this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy

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63
ELI5: How does Lemmy operate? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by Senseibull@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
32 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Would be helpful for most new users to understand how Lemmy works and how the different hosts interact with each other in a basic way.

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[–] simple@kbin.social 23 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Adding to what the other guy said, you can think of Lemmy as a collection of servers. Right now you're on lemmy.ml, but some people are on https://beehaw.org/ for example. Beehaw is also Lemmy, but it's a different server with different users and communities.

Here's what makes the Fediverse cool though. You don't need to go there to interact with them. You can stay on lemmy.ml and access and comment on Beehaw. When you're on the home page it defaults to "Local", but if you click on "All" you can see posts from different servers. Same thing when you click on "Communities" at the top. It lets you browse communities on different servers by clicking "All".

Let's say you wanted to browse the gaming community on Beehaw. You can write "gaming" in the search field and find gaming@beehaw.org, or you can just type it into your search bar as https://lemmy.ml/c/gaming@beehaw.org

Now you can browse, comment, vote, and interact with that community. I posted this comment from https://kbin.social/ , which is NOT Lemmy, but since the Fediverse is connected we can basically interact with each other from different websites.

[–] Showervagina@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So basically if IRC and Reddit had a baby, it would be Lemmy?

[–] perkele@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 year ago

It strongly reminds me of linked IRC servers, I love it.

[–] Kichae@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A detail that is useful to keep in mind, as it can explain some edge cases, but which isn't critical to actual day-to-day usage, is that whenever you're viewing a community hosted on another server, you're not viewing the content on that server. Instead, you're viewing a mirror of it hosted on your local server.

This means there may be comments or posts viewable on the community's host server that you're not seeing yet, because they haven't been passed along to the instance you're using yet. The remote community needs to actively forward new posts and replies to instances that are following it.

This is also why if you follow a remote community from a new instance -- that is, you trigger the mirroring -- you won't necessarily get the whole backlog of posts from the community. Just like how if you subscribe to a magazine, you only get future print editions (they don't send you their entire back catalogue), when an instance subscribes to a remote community, it only receives future content.

[–] BurningnnTree@lemmy.one 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Interesting, do you think this approach will limit how big Lemmy can get? For example, if a server wanted to subscribe to ten communities that are the size of large subreddits, how much data would that be? How much would it cost to maintain a server that could handle that?

[–] Kichae@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago

Generally speaking, text is cheap to transmit and store. It's images and video that could be a real issue.

But ultimately, content on small instances may end up being somewhat ephemeral. Developers and admins may want to look into ways to earmark significant posts so that they don't end up in the dustbin, but 90%+ of what gets posted to social media isn't actually worth saving long term anyway.

[–] pancake@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago

Only text is mirrored, images and video are hosted on the instance where they were posted, so overall it's really cheap to store all of that, and even more so if the load is distributed across many instances.

[–] kynoptic@lemmy.sdf.org 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Reddit is like going to Chucky Cheese for your birthday. It’s fun, but it feels a little forced and ultimately the point is for Chucky Cheese to sell you terrible pizza.

Lemmy is like being left alone during summer vacation with nothing to do and one of your friends hands out walkie-talkies and you all hang around the neighborhood and make a game of stalking the mail carrier and there’s absolutely no point but afterwards you get real pizza at Salvatore’s.

[–] Senseibull@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

The real ELI5 πŸ‘

[–] pancake@lemmy.ml 17 points 1 year ago (3 children)

It's Reddit but federated. A federated service is one that works like e-mail, i.e. there are multiple providers/servers/instances but all of them are connected so it doesn't matter which one you choose. Additionally, Lemmy is federated to other services (e.g. Mastodon), forming what's known as the Fediverse.

[–] Senseibull@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago

Thank you! Good answer. ~___~

[–] barqers@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So one thing I don't understand is, how do all the federated servers find each other? Is there one server that maintains the registrations to all other servers and each server can pull from there? What happens if that central server decides to delete another server from it's list, doesn't that put authority back into one server/persons hands? Or does each server maintain their own list of federated servers and if so you never know if you're fully connected / how much time would that take each server owner?

[–] pancake@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No, there's no central server. To my knowledge, servers federate either manually or by their users manually exploring other servers. But most servers at the moment are already federated with each other.

[–] barqers@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago

Very interesting - thank you!!

[–] isdfoa@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What's the difference between the multiple lemmy instances and something else also ActivityPub based like kbin? Is lemmy.ml vs lemmy.world the same as comparing lemmy.world with kbin.social? I have accounts with both Lemmy and Kbin and confused a bit by what I'm seeing, and also Threads vs Magazines vs Microblogs haha. So much to learn about the fediverse!

[–] pancake@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Well, the software they run is different. The frontend looks different, etc. Lemmy can connect with kbin, as well as Mastodon, so it's just one big network at the end of the day.

[–] matthieu_xyz@piaille.fr 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@Senseibull
You can think of it like emails.

A lemmy community is like an automated mailbox that sends everything they receive to all subscribers.

You can host a mailing list/community on gmail.

Then you can subscribe to the mailing list from outlook.

Then a user can send a post to the mailing list from yahoo.

The automated mailbox at gmail will receive the message from yahoo and send it to outlook and all other subscribers.

[–] Sibbo@sopuli.xyz 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is more of an ELI75 lol

[–] goldgate@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ha ha, no 75 year old is going to understand that either.

[–] sprocket@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"What's an email? Is that like a phone?"

[–] Senseibull@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Lmao 🀣

[–] sideone@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

New mod here. What's the best way to use mod tools? There doesn't seem to be anything in Jerboa, so is it best to use the web browser?

[–] king_dead@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The best way i can describe it is with Runescape. Users can access different worlds(or "instances") and every world runs the game. However unlike runescape every world is independently run and which world you form your account on determines which other worlds you can see and interact with.

[–] Ziggurat@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 year ago

This video applies to Mastodon, but Lemmy is also using the activity pub protocol https://40two.tube/w/8a203465-b443-44bb-90a5-7cf5d941899a So in the principle it should be relatively similar

[–] PriorProject@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

There was a good discussion of this topic in another post recently. Here's the comment I posted trying to cover some of the fundamentals: https://lemmy.world/comment/20357. But the whole post is pretty helpful.

[–] FuzzyDunlop 4 points 1 year ago

You will have a honest answer on /r/lemmy

[–] zinklog@lemmy.fmhy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

a

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