Why YSK: Because intuitive explanations are few and far between, and the technical explanations often present too many ā€œtreesā€ and not enough ā€œforestā€, which is just how technically-minded people are trained to approach things. Forests are, after all, made of trees, and itā€™s not their fault we donā€™t care about individual ā€œtreesā€. This then, is my unprofessional attempt to consolidate everything Iā€™ve read over the past three days into one, easy-to-understand explanation of how all this shit works in lay-personā€™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, letā€™s begin:

Imagine you have reddit. Fantastic, itā€™s a giant forum composed of a whole bunch of smaller, sub-forums. But letā€™s take this one step further. Why have just one reddit? Why canā€™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, letā€™s do this, and push it to the extreme. Letā€™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? Weā€™ll get to that. Letā€™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 letā€™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. Letā€™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 ā€œLemmy-verseā€], 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 canā€™t just guess. So, okay, letā€™s let users solve this for us via crowd-sourced labor. We donā€™t have to find all the reddits for them. Letā€™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. Weā€™ll call this batching, they can do it with the reddit search bar. Then, weā€™ll wait for that random-ass user to actually subscribe to any new sub/community over there, which theyā€™ll only do if itā€™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, theyā€™ll share content back and forth freely, with comments, votes and posts all being visible to both reddits. Letā€™s call this ā€œfederating with each otherā€. Itā€™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, thatā€™s it. Thatā€™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? Letā€™s do the same exact thing with twitter, facebook, youtube and every other thing we can pull out of our asses. Letā€™s let all of them share and access each otherā€™s content with the exact same structure and system, so now you, hanging out in your reddit, can get all the tweets too. Weā€™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 thereā€¦? reddit is chump change, letā€™s just do this to everything.)

So, thatā€™s it in a nutshell. Thatā€™s how this shit works. And the next time someone says itā€™s like email, Iā€™m going to climb through their computer screen and smack them. Itā€™s only like email at that technical, ā€œtreesā€ level, and when you go up to the more intuitive ā€œforestā€ level, this just serves to confuse the ever-living hell out of everyone.

(Iā€™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 canā€™t see ours. This enables them to control how much connection they have to the rest of the Fediverse.

(Letā€™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 Iā€™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 someoneā€™s individual expertise, instead of being translated into my own words.

(I donā€™t actually know what Iā€™m talking about. Scroll down for people who do.)

Hope this helps.

edit for grammar/cleanup

  • yaaaaayPancakes@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    Ā·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    This is a great writeup, but if someone could elaborate on how a piece of content in the Lemmyverse gets into the Mastadon-verse, and how interaction on that piece of content in both -verses is handled across the verses, I would appreciate it.

    From what Iā€™ve seen, it sounds like since everything in the fediverse shares the ActivityPub APIs under the hood, itā€™s possible to share the same piece of content across verses. But I canā€™t wrap my head around how interactions with the content across -verses is possible.

    • warmaster@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      Ā·
      1 year ago

      Imagine a UN gathering with government officials of different countries speaking English as common language, simultaneously CNN of each country streams the translated message in local language.

      Same thing happens between different Fediverse apps. Within the app, the info is stored differently, but it gets mapped to the common ActivityPub fields.

      You will fully grasp this concept after a quick read of this page on how does Bookwyrm interact with Mastodon:

      https://docs.joinbookwyrm.com/activitypub.html