• stormageddon@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I agree, but the whole “instances” and federation stuff can be overwhelming for the average user. As long as enough power users and content creators make the move, then Lemmy has a good shot long-term.

    • masked_nybbles@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Countries such as the U.S.A., Canada, Mexico, and agreements such as the E.U. among others are federated within themselves; the ones mentioned also possess what are called federal governments.

      This may be one of those things people where people may have at least some vague understanding of a concept but not the term for it.

      A few definitions:

      federation n: an organization formed by merging several groups or parties

      federation n: a union of political organizations [syn: confederation, confederacy, federation]

      federation n: the act of constituting a political unity out of a number of separate states or colonies or provinces so that each member retains the management of its internal affairs

      People, aside from the homeless, generally have an address in one or more countries, and remain under the authority of whichever country they happen to be living or traveling in. Likewise, people have — in this case, need — an address to interact here. Rather than get imprisoned in a country, a person simply gets banned from an instance. Like countries in the E.U., instances choose whether they want to continue to cooperate and stay within some agreement. A large difference between something like applications built on ActivityPub and the federation of countries, states, provinces, or territories mentioned above is the lack of a central federal government.

      Rather than use Email as example, why don’t we use federation amongst more familiar organizations as example? Why aren’t we explaining Email like that?