this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
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Trying to wrap my head around the fediverse. Is each instance like another person with a server? Could that person just shut it down whenever they wanted to?

Are there any companies that have invested in hosting Lemmy/ other fediverse servers?

Sorry I'm sure I messed up some of the terminology, I hope my questions make sense! I love the idea of the fediverse as I understand it, but I like to dig into these details.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Is each instance like another person with a server?

Individual person, group of people, nonprofit, company, governments, political parties, whatever. Anything goes.

Could that person just shut it down whenever they wanted to?

Yes. That's why it's advisable to join one with a dedicated group of committed individuals, or run your own. Joining super small servers might sound nice, but the owners might just ditch it.

Are there any companies that have invested in hosting Lemmy/ other fediverse servers?

There are some run by companies, yes, for example social.bbc which is run by the British Broadcasting Corporation. gruene.social is run by the Greens (political party) in Germany, and social.overheid.nl is operated by the Dutch government.

There will probably be some company-run instances that don't allow user signup, since all they do is feredate with everyone and exfiltrate data. It's what people do...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (12 children)

What do you mean by the company-run instances? Like for internal communication?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Is each instance like another person with a server?

Yes.

Could that person just shut it down whenever they wanted to?

Yes.

Are there any companies that have invested in hosting Lemmy/ other fediverse servers?

Idk, they'd be very niche.

Sorry I'm sure I messed up some of the terminology, I hope my questions make sense!

Nah, you pretty much nailed it.

Lemmy, and a lot of the fediverse, functions very similarly to email. Gmail can send emails to Proton even though they're hosted by two completely separate companies. A post/comment/vote/interaction is like an email in that a copy of every interaction is sent to every federated instance, like emails sent to recipients. This creates a lot of redundancy and traffic between instances, which has its pros and cons.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

The email comparison helps a lot. I imagine the redundancy would help potentially safeguard the system when one instance goes down, but maybe is ecologically more wasteful?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Users are like coffee drinkers and servers are like decentralized coffee shops that talk to each other ("federate"). Anyone can open a coffee shop and many do. It's harder and more expensive than simply drinking coffee, but not that bad in the scheme of things, and within reach of average hobbyists with time on their hands and a few bucks to spend.

If the instance stays small, it's cheap to run. If it gets popular, you can ask users for donations and volunteer help. Lemmy.world is the current biggest, and stays afloat that way.

Right now there's not much corporate presence, but that may change soon, unfortunately.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (5 children)

Nice analogy, thanks. Good to know Lemmy.world is donation run. Are decisions about the instance made by a collective body?

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[–] [email protected] 65 points 7 months ago (4 children)

Is each instance like another person with a server?

Yeah. I would assume that most, if not all, open instances are going through a 3rd party hosting service, but nothing stopping them from being hosted on hardware in somebodies home.

Could that person just shut it down whenever they wanted to?

Yup. Anytime and for any reason. It might cause a moment of disruption, but the beauty of federation is that you can always setup an account on a new instance or create your own.

Are there any companies that have invested in hosting Lemmy/ other fediverse servers?

Yes. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is Facebook federating their Threads services. I'm sure that there are others.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Thanks, helps a lot!

If an instance is closed, would everyone's accounts and posts on there be lost?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Not lost, but inactive / isolated. As I understand it, when a user on insurance A subscribes to a community, votes, or comments on a community on instance B, that content is copied to insurance A and the two instances will sync their changes together. If instance B shuts down or the two instances defederate, then the content on instance A stays intact, but it no longer syncs with the source of truth.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (4 children)

Okay, so does that mean you could potentially protect your own account from an instance being shutdown by making sure to subscribe to communities in other instances?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

each domain is hosted by individual groups. lemmy.world lemmy.ml sh.itjust.works individually managed and ran.

In simple terms, each individual server sends and receives content from all of the others and displays it to you. You can interact with lemmy.ml via lemmy.world, for example.

Any individual server could shutdown however content has been shared (federated) to other servers (instances) and stored so depending on content retention, it’s still available.

You can also run a server yourself.

Usually, servers are referred to as instances.

There are types in the fediverse, such as mastodon. Content is shared between them but displayed differently

In terms of commercial interest, facebook wants to eventually federate with their threads app.

Everything else is opensource and community funded, I believe

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

So cool! Thanks for clarifying some of the terminology for me as well.

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