this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2021
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Asklemmy
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Just more people knowing about it. No one knows it exists.
Also, more normie subreddits. A lot of people join reddit for specific communities. The most active Lemmy communities are political or tech focused. Art communities like imaginarycityscapes or nosleep and fan communities for shows and movies draw in a lot of people. Lemmy's userbase is made up largely of people who are able to comprehend what federation is, which is limited to people who understand what a server even is, which has an impact on the type of content.
I'm on lemmy, but I'm still not too sure to still understand what a federation is. Sometimes I feel like I'm missing a lot of content...
This is honest of you and a fair point: federation can sometimes be invisible. The basic idea becomes clear if you think about how you access websites. Think of Facebook. When you go to it, you type "facebook.com" in the address bar. And you go there. Notably, if you want to use Facebook, you can only go to "facebook.com". This is different with federated systems.
Federated systems make it possible to go to, for example, "fb.com", which will have its own version of Facebook, different to "facebook.com" or "facebookfed.com" or "333.com" (if someone decides to call their version that). Each one of these websites will have their own servers, their own logins (so you'd have to create different accounts), rules, and mods.
Sometimes, those websites talk to each other so that content is shared between them. That way, you can publish once in fb.com and another person can see your post in facebook.com. Other times, depending on the service and the version/instance, you'll have a sort of private Facebook.
So federation here means that there are many different servers ('instances') that run the same software. These servers talk to each other so that you can see the content of the rest of the instances, in the case of the Fediverse. The Fediverse is a federated (hence the name) network of different services including Lemmy, Mastodon, and PixelFed. I'm not entirely sure, but I think the idea is to be able to share content in between all of those (someone plz correct me or explain this to me? hahahah).
Federation is also tied to certain values, like owning your own data. For example, Facebook's servers hold all of your Facebook data. But, in the case of Lemmy, if you were to run your own Lemmy instance in your room, you would own your data (assuming no hacks or other shenanigans). This autonomy and privacy goes along well with the values surrounding Free and Libre/Open Source Software, where anyone can copy, modify, and run their own versions of code.
So you get this synnergy of FLOSS and federation that brings a bunch of people who are pumped to share stuff on websites like Lemmy, a FLOSS and federated link aggregator!