favrionCan somebody explain defederation in simple layman terms please?
m-p{3}Let’s start with what a federated system means.
A federated system consists of multiple instances (ie: lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, feddit.de, etc) that are able to communicate between eachothers using a standard communication protocol (in this case ActivityPub). This mean that each users in all of those federated instances are able to see and interact with eachothers by posting, commenting, and subscribing to local and remote communities.
Think of it like the email system. You’re able to get an email account with Gmail, but that doesn’t limit you from sending emails to users at Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.
Let’s say you’re on Lemmy.ml (which is an instance) and there’s another instance (example.com) with users are consistently disrupting the communities in your local instances. You ask them to follow the rules of the local communities and the instance, but despite banning these users and removing posts and comments, the situation persists. The instance admin may decide to push the nuclear button, and deny the unruly instance from being able to communicate with it. This makes all communications between these two instances impossible, and all posts, comments and user content that was synced will remain visible (unless the instance admin does a cleanup), but all new content from that instance will basically never show up.
LinkOpensChest.wavThe email analogy really made it click for me. And to extend the analogy, I think of platforms like Mastodon and Kbin like SMS. They can fully communicate with Lemmy, but with some minor idiosyncrasies.
booooobooIIRC in mastodon if the other instance deletes itself, all links to it in other instances will also get nuked. Is that also the case for lemmy?
cobysevLet’s start with what a federated system means.
I’m gonna take a step back and introduce a more commonly heard/understood term. According to Merriam-Webster, a FEDERATION is:
a. a federal government
b. a union of organizations
Definition 1b. best sums up a federated system in the sense of OP’s question. It’s a collection of smaller independent organizations united for a particular cause. In the case of Lemmy and other federated sites, sharing digital information. No single federated site controls all of the “fediverse,” yet they can all technically communicate with each other as if they’re one entity.
Defederated, on the other hand, is just the opposite. A single centralized organization with complete control over the content they provide. Reddit, being one corporation that has complete control over all content on their own servers, is a defederated site.