fediverse?
Once upon a time, people thought that it would be fun to have a place to learn and play and talk together, and the more people that came, the better they would all learn from each other. So they got together and built this place in one fixed spot. And they DID learn from each other, and it was fun and amazing. But some people were greedy and wanted to control all of it so that they could feel like they were better than everyone else. These greedy people forced the people to give them more and more money to be able to use the spot. The bad guys would treat the people who wanted to have fun badly, and use information about them against them. This made people sad.
Then one day, somebody said, “Hey, why can’t we just have a bunch of little spots, so that nobody can hold us hostage?”
But the other people were afraid they wouldn’t be able to play with some of their friends or learn from other people if everybody was separated. Until some people came up with the idea that all these small communities could agree to share everything they were doing with each other, small spot to small spot. Nobody owned all the spots now, and people were free to choose spots that were more convenient for them, without having to be afraid that others wouldn’t be there, because all the small spots still made one big spot!
And that dear, is basically the fediverse in a nutshell. Now go to sleep, you have a big day tomorrow. tuck tuck
This is how I’m explaining the Fediverse to everyone from now on. This is perfect.
Really? Cause this explanation doesn’t actually explain anything, but certainly provides us with an enemy ‘evil money guys’.
The more I think about it, I think this dumb talking-down explanation just muddies the water.
I mean, this is Explain Like I’m Five. I feel the goal would be to dumb it down as much as possible and I feel that this is a very good, if somewhat cheeky, way of explaining the very very basics of the Fediverse.
Is this missing a lot of nuance? Of course. But everyone having a bunch of different spots that can’t be held to some “bad guy’s” standards while all those spots are still able to share and talk to each other, is a very good way to explain to someone who has no understanding of instances and servers and especially if you needed to explain it to a 5 year old.
Thanks, exactly. If somebody had just said “Explain it to me” it would have been a much different explanation. But “explain like I’m FIVE”… well, I explained it in ways a five year old would relate to. Experience: Parent whose children used to be smol.
This is beautiful
I don’t necessarily have the best understanding either, but I’ll give it a shot.
The fediverse is a federated universe, which means lots of servers can talk to each other (like a federation of people) instead of all being centralized in one company and their servers. It’s like how email is a common way to talk to each other, even though there are different groups with different versions.
Lemmy is the Reddit like portion of the fediverse. There are other parts, such as Mastodon, which is like Twitter. These can talk to each other a bit too, but right now they mostly talk within themselves.
Servers like vbin, sh.itjust.works, Lemmy world, Lemmy.ml, and many others are computers that store the information on Lemmy. They keep track of how many upvotes, text, links, and sometimes content hosting. But because there are a lot of them, and anyone can easily make their own, it’s harder for a company like Reddit to just ruin it all for profit.
@JohnDClay @s804 as with so many things, Wikipedia is a great place to start. It can be over whelming to wrap your head around, until you realize oh #ItWorksLikeEmail
Lemmy is the Reddit like portion of the fediverse.
Don’t forget about #kbin which has both “reddit subs like” functions (magazines) and “twitter like” functions (microblogs). And all are linked to lemmy and mastondon instances, or whatever else in the fediverse.
Do 5 year olds have email? Because it’s kind of like that. You have an email address “[email protected]” and you can send a message to “[email protected]”. You don’t both have to be on Gmail.
Well fediverse apps are kind of like this. Imagine lots of little reddits with their own communities and user bases.
You are [email protected]. You can talk to [email protected]. Same goes for magazines/communities (subreddits). If you want to join a magazine on another server, you can do that like @technology (notice the leading @ symbol which tells Kbin that it’s a magazine and not a user).
This is what is most important for the average user to understand about the fediverse. There is a ton more than this like interoperability with different apps that aren’t thread based like Kbin and Lemmy like Mastodon but that’s a different discussion.
Edit: The community link should probably start with an ! as suggested by @fu but there is a known issue with formatting presently: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/199
Ok, I had to play with this a bit to try to see what’s going on because I have seen the ! notation elsewhere as well. It looks like if I type !community@instance ( [email protected] ) it creates a link automatically but it takes me to /m/!community instead of just /m/community. If I use @community@instance ( @technology ) it takes me to /m/community. Interestingly though, the @ notation looks like it also works for users but also has the odd problem of including the @ symbol in the link when the address isn’t expecting it @[email protected] ( @jonefive ) takes me to /u/@jonefive but it should be /u/jonefive
Edit: There’s an issue logged for this: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/199
@JonEFive @s804 I know Mastodon doesn’t recognize the !. Using the @ will let you comment on posts from a community you are following, (and all posts to the community show as if the community “user” re-tooted them all in your feed), but posting original posts from Mastodon doesn’t work well. It used to not work at all, since Mastodon implemented the ActivityPubl implementation for Title “wrong” (a title from another instance shows as a Content warning on Mastodon, and posting a Content warning on mastodon doesn’t show like a title anywhere unless they have software specifically designed to recognize its from mastodon and handle it differently) I know there had been a lemmy change to specifically use the first line of a toot from mastodon to
@communityname@instan.ceas a title to a new post, but I have only seen it ever look like garbage. Even though Mastodon is by far the most popular platfrom on the 'verse its really the least feature rich. Even the granddaddy of them all (GNU Social) has more features, though the code isn’t regularly maintained (v3 being released feels like “when Covid is over” level of never).@s804 @JonEFive my understanding is #Kbin is the new kid on the block, with lots of promise, one of the reasons i created a different kbin.social account weeks ago. My understanding is that original implementation had been done only in Polish from within Poland and is just now reaching the rest of the world.
Wondering if this has something to do with why kbin isn’t federating properly with some groups. That and the case sensitivity thing. [email protected] does not work on kbin.social no matter how I try to search or format the url.
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@s804
it’s a cool protocol that many platforms use in order to allow any user on them to communicate with each other. Kbin is one of them. Friendica is another one. Hello from Friendica!Disregard what I said, I didn’t really see which magazine I was in. Basically it is a term describing multiple social media platforms, with various use cases, that can talk with each other using ActivityPub - a web protocol (kind of a language in layman terms) that allows them to do it.
- Here’s an image showing you how that would look like (And here’s the source of it. It has a really simple, but comprehensive explanation).
- A great website if you want to learn more and discover more platforms in this regard is this one.
As I said in the strikethrough text above, I am on such a platform myself. Hello from Friendica! 😁
it can be used for others (like posting to mail lists, or forums that have integrated mail support)
it can be used for others (like posting to mail lists, or forums that have integrated mail support)The only time I ever actually used twitter regularly was >10 years ago when I accessed it via email by sending email commands to a server tweetymail.com but alas they shut down long before the recent API changes to Titter. Before that I had also access it via XMPP/JAbber, I think that was native support (like they PROMISED they wold continue to do via SMS forever) but I"m not sure, could have been someone elses’ implementation of the OpenAPI. Perfect examples of why we need to use actual #FreeSoftware (like Friendica) and DEMAND IT, so users can fork it at any time for any reason, rather than celebrating OpenAPI.
If your house is your local computer, the place that you’re accessing from (kbin.social) is like the post office in your town. You know how email addresses follow the format <user>@<hostname>? The same kind of thing is taking place here - kbin.social is it’s own place, you log in there, and it has a local ability to moderate your posts and what you see.
The difference with ActivityPub is that instead of only seeing the mail that was delivered to you and knowing nothing about what other people’s email looks like, you see the whole “town square” of kbin, and events in cities that it’s connected to as well. Depending on what software is being run, that can be presented in different ways, because ActivityPub is flexible and focuses mostly on the idea of “sharing and subscribing to events” - it doesn’t say what the interface has to look like.
kbin makes it look like reddit, but things happening on kbin are also represented on, for example, Mastodon. When I look at kbin’s “Microblog” tab it shows a lot of accounts that I am familiar with from Mastodon. They don’t live here, they aren’t posting here, but they’re “federated” here and you can interact with them.
Fediverse is based on a distributed protocoll, where everyone can join. It gives alternatives to most known “social media” service silos like:
- pixelfed : instagram
- mastodon : twitter
- Lemmy : reddit …
Go ahead and use a search engine ;)
The Fediverse is a collection of websites running different kind of social media software that are able to communicate with each other similar to email via a protocol called ActivityPub (and a few others).
I’m just wrapping my head around it myself.
From what I got Kbin is an instance of Lemmy and Lemmy part of the Fediverse. The Fediverce is made up of a bunch of different types of social platforms.
eg:
Microblogging: Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey
Blogging: Write.as, Read.as
Video hosting: Peertube
Audio hosting: Funkwhale
Image hosting: Pixelfed
Link aggregator: LemmyInstances are those platforms being hosted by a user. It’s like their own personal reddit. They get to make their own rules and stuff. The cool thing is all the instances can talk to each other. And you can choose to communicate the other instances.
There’s more to it but I don’t really understand everything.
Watch this: https://savjee.be/videos/simply-explained/mastodon-and-fediverse-explained/
Kbin is not Lemmy, it’s a separate software. See kbin.pub.
Hmm, I’m seeing kbin.social just like usual subs, is it just built on a different architecture? What’s the difference?
It’s a different architecture and codebase, but it uses activitypub, which is what the whole fediverse is built on, so you should be able to interact with it from any other system that uses the same protocol
@AbstractLinguist @JohnDClay @s804 @Tigbitties @BaldProphet and it looks like lemmy to you because you are on lemmy. I’m on Friendica, which is why this whole post looks like Friendica even though there is contents in it from lemmy, Kbin Friendica, and even Wordpress. It like deciding to join a subreddit on your facebook profile, and it just works.
It’s actually super cool to see my comment from a completely different platform! A great example of federation at work.
Let’s say each planet is its own “codebase”. Lemmy is a planet, Mastodon is a planet, Pixelfed is a planet, Kbin is a planet.
shitjustworks, lemmy.world, lemmy.ml (maintained by the creators of Lemmy), beehaw.org - these are all like separate countries on the Lemmy planet, each with its own unique citizens. They use the same Lemmy codebase, but are separate instances controlled by separate people. Anyone, even you, is allowed to use the Lemmy codebase and make and control their own instance. That’s why beehaw can break off and have tighter rules. It’s the fediverse working as intended
kbin.social, karab.in, fedia.io - these are all instances of the Kbin codebase. Kbin’s a bit different because it can interact with link aggregators (like Lemmy) and microbloggers AKA Twitter posting (like Mastodon). Conversely, Lemmy can only interact with link aggregators. This is because Kbin and Lemmy are 2 completely separate codebases developed and maintained by different people
And in this example, the fediverse itself would be like an inter-galactic network that connects all of the planets and its countries to one another
Hope this helps. Beautifully illustrated:
It’s the backend a bunch of smaller social media sites use, allowing them to all communicate. For non-technical users, you shouldn’t have to worry about it too much, but it’s useful in allowing all these small sites to have far more content then they would if they couldn’t communicate.
You can send a letter OR a package OR pictures OR a birthday card, etc through the standard mail.
Big corporations lead you to believe that only MAIL could go their service X or PACKAGES go through service Y. Both could NOT go through the same, because they wanted to make MONEY.
Fediverse is the open service that proves them wrong. And it needs YOUR help to survive and thrive by putting your content into the fediverse and not those walled gardens.
- Lemmy & KBin - Reddit alternative
- Owncast - Twitch alternative
- Mastodon & Pleroma - Twitter alternative
- Peertube - Youtube alternative
- Funkwhale - Music Spotify like alternative
- Pixelfed - Instagram alt
- Diaspora - Facebook
And you could build and host your own. It’s open for EVERYONE.
