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
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.
Do 5 year olds have email? Because it's kind of like that. You have an email address "someone@gmail.com" and you can send a message to "person2@hotmail.com". 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 your_name_here@kbin.social. You can talk to otherguy@lemmy.ml. 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.
@JonEFive@s804 really? Kbin uses @ to identify it's a magazine, when every other platform on the 'verse (GNU Social, Friendica, Lemmy, etc.) uses ! to identify that its a group?
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 ( !technology ) 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 @jonefive@kbin.social ( @jonefive ) takes me to /u/@jonefive but it should be /u/jonefive
@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.ce as 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).
Wondering if this has something to do with why kbin isn’t federating properly with some groups. That and the case sensitivity thing. !3d_printing does not work on kbin.social no matter how I try to search or format the url.
@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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
@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.
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).
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: Lemmy
Instances 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.
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
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.
Fediverse is essentially the infrustructure that lemmy is built on (see also mastodon, kbin, etc). It's a way of decentralizing a platform. Essentially, imagine if reddit had a bunch of separately and independently hosted websites that shared content with each other. That's what lemmy is. And it is distributed and built on the "fediverse" or federated universe.
Add comment