Is there a major difference between Lemmy and Beehaw (or other federated instances)?

No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 130 points – 1 years ago

Hello everyone! Long time redditor, first time poster to Lemmy.world. As I'm learning more about the Fediverse, I'm seeing there are several instances that seem to serve the same purpose. For example, Lemmy and Beehaw seem to be similar, yet they are still separate.

Are there any big differences or factors I should be looking for when browsing different instances? So far, it looks like the number of communities and rules are the biggest differences between instances.

Bonus question: are there any good sources for learning more about the Fediverse? I've found these links so far:

https://opensource.com/article/23/3/tour-the-fediverse - Gives a decent explanation of the Fediverse. https://fediverse.party/ - Provides a link to different Fediverse instances, not specific to Reddit replacements.

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Beehaw is a Lemmy instance. However, they defederated from two huge instances, because they're open registration, and the four BH admins felt overwhelmed with the incoming traffic and unable to manually block trolls, so they decided to just separate from a large chunk of content rather than get it under control.

I'm on one of the two defederated instances, sh.itjust.works, and I can neither see what's posted there, nor can a BH user see what I post (or what's up on our server, for that matter.

The other big instance is lemmy.world.

BH has very specific rules for what's okay over there and what's not. Check them out and see if you're willing to live with the defederation for the sake of what their admins define as safety.

Thanks for the background on Beehaw! After reading that, I was able to read more on defederation and what impact that has. I think I have a better understanding, but I'll continue doing some research. Thank you!

I kept reading defenestration and I won't stop thank you very much

Still works, Beehaw did kinda "throw the baby out with the bathwater" as they used to say.

Beehaw seem to have refederated lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works

https://lemmy.world/post/980052

No, they have not.

If you compare your link, on Lemmy world to https://beehaw.org/post/931057 the same post viewed through beehaw directly, you will see completely different comments. And the Lenny.world link only has comments from Lemmy.world users.

Defederation behaves in a very confusing way. It blocks interacting with a community, but not the content itself. You can see beehaw's posts, they can see Lemmy.world's posts. Comments are not shared, and any posts to unfederated instances never leave the instances they were written on.

I am new here so this is a little confusing for me. In the Beehaw post you linked someone writes that they see only lemmy.world posts that where synced before the defederation. But lemmy.world users should still see the posts of Beehaw since lemmy.world has not defederated from Beehaw only the other way round, isn't it?

Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.world, but Lemmy.world did not defederate in return.

Instances copy content from other instances. When thousands of Lemmy.world users want to read a post from a tiny instance, they can. All that traffic is served from Lemmy.world's local copy, and the tiny instance is only bothered by one download request from the Lemmy.world server.

When Lemmy.world asks beehaw for posts to update its local copy of a community, beehaw agrees and sends the content. So Lemmy.world users can see new beehaw posts when they connect to their home instance.