Hello World!
First off, better late than never: Happy Halloween!
Sorry we’ve been a bit quiet lately. But we love you, promises given! We’re just working on a lot of things, and most of us are very busy with their daily lives lately. We’ll be back with you to announce some of our projects tomorrow. <3
Lately, and gladly, here’s a grand thanks to @[email protected] for giving us an amazing Halloween icon!
is there a picture on what Federation does?
like how does my post on lemmy.world go to lemmy.ml
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This is a great infographic!
I forgot about Beehaw. I guess they chose to stay defederated from Lemmy.world?
Yes, there is on wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse#/media/File:Fediverse_branches_1.2.png
But the Fediverse is bigger than what you are asking on the lemmy.world and lemmy.ml. The Fediverse is an umbrella for all of the different types of social media that are connected sometimes loosely and sometimes directly. The picture I just linked above shows all those different types. For example, Mastodon is like Twitter, Lemmy is like Reddit and Peertube is like youtube. When I say they’re like the other social media, I mean that. They’re not the same but loosely similar.
lemmy.world and lemmy.ml are different instances (aka, servers hosted by someone). This means that Ruud, the head admin of lemmy.world has all the servers for lemmy.world and someone else has all of the servers for lemmy.ml. Since they’re both federated and a lemmy type (meaning forum), they copy all of the posts from each other onto their own servers. There are different rules for that and that’s getting more into the weeds and I’m not sure, but that’s the basics.
Again, there are different rules for a Mastodon type or a Peertube type on how they communicate with a Lemmy type. Just keep that in mind. I hope that helps but feel free to ask more questions.
You could read a long explanation, if you’d like, but the email analogy also somewhat works.
In the same way you can email someone with another email address, you can write messages on a community on another instance. They “federate” posts together.
IMO, unless you care about federation, which the average person doesn’t, that’s all you really need to know.
There is no magic, the servers just send it to each other.
So you send your post to LW, they store it and show it on their website. But they also send it to all the other Fediverse servers they are connected to (aka “federated with”), so those can also show it to their users. The same thing happens when a post is updated or deleted, or when new votes come in. The servers just send each other messages about what changed, so they can all act accordingly.