I get it's like an aggregate of sites, but is it like it's own network kind of thing, where each site pulls from each other, or more like each site is a home, with windows to see into the other homes? and is it exclusive to just social media, or are there other uses for it?
I feel like I just got the hang of it, so here let me try:
Imagine you live in a city (the internet). There are a bunch of good samaritans who have built massive houses (instances like kbin.social, mastodon.social, Lemmy.world, peertube etc.) that can host tons of people and also give you the construction plan for the houses, so you can choose to make your own kbin.bustanutella if you want to. Just because you're in a different house than your friends doesn't mean you can't communicate or interact with them. You don't even need to be a member of the same house to interact with them or any posts from their home. All that needs to happen is that both your house and your friends house need to agree to open their windows to each other, which is pretty standard as instances usually federate with each other freely unless an instance does something bad (spam, violating ToS, etc.)
So now, when your friend takes a shit on the floor of his house (makes a post), you get to see it and interact with it from the comfort of your own home. To interact with your friends, you would go to your own home and look through the window (login on your instance and search for the community URL or friend URL)
From all the use cases so far, it does seem like it is social media right now, but I don't see why it can't expand to other areas once adopted by enough people.
That really helps, thanks :) There are still some things I would like to better understand though. If I'm in a house, it's easy to see which windows are open and it's obvious when I'm looking through a window at a different house. How does that work in reality?
For example, here we are on kbin.social looking at this post on ELI5. If my friend is on Lemmy.world will they see this post in their ELI5 or do they have to know to visit kbin.social to see it? If they are looking for good explanations of how the fediverse works, how would they come across this post? Do they have to look on every instance until they happen to find it here?
So if i make a comment on a post from lemmy.world from my sh.itjust.works account, does it get saved on lemmy world server or this server?
Afaik it get saved in sh.itjust.works server. So that means lemmy.world have to look in this server to find my comment. It has to look in 100s of instances to see if someone from there made a comment to this. Kind of inefficient right?
The Fediverse is a network of services. It is an agreement to communication between platforms.
Services can be groups of services with different themes and types of content.
Some people may create text-only services. They split into three groups of people, and each group hosts their own services that join the Fediverse. They then link each other and share their content and users. You can see and subscribe to and talk with users of the other servers.
Another group thinks text-only is stupid. They create a service that only hosts images. No text allowed. They join the Fediverse too.
Now both groups services are part of the Fediverse. They communicate and share content through the same kind of protocol, the same kind of agreements.
But does it make sense to mix text-only and picture-only services? Those that initially set out to create either may want a pure experience. They may present a split and separate experience to their users. But others may like both approaches, for an intentional, interesting form of content and discussion. They may create a service that combines the other two. In it, you can see and participate in both of the other kinds of services.
Every website follows same principles regarding the form of user content published there. When user publishes something, the website shows it as html and also includes this in a public channel in a form that’s easy to consume by machines.
Other websites can listen to that channel and include posts on their own so people see content made elsewhere.
If server A listens to server B and C they are federated. When none of them listens to server D because they all think the owners of that server are assholes, server D is what we call: defedarated.
On Mastodon servers usually don’t include all the content of other servers (using a relay) but just to channels of people who are followed by someone on the instance.
This has some disadvantages like when you don’t see all the comments on someone’s profile if that someone is on another instance.
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