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.
Lemmy is the software a lot of the Reddit style fediverse websites run on. Many of them include Lemmy in the name such as Lemmy.ml and Lemmy.world, but others don’t include Lemmy in the name. Beehaw.org is another website that runs the Lemmy software, it just didn’t put Lemmy in its name. Beehaw does have an uncommon configuration since the down vote ability is disabled there, but it still is Lemmy at its core. Beehaw did defederate from some of the other big Lemmy servers because they were overwhelmed with trying to moderate that much content and those servers reportedly had open sign ups which led to a big influx of spammy bots, so Lemmy.world and beehaw.org are invisible to each other right now, but the admins of Beehaw have expressed a desire for more granular moderation tools in order not to have to defederate from such large servers as a whole in the future.
Kbin is a different software altogether so the kbin servers such as kbin.social and fedia.io have a different layout, terminology, and some different features than the Lemmy based servers, but Lemmy and Kbin both use the ActivityPub protocol to send and fetch data, so you can post between the two platforms as if they were on the same server. I am browsing this post and writing this reply from kbin.social.
Beehaw.org places a high priority on censoring content that would offend folks like the LGBT crowd; they’ve been more-willing than most other lemmy instances to defederate from kbin or Lemmy instances that they consider sources of problem users. For some folks, that’s great, and for others, that’s not what they want.
It is currently a little hard to find the community rules for instances that give you at least a basic idea of what an instance is “about”. And not all instances are aiming for something, but for those that are, it’s nice to know about it. Sign up for pawb.social, and you’re on a furry-oriented instance, for example. For Lemmy instances, trying to join normally shows a page that talks a bit about the instance rules. For kbin instances, you can see a short writeup from the instance admins at /terms, like:
You can get there by clicking “Terms of Service” at the bottom of any page.
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.
Beehaw seem to have refederated lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works
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.
Before defederation, beehaw would do the same. Beehaw asks Lemmy.world for the latest content, and beehaw updates its local copy.
Once the defedeation started, beehaw stopped asking Lemmy.world for new content. But if a beehaw user tried view a Lemmy.world community, beehaw would happily send its local copy, blissfully unaware it was out of date.
Lemmy needs better user-facing error messages. This is too confusing for normal users, but its reasonable behavior for pre-alpha software which is what lemmy is right now.
Lemmy and beehaw are not separate. Beehaw is Lemmy. It’s a Lemmy server/instance. Beehaw just chooses not to participate with a bunch of other instances.
The main difference between instances is how they’re run. Like you’re asking about just now, beehaw is run very conservatively where they tend to block more quickly and try to make their instance as safe a space as possible, while others may be more laissez faire or something in between. Some may have a topic focus. But which communities and how many are on an instance basically doesn’t matter.
Thanks for the clarification! From what I understand, it sounds like as long as all the instances stay connected, the number of communities per instance doesn’t matter, but if a major instance defederates (like Beehaw I think), then you could “lose access” to the communities on the deferated instance. You can still view the content by going to that instance though, so it’s not like it’s the worst thing to happen.
