where many whole reddits can individually exist, each in the vacuum of space.)

Now let's fix that content and loneliness problem. What if we allowed each reddit to communicate and share content with every other reddit, similar to how subs can communicate with each other? Boom. We just created a spider-webbed network, of countless individual reddits, each composed of subs, that can now all share content back and forth. Let's call this big spiderweb an over-reddit, to contrast it with subreddits.

(Now instead of a two-tier system of isolated reddits and their subs, we have a three-tier system, of over-reddit [the "Lemmy-verse"], reddits [Lemmys or Instances or Servers], and subs [communities or sub-lemmies].)

But, we actually have a technical problem. How do these individual reddits find each other? How do they know the other ones even exist? They could be on servers on opposite sides of the planet, with random web addresses. Obviously we can't just guess. So, okay, let's let users solve this for us via crowd-sourced labor. We don't have to find all the reddits for them. Let's just design the system so that the reddits only find out about each other after any random-ass user introduces them to each other. We'll call this batching, they can do it with the reddit search bar. Then, we'll wait for that random-ass user to actually subscribe to any new sub/community over there, which they'll only do if it's any good. Once this is done, now the two reddits and that one sub become connected, not just for that user, but their whole reddit userbase too. The rando doing the search and subscribing simply introduced two good reddits to each other. Now that they know about each other though, they'll share content back and forth freely, with comments, votes and posts all being visible to both reddits. Let's call this "federating with each other". It's not too different from neurons in the brain reaching out to each other, really.

(To find and connect the disparate, scattered reddits into our over-reddit, we use crowd-sourced labor.)

Well, that's it. That's the Lemmy-verse. But what about this Fediverse? Well, okay, remember what we did with reddit, and giving it a third tier of over-reddit? Let's do the same exact thing with twitter, facebook, youtube and every other thing we can pull out of our asses. Let's let all of them share and access each other's content with the exact same structure and system, so now you, hanging out in your reddit, can get all the tweets too. We've made a fourth tier now. The Fediverse, which is most comparable to the internet itself, and includes the Mastadon-verse, the PeerTube-verse, etc etc.

(Why stop there...? reddit is chump change, let's just do this to everything.)

So, that's it in a nutshell. That's how this shit works. And the next time someone says it's like email, I'm going to climb through their computer screen and smack them. It's only like email at that technical, "trees" level, and when you go up to the more intuitive "forest" level, this just serves to confuse the ever-living hell out of everyone.

(I'm a bit of a dick.)

One last detail: Admins can whitelist (allow-list) or blacklist (shadowban) other Instances/servers. As an example, one of the other largest Instances has blacklisted (shadowbanned) us here at lemmy.world, because we were producing too much spam. As a result, until they undo this, all of us here are shadowbanned from their Instance/server. We can see their content, they can't see ours. This enables them to control how much connection they have to the rest of the Fediverse.

(Let's not forget to give admins the power to stop people from other places bothering them, if they do not approve of the content. Very important feature.)

Sources: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/01-getting-started.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(software) https://github.com/amirzaidi/lemmy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36387939

Again, if I've made any errors, regardless of how small, please let me know below. This is intended to be another reference material for lay-people, so accuracy is important. However, outside of major errors, I will not be editing this post to correct it, as I would prefer any corrections to be delivered from the full perspective of someone's individual expertise, instead of being translated into my own words.

(I don't actually know what I'm talking about. Scroll down for people who do.)

Hope this helps.

edit for grammar/cleanup

Not a traditional reaction vid, this is actually a longform interview with a US veteran from the war in Afghanistan, about his experiences returning to civilian life. I believe it qualifies as a video essay as it tries to put forward a cohesive picture, and even a subtle argument--for understanding of veterans' experiences when they try to come home from war.

The anime and its representations of the challenges faced by ex-soldiers, being the central focus of the interview, allows it to serve as a contextual bridge of sorts. This helps people who have seen the show try to understand these perspectives and experiences they hopefully will never need to truly know for themselves.

Content Warning: audio of an Incoming Alarm siren, audio of a rocket attack, discussion of military violence, discussion of suicide, others.

Ever wanted to know more about military budgets, and all the things that can go wrong with them? Perun has got you covered, after the Ukraine invasion he pivoted from a video game channel to a channel full of hourlong powerpoint presentations on military-industrial topics, from a top-level view.

Why does military equipment cost so much? Why is Poland purchasing South Korean tanks? Why does China like missiles so much? He's got a broad range of videos tackling many of the tackle-able military/budgetary/geopolitical questions you might have ever asked yourself. This is the channel for defense procurement analysis.

Why YSK: We have a significant number of users now, and yet the amount of content to scroll through is still fairly small. This is because not all users are the same, and while the majority prefer to lurk, and a much smaller minority prefer to comment, the percentage that really likes making posts, memes, art, rants, videos etc is extremely small.

One way that we can all assist with this is to simply make content ourselves. But even if you don't want to do that, you can still help by finding productive creators elsewhere on the internet and telling them about us.

Many reddit users are still simply unaware that we exist. They don't know that there is a community of consumers here, waiting for content. They don't know that if you can navigate reddit, then you can navigate this. Lemmy is just not as complicated as it can sound at first.

So, if you want, simply invite them. Give them a link to a community down here that would fit the content they like to produce, and let them know we'd love to have them. Because we really would love to have them. Let them know that you, as a fan, would love to see them here. After all, wouldn't you?

Thanks for reading.

Sweet, a video game sub I can participate in.

So, I remember reading a slew of disappointing sounding complaints after release. Remembering the state the original dropped in, I just got sad and decided I'd check back in later.

Well, it's later now. Have they been patching like madmen? Is it as good as it should've been by now?

I would watch them from time to time before this, usually on a subject I already had a degree of interest in. This video was the first that made me realize they were a form of entertainment unto themselves, not just an educational tool though.

Hello Swedish friends.

I've been told before that Sweden cannot supply the Gripen fighters to Ukraine due to the country being at war.

While I understand the purposes and reasonings behind such a law, I was wondering if there is much of any talk within Sweden of changing this. Is it something the average Swedish citizen would have an opinion on? Is it debated?

I recently read that Ukrainians will be undergoing fighter training in Sweden. Does that mean the policy is potentially changing, and they will be receiving these much better-suited jets than the ones we Americans can sell them?

Thank you.