Fediverse Explained.

You rock!! As soon as I find a way to pin this I will.

I didn’t make this. I found it from a comment. I was going to credit the poster but couldn’t find it.

Edit: found it. credit goes to @[email protected]
- Thank you for the credit and spreading the word!
  
  Happy it can help :)
- Sorry what I meant to say was, Great post YOU THIEVING PILE OF GOODNESS
- Honesty is a great trait. Good post nonetheless. I hadn’t seen it yet buts it very well put together to give you the basic idea!
- I changed the screenshots to a light theme, someone here said buttons are difficult to read on dark, can you please see if you can update the link in your post? https://imgur.com/a/fiLOmI7
- Copy that. Ok well fair enough. Thanks for the honesty!

Great post, but here are some questions those graphics raise, that I couldn't find an answer to, and which have only my experience with email, usenet and irc for reference (all of which are federated, easy to abuse, had a host of problems, and have slowly migrated to centralized versions to solve these issues):

how do you ban someone?
what stops him from spinning 100 amazon ecc instances, federating 100 servers and spamming his thing 100 times from 100 different instances?
how do you even block an instance?
what happens with the federated content once the source instance goes down?
say lemmy.ml and memes goes down, how do you post a new reply in [email protected]? does it even work?
i haven't found any info for syncing accounts across instances (to prevent this loss) or if this is even possible at low level
what happens with comments and pictures once a federated instance goes down? say, if i selfhost and i crash without backups, does my content and posts disappear?
can i pull it back?
what kind of capacity planning would I need to selfhost say, a decade worth of reddit browsing? assuming I only care about my posts and what I save, would they be accessible for me?

i haven’t found any info for syncing accounts across instances (to prevent this loss) or if this is even possible at low level

Not possibly or very difficult from what I heard.

what happens with comments and pictures once a federated instance goes down? say, if i selfhost and i crash without backups, does my content and posts disappear? Everything is stored in a database, so crashes are no different than any other site. It comes back and its accessible again.

what kind of capacity planning would I need to selfhost say, a decade worth of reddit browsing? assuming I only care about my posts and what I save, would they be accessible for me?

You mean like host an instance for just your own account? The smallest instance for $5 a month should be enough.

I also really feel people are starting to better grasp what the Fediverse is, I mean people dont seem to be as lost as during the massive Twitter exodus to Mastodon!

Uhh... What happens when I do create the same username + email on several servers?

it would be a bit like making multiple email accounts with multiple email providers. for example, if you were to signup "[email protected]" and also sign up "[email protected]", all you've done is made 2 accounts called "eskimofry" at the two different providers.

it works the same in fediverse. your account is @[email protected], but you could just as easily sign up @[email protected], or @[email protected], or @[email protected], all you would be doing is making more accounts.

these accounts don't conflict with each other in the exact same way that "[email protected]" and "[email protected]" don't conflict either. if these 2 emails are owned by different people, then it is the user's job to know which is the intended recipient.
- I had the same question as eskimofry. I'm brand new here, and was under the assumption that one login was good across the fediverse. However, I am unable to login to comment or subscribe to other servers, so I've ended up with multiple accounts. Is there something I'm missing here, or do I need to create an account everywhere?
  
  Attempting to log in to a different server is met with a spinning login button that does nothing, no matter how long you wait.

Another useful definition that comes up is "Federation". As I understand it's referring to the whole set of mini-Reddits for example, and multiple Federations exist in the Fediverse, correct me if I'm wrong.

You're not wrong :) It's the whole set of mini-Reddits + the whole set of mini-Twitters + other similar federated platforms/sites.

Fediverse = federation + universe.

Might be a dumb question and not sure how to ask this but.. If I spin up my own instance, what happens with my posts if I decide to tear down the instance? Like, will the delete get propagated to other instances where I may have commented?

From what I hear, your instance will send the delete request to the other instances but they may or may not listen to it

This is helpful! Does anyone know what it means when you try to subscribe to a community and it just says "Subscribe Pending"? That has happened to me 2-3 times, and it just seems to stay like that.

Just click it to cancel, then try again. It can take a few tries. I think it's an effect of overloaded servers.
I do not know for sure but I'm assuming that whoever set it up required sub approval, similar to how some instances require you to apply before being admitted. I've seen it too, but most/all went through within a few hours with no rhyme or reason, so that's my best guess.
- Ok thanks!

Hello, thank you for the post,

This clears up a few things for me, because the concept of Fediverse are still "abstract" for me.

When i first join, I created multiple accounts on lemmy.world, beehaw, lemmy.ml, because i thinks its mini Reddit, with its own content, and its own account.

Now i know that i only need one account, and i can still see the post from another instances.

There's still some questions that i can't understand

The decentralized nature of the Fediverse, how does one search or now what community on another instances?
Say when in Reddit, we have /r/aww for example, it means that lemmy, beehaw, or another instances can have their own /c/aww ? does it means that we have multiple instances of /c/aww or, we have one single /c/aww but distributed between multiple instances

Sorry for the bad English :D

You would have multiple and sub to each one separately, one will probably come out on top as the "main" one though

Not to dissimilar from when there are multiple subredditts with practically the same name and use
- Ah, okay
  
  I think I'm not exposed with multiple sub reddits with similar names, although ive been using it for more than 10 years
  
  Thanks for the info :D

This is the visual presentation breakdown Ive seen so far! Finally grasping this!

I saw a post yesterday about it, and someone said it was a known issue.

I'm more concerned about how the votes on this post are bouncing up and down between 4 and 818 as I'm typing this reply. Seems like there are some problems here...

EDIT: WOAH this ended up under totally the wrong post. Odd bug...

I think I know what thread you were trying to reply to, and I'm pretty sure the reason your comment appeared on a different post is caused by the same root cause fyi.
- Haha good thing Ruud is a db expert. I think he's going to need to be!

Thanks for the easily visualiser, needed something to explain it to friends.

Good infographics! It is better to change the screenshots to light theme (instead of dark) since the links and buttons are hard to read in the photo.

This is really great! I've also been quite lost but am enjoying the learning process!

One thing I've just learned is that all the different instances don't neccessarily 'federate' with each other in real time (there can be some lag in content showing up in your instance) or at all. Only instances your instance federates with sync up? I think? :-) I see beehaw.org have had to cut ties to a couple of instances to help with the flood of new users and content happening right now. It seems while you can still view their content from your instance you can't comment or post to it? I think? :-)

Thanks, I was so confused with everything but this answers a lot of questions.

Great post!

Right now i've had an issue myself where the potential answer to my issue is in a privated subreddit. So, i had to search even more. Frankly, it highlights the downside of having this become a thing. So i am on the fence whether i want that to happen at all.

If you see the Google results on reddit for what you are looking for, you can click the three dots and look at the cached pages of reddit on Google
Totally understand this. I'm working on setting up my steam deck, and decided to go the Windows only route with it. Well, the main place for all things windows on the steamdeck is reddit. Youtube's search means it's a needle in a haystack for specific questions I have, since the overwhelming majority of people using the steamdeck are using SteamOS on it. It's really put me at a loss when it comes to getting answers, until that sub comes back up. I just hope that data can be migrated somewhere else, since I don't want to support reddit but I DO want to engage heavily with that community.
- https://libreddit.domain.glass/
  
  This might help you find what you need on there without being on there.
  
  https://safereddit.com/
  
  I'm not sure what the difference is...
- I feel like subreddit moderators dropped the ball here. They all could've made Lemmy communities and linked the subreddits there so everything could've just continued as normal but on Lemmy instead. I'm wondering why none of them did that. Do they actually think Reddit will revert the changes and go back to normal?

Awesome post. Cleared things up so much for me

Thanks for sharing and props to the creator of the image, puts it over really well

This is amazing. I only found this sorting by comments. Something I will miss from rif

Thank you for this! But unfortunately I'm very stupid, and I have more questions!

I joined Fedia as my server (instance?), so I should be able to use this account in other servers too, right? And I should be able to see other communities from Fedia? How do I start to like... aggregate all the communities I want to follow in one place? I also get the message that posts may be missing when I look at communities through Fedia, so I'm worried I'm doing it all wrong ;-;

You can't login on another website with your fedia account but on fedia you see and interact with content from other instances.

This post you commented on right here is from lemmy.world, so you're already doing it.

Don't worry about the missing posts thing.
- Okay phew, thank you!! I'll just ignore that alert then and assume I'm seeing as much as I deserve to see haha
On your home page at Fedia there should be a 'subscribed' tab that's how you see all the communities you subscribed to. To subscribe to a community there should be a 'subscribe' button in the 'sidebar' menu which you can find at the top of the community's page.
- Thank you!!

that image is a good start but we've got a long way to go in order to simplify it enough for the average reddit user :D

Great find. Appreciate you posting it.

Great explanation without going into too many unnecessary details!

I don't know of any here as long as it is in the correct community.

Brilliant diagram. Easier for us to visualise how this site works.