OC Explaining the Fediverse as a Redditor

This is just a reiteration of a comment I left on an earlier, probably more useful article, but I’m posting as its own article for visibility. I hope it can help make sense of the fediverse to at least a few more of my fellow migrants.

Basically, rather than having one Reddit with a bunch of subreddits, you have a bunch of Reddits each with their own set of subreddits. Each Reddit operates with its own admin, features, UX, etc. so you just join any Reddit that feels good to you.

Let’s say you make your account on “Reddit.one” because not only do they have killer memes, they also have a dark mode!

What makes the fediverse so great is that you don’t have to worry that “Reddit.two” actually has a far more active r/gaming community than Reddit.one, or that “Reddit.three” has the only r/catsatwork subreddit on the fediverse, because you can actually just subscribe to those subreddits from Reddit.one anyway. Now you can have r/memes as well as r/gaming@reddit.two and r/catsatwork@reddit.three all in your feed at Reddit.one with dark mode on!
Some reddits even let you follow your favorite twitter personalities as well!

It would be like being able subscribe directly to 4chan’s /b/ and then follow elon musk’s Twitter account directly from Reddit and vice versa. I don’t know why you would actually want to do those terrible things, but you’d have the freedom to do it at least.

Now imagine if Reddit.one’s administrator goes all u/spez on everybody and you just can’t even anymore. You can easily jump ship over to Reddit.two, or any other Reddit you prefer, and resub to all your favorite subreddits again. it would be like you never left.

Hope this helps. Feel free to set me straight on some points or just post your own explanation in the comments.

TLDR: Lots of different Reddits. You join the Reddit you like, but you can subscribe to any of the other Reddits’ subreddits as well!

Anon2971, (edited )
Anon2971 avatar

Great explanation! Really well written and clearly explained. However...

Forgive my bluntness, but people not into tech tend to be lazy and stupid about everything lol. I feel like they'd take one glance at that, think TOO MUCH TEXT, not read it properly and still complain about the Fediverse being confusing.

Any kind of attempt at explaining the Fediverse seems to really confuse people, so IMO the best solution is to not even bring it up. Kinda dismiss it as no biggie, then sneak in a quick explanation at the end. Here's my go:

"If the word 'Fediverse' confuses or scares you, ignore it. Just join any Lemmy instance you like the look of. They all work more or less like Reddit. If you can't find a community/subreddit you want on one, make it yourself.

Or, alternatively, use this to see if one exists already. If it does, you can copy the community Lemmy address (it appears on the right in blue under the 'create a post' button in a form like '!linux'), search for it on your site's search, then subscribe like you would any other subreddit.

That cross-site subscribing is what the Fediverse is about - it's a bunch of small, independent Reddit-ish clones cross-talking. But since they're small, they're struggling and slightly breaking with Reddit refugees at the moment. I'd recommend local communities only for now. Join the commuities you find via Feddit in maybe a few weeks or so once everything's calmed down."

chicane,

I dont see any blue text on the right, am i doing something wrong? Do you need to be logged into a lemmy instance for it to show? I'm using kbin, so it might be that? the only 'link' i can see if the full http web address to the Lemmy instance

BobRoberts,

That search engine is exactly what I have been looking for!

dryak,
@dryak@mstdn.science avatar

@Eggyhead nice explainer.

matthieu_xyz,
@matthieu_xyz@piaille.fr avatar

@Eggyhead
What I love with this twitter/4chan/reddit example is that among others Wordpress, Tumblr and instagram are working on implementing ActivityPub.

There is a very real possible future where a Tumblr user will reblog a wordpress article and an instagramer will see it and reply to it.

vitaminwater247,
vitaminwater247 avatar

and resub to all your favorite subreddits again.

this will be a ux deal breaker for many people. no one ever ways to remember what subs they have and on what servers they are on. people can only remember they have one account or profile (hopefully one that is permanent and they have self-sovereignty over), and they shouldn't even need to know or keep track of what server has what. let all that server information stay under the hood. people just want to drive and communicate with others.

SamurottX,

The easiest solution might be to just add an option to export your list of subscriptions as a comma separated list, or some other plain text format. It's not completely seamless but moving to a different instance involves making a new account so there's no real way around some kind of export/transfer process.

Eggyhead,
Eggyhead avatar

Nice idea!

Eggyhead,
Eggyhead avatar

I hear you, still it’s better than just losing all the communities altogether when leaving the site. I personally wouldn’t want to have a singular account follow me across the fediverse, I feel like there’s a privacy security risk there.

Yoldark,

Making an import function by providing your account info would be a nice start to recover your account elsewhere.

rodhlann,
rodhlann avatar

I really wish there was a way to federate your user account. I think it'd be really neat to not have to worry about the instance admin being an ass. If I just owned all of my data, all of my subs, comments, etc, and could just interface across the fediverse with a single account, that would be the dream!

Don't need a different account for Mastodon and BookWyrm and Kbin, I just have one account and can access each of those things independently. And I own everything that I post or say, and maintain it myself.

Probably more than many casual users would want to be responsible for, but I love the idea!

I think I could hypothetically do this by creating my own personal Kbin instance, for example, but I think I'd want it to be even more granular!

vitaminwater247,
vitaminwater247 avatar

Have you checked out Nostr? Nostr works somewhat like that. You own your public/private keys. You sign in with your private key in different instances and your profile, your subs and everything follow you. That I think the Nostr relay model is superior to the Fediverse framework.

rodhlann,
rodhlann avatar

I haven't heard of that! I'll check it out, thanks!

Eggyhead,
Eggyhead avatar

If @christianselig were to make another app after Apollo, I'd want it to be something that does exactly this. Your account address would be something like @username@apollo.app or something, and the app would simply aggregate any feed you want from across the fediverse without needing to be its own community.

airlynx,

That is what I'm looking for, some way to own my own account. The comparisons have been made to email so why couldn't I just start my own server up to be airlynx@airlynx.social? I would have to buy my own domain but I would have to do that for email anyways. Kbin.social is where my account lives right now but in the surge and in my own exploration I've also created accounts on Mastodon.social and some random lemmy instance. Now that things are starting to settle down and I'm beginning to understand what I'm doing I kind of want to merge those accounts.

rodhlann,
rodhlann avatar

I definitely feel like that's the next major step for this technology. And for online ownership! Stop letting other people own your data. Own it yourself!

awh,

I'm worried that if I host my own server, I'll have to have stupid amounts of storage because it'll want to have copies of all of the fediverse on there.

MagicalVagina,

The main issue I see with that is the privacy issue. You can host your kbin instance with your own domain yes, but then everyone can see your domain after your username. And it becomes quite easy to doxx you then...

rodhlann,
rodhlann avatar

Could you not just spin up the same server at a different domain? If it's your own server that's not really hurting anyone other than people who follow you or your magazines directly (I'd probably do more commenting than creating, tbh)

MagicalVagina,

Not sure what you mean. Sure you can buy any domain and put it behind. But ultimately you are much easier to doxx. Between whois, server IP etc. Then there is the issue of the security on that server too, but that's another story. What would be better is to have a way to put this behind TOR/I2p, that would make things a bit better.
On a centralized website the issue is less present as only the admins of the server can see the details about you, ip etc (maybe mods can too on reddit, not sure), here everyone can see everything, it's a lot more invasive imho. Everytime you upvote/downvote something, your account handle is saved on the post as upvoter/downvoter. This is very juicy data to build profiles and analytics on people.

jclinares,
jclinares avatar

Will Kbin communities eventually show up in those explorers? Right now, it seems like nothing from Kbin is. I assume that's because federation was just turned back on very recently?

Eggyhead,
Eggyhead avatar

I’m sure they will. We’re just in the tutorial stage right now and the map hasn’t opened all the way up yet.

RunsWithSprocket,

Thank you for this explanation. It was kind of the mental model I had built up from what I was seeing, so nice to see I’m on the right track.

It’s an exciting model and I’m really grateful for the technical people who are not doubt spending a large amount of effort scaling up right now.

olrik,
olrik avatar

Thanks for the explanation, this was useful but I still can't grasp how to see posts or articles from other instances in the fediverse. Is it through tags? How exactly similar content created on lemmy.world for example can appear on a magazine devoted to the same topic over here?

BobRoberts,

Right now that feature is shut down so that the site can function with the huge influx of people over the last few days. Apparently if you search for something it should search all of the sites for it. So searching “funny” will get the local “funny” and funny.Lemmy and others as well, I think.

Deref,

It doesn't appear automatically on related magazines (would be a nice feature though) but you can link magazines from other instances like this: /m/lemmyworld@lemmy.world. You can subscribe to them and see them in /m/all like they're part of Kbin.

olrik,
olrik avatar

Thanks, but I was asking as a creator of a magazine, I would like it to be populated by posts from other instances who already have a community or magazine relevant to the one I created here. How do I do that?

Eggyhead, (edited )
Eggyhead avatar

I’ve only been aware of being able to subscribe to the magazines from other instances, not pulling articles posted in magazines from various other instances into a single local magazine. I really like that idea though.

olrik,
olrik avatar

Ok? But how does a magazine from kbin suscribes to a community on lemmy.world?

SamurottX,

A magazine on kbin is roughly equivalent to a community on lemmy.world, so I'm 90% sure that's not possible. You as a user subscribe to a magazine/community, regardless of which instance it is on. You're essentially asking how to automatically re-post from one community to another, right? That can turn into stealing other's content really quickly so not sure if that's the best solution.

A possible solution to your situation would be creating multi-communities a la Reddit where you can view multiple communities at the same time. So while it wouldn't be in your community, it'd still be visible for you to interact with and the actual location doesn't matter.

olrik,
olrik avatar

Yeah ok, thanks for your answer I'm slowly starting to see more clearly now.

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