tj

Elon Musk: “Hold my beer”

It is indeed. Main consequence of this is that if you join a new or small instance, you will see less of the fediverse without actively seeking it

By that logic, how do you learn to talk? Before you understand language, no one can explain the meaning of words to you.

I imagine this happens the same way. You “bootstrap” language by introducing a few touch signs and go from there.

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

DYI NAS (mini-itx mobo with on-board atom chip and 8 GB ram and zfs) running:

• ssh (SCP/sshfs shared)
• smb
• jellyfin
• syncthing
• dovecot
• rclone for pull backups from Google drove, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc.
• restic for backing everything up to backblaze + azure

Intel NUC running:

• zwavejs
• deconz / phoscon

Intel NUC (DMZ) running:

• wireguard
• home assistant
• Doods (object detection for home assistant camera entities
• mosquitto mqtt
• unifi controller
• AdGuardHome
• roundcube email
• nginx reverse proxy for all services + hosting some static sites