this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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as someone who just joined, and is still trying to understand "federated" can someone give me an ELI5 rundown of what this means? I thought it didn't matter which instance you joined because they were all connected, does this mean that other instances can just... block an entire instance?
It's essentially like email. If you have a gmail, you can communicate with anyone on any other email service. If gmail determines that spamsite.xyz, you won't send or recieve any emails from that domain. Same thing here. You're using lemmy.world. If lemmy.world defederates with my server sh.itjust.works, you won't see my messages. We will just never cross paths.
hmm...that seems super counterintuitive to what I thought the fediverse was all about. That would be like Gmail just deciding all Yahoo emails are spam. doesn't this mean that Lemmy will just be a bunch of islands of content that will require users to have multiple accounts for each instance?
If everyone plays nice, you get to have really big islands. But that's only if your overlords (the mods) allow it. If they don't like an instance, see ya! I don't think this happens often other than blocking spam and illegal activity, but you can clearly see how this will make all the mini islands.
I think people tend to be tribal by nature. It would likely be folly to think everyone will not use petty squabbles and minor disagreements to cut off other people they disagree with for the first time in history. This could really hurt lemmy in the long run if everyone only lives on their island.
Apparently the main issue is that the "ALL" feed starts showing posts of other instances when one user subscribes to anything there. So if e.g. you don't block a NSFW instance, you will have popular porn posts showing up on your instance as well.