I think part of why it's confusing is that we don't have defined names for these things. This is so early in a social media "product" life that there isn't a common understanding. You're now part of making those names. It's a bit exciting but mostly confusing while everyone uses their own terms to mean the same fundamental things. Embrace the chaos!
I wholeheartedly agree with this one. It's also still semi funny referring to them as basically trashcans. But I think as a new user it is just way more streamlined and sensible than calling them "magazines". When I read that first I just could think of like paper magazines and thought they'd be some sort of editorial content, which is highly misleading. Calling them "bins" just makes way more sense and sort of adds to the brand of the platform.
You can kindof think of the fediverse stuff as being similar to email. You and I both signed up to create an account with kbin.social. This is where our account lives and it will show up in our full username (hover over any username) after the second @. You are @autumnplains@kbin.social and I am @sxt@kbin.social.
OP created their account with reddthat.com so that is where their account lives.
Unlike email however, we aren't sending messages directly to each other - we are instead sending them to a particular "community" which happens to live on the lemmy.ml server. This is possible since each of these hosts are running software which can communicate in a common manner (this is what ActivityPub defines the rules for). You probably got to this thread from kbin's general "threads" page which is able to list posts from other hosts due to them being federated (can communicate what posts they have to each other).
As for kbin.social being put next to the right of the title for this thread, I'm not sure. I think that might just be part of kbin's UI showing where we are viewing the thread from?
The problem is that every "magazine" or "community" or whatever you want to call them (each one using a different name is also a bit of an issue) is part of their own decentralized network. Yes, you might be able to read them from other services, but it still causes a lot of fragmentation. For example when I look into something akin to a news sub for international news, I find worldnews@lemmy.ml as well as news@beehaw.org. Both basically do the same thing topically, but both have different submitted content, different users, and oddly in this case even the same owner.
This now begs the question for me as a user: Which one do I subscribe to if I want to stay informed? An article on one side could be submitted or gain traction when it does not on the other. But subbing to both could lead to a lot of duplicate articles being fed to me.
I think this is a huge issue in the whole design philosophy of the fediverse that will hamper the growth of those services. Deciding where to make an account might be something a new user gets around to, but being then confronted by this is very quickly going to turn away the absolute majority of potential users. There needs to be at least a little bit centralization to form major default communities that at least start as a gathering hub for new people. If there's issues with them then people can still create alternatives if the user numbers are high enough, but in its current form I'd have to decide between several places that are essentially the same thing.
But is it really a Problem exclusive to the fediverse? there is several large news communities on reddit as well, and you have to pick or see duplicates. Also, this is only an issue in heavily aggregation-focused communities, not in those where content is generated (memes, hobby communities) as those do not have the issue of duplicates so you can just sub to all the ones you are interested in, even if several of them have the same subject.
And is fragmentation a problem at all? We used to have thousands of websites dedicated to the same topic, and it wasn't an issue. Then we had, like, 3, and suddenly people are upset if they can't see 100% of everything ever said about a thing.
But no one reads everything on ever issue they care about anyway. And the homogeneity created by having everything in one place, where it can be dominated by the same set of power users, and overseen by the same set of moderators seems, uh, kind of bad if you stop to think about it for a second.
For people who grew up with xanga, myspace, and even the older basic HTML sites, the fediverse feels nice. I can understand how younger users would panic without a centralized hub to get to everything from. But like you and others have said, it's not really any different than what we're used to, just easier for smaller groups to manage their own content. Once you get past the initial shock of "no home-base", it's mostly intuitive.
As for kbin.social being put next to the right of the title for this thread, I'm not sure. I think that might just be part of kbin's UI showing where we are viewing the thread from?
It seems that if kbin federates a post that doesn't have a link or image and just points to itself, it fills in (kbin.social) as the link pointer, when you view it on kbin. It's a bit confusing at first, should probably be replaced by something that indicates it's a federated "self"-post.
This is a post to linux community (@linux) by user falcoignis (@falcoignis). You're reading it on kbin since it has federated this post. The default "front page" shows federated feed (Threads).
I like board. Communities is too long, and coms sound like communication which armies use, magazines/mags is a bit odd and may be mistaken with the obvious gun reference. Forum is like the pre digg forums (like hardforum.com).
Instances are effectively just different versions of the site, they all communicate with each other and display the same data (roughly), like someone said in a different post, think of it like Email, wherever you made your account being your host domain (An example being look at mine and your username, you are posting from Beehaw, while I'm from Sh.itjust.works, different instances, same content.)
Great question! Yes; hosting providers will undoubtedly exist, and some power users may want to host more than one instance on a single server to cater to slightly different audiences.
In modern server infrastructure, there’s no need to maintain the overhead of a fully virtualized operating system just to run a different instance. Containerization is the modern best practice, and with Amazon EKS or Azure Kubernetes Service, the containers just live directly in the cloud on a PaaS backend.
Personally that term makes me a bit uneasy. To me it sounds too grandiose and organized just for something that might just be some random people shitposting or chatting about their interests. And actually having tight knit communities can easily lead to all kinds of negative effects, group think, hierarchies and drama.
Of course some subreddits, forums, lemmy communities etc can be actual communities but just as a personal preference I don't like the idea of calling them that default.
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