I don’t think many people understand that if they use Lemmy or kbin, they are posting to the fediverse. There are other platforms and will be more to come. Referring to a post on “Lemmy” or “kbin” is like saying you saw a post on your Windows or Mac computer.

We should be referring to it as…

  • I saw it on the fediverse.
  • Hey fediverse users …
  • A thread on the fediverse…

New terms may emerge but referring to the platform seems weird, almost ignorant.

edit: A better example is email. You wouldn’t assume everyone is on Hotmail because that is the email provider you use. You say I’m sendingan eamail, not I’m sending a Hotmail.

  • richard_wagner@lemmy.world
    2·
    1 year ago

    Awesome, the comment you linked was super helpful. Thanks!

    To summarize for my own understanding:

    • the federation protocols (whatever they are) dictate that data is replicated across instances. So my data could be stored in multiple DBs. No one person owns it. (So I should be careful what I post 😅)
    • If my instance goes down, I won’t be able to use my account created on that instance
    • If another instance goes down, I’ll be able to read older posts from that instance, but maybe not newer ones since they won’t be reliably be replicated

    The main goal with the fediverse right now is traction, so we should just be focusing on using it as much as possible and figure out sustainability later.

    • imaqtpieA
      1·
      1 year ago

      Yup, that all seems right.

      Totally agree, once we have a strong, sustainable community in place, all of the theoretical issues can be fixed as they pop up. The flexibility of federation gives us a lot of options in terms of developing the platform. We don’t have to be locked into one vision or plan, different instances can create their own solutions and servers can learn from each other in terms of what seems to be working best.

      I get so excited every time I start talking about where this platform is headed 😊