One Small step, a giant leap for Fediverse but...
Day 2 here, and I can see the growth already. Personally I really like the notion of how its gonna shape up in the future but at the same time I really feel for the average user as of now its too complex to understand the working and how the cross servers thing is working. I mean yes still early days, UI will improve further leading to a better UX but the core mechanism yet is little tough to get along. For instance, still unclear if I made the right choice by signing up on lemmydotworld why not lemmydotml , beehaw etc.... and where does this stop? like in the coming times i it would be like a thousands of servers lemmy.this lemmy.that lemmy.etc or anything.anything. That's soo confusing for someone who just wanna join a server. Would be interesting to see how "signup anywhere, its the same thing" evolves.
I'm new here, can someone explain how this whole federating thing works?
You know how discord has multiple servers?
Now imagine if those servers where actually owned by a person (self-hosted), and each server could connect with the other servers, so you can see content on whatever server you are.
best explanation I've seen for the fediverse
For reddit folks - imagine there are 10 different reddits with all of their own individual subreddits. You have the ability to only view and comment on yours, but also can look and comments on all of those others ones if you want to.
Someone on my server came up with a mall analogy which I am extending upon, might be helpful:
Sites are like cities (kbin is a city, lemmy is a city, etc)
Instances are like malls (kbin.social is a mall)
Stores inside a mall are like magazines
Cities can have multiple malls, and the malls all talk to each other and give each other information about what's happening in their mall in relation to their stores, which is why we can see posts from other instances of the same site.
And what's more, malls (instances) in different cities (sites) can also talk to malls in another city and pass information about their malls to the other cities' malls. Cities talk to other cities. Translation: The sites share content with each other.
another analogy: Federation in the fediverse is like a group of islands with bridges connecting them. Each island represents a different platform, and the bridges allow people to travel and interact between the islands. Even though each island has its own unique features and rules, the bridges enable communication and sharing of ideas across the entire network of islands.
I hope this didn't further confuse you lol