I don’t really want a definition of what the fediverse should be or was initially envisioned to be. I just want to understand how people actually use it. I started wondering because I felt the talks about its current state and growth stumble in invisible misunderstandings about the basic nature of what we are using or how we are using it.
I came here with the reddit exodus, but the site was mostly utilitarian for me, with my attempts to find community a failure. I saw something forum like and treated it like that, and the same can be said about my use of beehaw. Only recently I adventured in seeing a feed with All displayed, which was definitely not for me, but helped me find some communities to subscribe.
Federation, personally, is an opportunity for different communities to communicate, not necessarily get conjoined. For instance, I have an account in tech.lgbt, although it’s abandoned. In this group x.y, I focused first in the lgbt, as I have being doing since much before I saw myself as queer, because it’s a very good way to make sure the people around are the kind I wish to have around as a start. That’s my home, a place in which I expect visitors to respect the rules if they want to be let in. That’s to say I believe there’s no public / communal space in the fediverse, you are always on someone’s home and should respect that.
The big issue I’d find with the fediverse is that we don’t advertise the outside communities we enjoy enough, mostly expecting something interesting to simply show up on our screens.
I’m a software engineer so I understand federation in what it really does.
But the common explanation for users is, it works like email: you can have a Gmail and send an email to someone using Yahoo, and it just works. You don’t have to make a Yahoo account to email people still using Yahoo.
That prevents companies from taking the majority of the users and locking it down to outsiders and force people to use a particular instance. People like Elon can’t buy Mastodon as a whole, it’s simply not possible. And if they buy a big instance like mastodon.social, and start charging $10/mo to use it, people can just move to another instance and it’s as if nothing happened.
It guarantees a minimal level of interoperability and resilience, at least for a while. There’s no single Lemmy or Mastodon that can be bought or go under and close down. The content is replicated, so even if an instance goes poof, most of the content will remain on other instances. It can’t become paywalled, or if it does, people would be actively choosing to post their stuff behind a paywall.
Unlike Twitter and Reddit, Lemmy instances don’t have to worry about appeasing to all jurisdictions at once. Americans can use instances that abide by US laws, European instances abide by European laws, Australian instances abide by Australian laws. There might be some defederation going on for legal reasons, but at least you’re not being cut off from the whole network, just bits of it. It doesn’t have to push you to an entirely different service. You can still talk to worldwide communities that are legal for your instance to federate with. There’s no single company there to force you to abide by US/EU/AUS laws even if you and your community members are on the opposite end of the globe. If anything, it prevents a single country from dictating what is allowed on social media.