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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: July 21st, 2024

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  • Think of instances like Discord servers. Then each instance has communities that are like Discord channels.

    Another way to think of instances is like email providers: you can select Google or @Gmail, Microsoft or @Live, etc. The same is true for the fediverse, where you can make Lemmy.World your “provider” of Lemmy content, etc. Each community in this analogy might be folders or labels you apply to your emails so you can sort them efficiently.

    What’s cool about the fediverse though is that no matter which instance you sign up to, you can see the content from communities of other instances as well. So if you have an account on Lemmy.World, you can see content from my instance, dbzer0, and all other instances.

    Well, sometimes. Each instance allows federated relations in which posts, comments, upvotes, etc. are only shared between other federated instances if both the sending and receiving instances agree to that channel of information flow. If say Lemmy.World doesn’t allow that information flow but dbzer0 does, then Lemmy.World won’t see any data from dbzer0 while dbzer0 will see all data from Lemmy.World.

    Think if someone posts a meme on Lemmy.World, if L.W federates with db0 and vice versa, Lemmings can see comments and upvotes from both servers to that meme post. If L.W. defederates but db0 doesn’t, then L.W doesn’t see db0 comments/upvotes but db0 sees L.W’s and db0’s. Also, db0 can respond/upvote L.W. users, but L.W. users won’t see that data. Then if both L.W and db0 defederate from each other, neither instance sees content from each other, effectively blocking the entire instances from each other.

    Federation is 2-sided. Both parties must agree to information flow in order to interact.

    Defederation is 1-sided or 2-sided. If 1-sided, one party sees nothing from the other, while the other party sends data that will never be seen. Kinda pointless! If 2-sided, neither party sees anything and so they don’t interact at all.

    Hope that helps! Federation is an amazing tool when dealing with issues like xenophobia/racism and corporate shills like Meta’s Threads trying to take over the FediVerse.





  • Welcome! I’ll leave this comment explaining Lemmy that I’ve previously left for new users:

    Welcome to Lemmy! I’m glad you joined. There are tons of tutorials out there for how to use the platform, but if it helps, here’s my advice:

    I use the Android app Sync For Lemmy. Reminds me a lot of rif is fun from before Reddit shut down 3rd party API access about a year ago.

    Lemmy.World is the name of the biggest instance on Lemmy. Think of it as a discord channel with different sub-channels except those are called communities here (and instead of r/ for subreddits we have c/ for communities).

    There are still trolls here. What’s nice about Lemmy is that you can block individual trolls, communities of trolls, or even instances of trolls (if you deem them so). Conversely, if you get banned from any of the above, you can make a new account on any other instance (like dbzer0 or shitjustworks) and still have access to the content from those people/places. The same is true if certain communities/instances change their policies on things like Luigi, which happened on Lemmy.World recently. I switched over to dbzer0 to avoid that censorship and to also see stuff about pirating - that which is banned on Lemmy.World.

    Lastly, we can see posts/comments from other people on the Fediverse, like from Mastodon (Twitter alternative) and others.

    Hope you enjoy your stay here! Lemmy is primarily tech- and politics-focused rn, but a lot of people draw parallels to Reddit’s early days, which is good!


  • Yeah. I’m a vegan and I took issue with that. Sure we can do scientific studies to see how cats do on vegan diets, but imo that further propels cat domestication which vegans should be against at the very beginning. We already subject cats and other pets to environments that aren’t natural to their genetic history. And now vegans are introducing foods that aren’t natural, even though taking cats off streets can be seen as the more ethical thing to do, given the alternatives.

    Lots of nuance here, but it’s not fair to the cats. Any time vegans think for themselves instead of the real victims of animal slavery, they undermine their entire cause.







  • Depending on where you grew up and were taught geography, America may or may not have been taught to you as a combined landmass from the Southern tip of Chile to the northern islands of Canada, or separate continents split near Central America.

    There is no right or wrong way of defining that. It all depends on custom and convention.

    The reason you say why people from the USA respond with the United States when people ask them where they’re from is likely because it’s a shortened version of the full country name. This is similar to asking someone born in the United Mexican States that they’re from Mexico, or someone from the People’s Republic of China that they’re from China, or someone from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland that they’re British (or Scottish or Irish or Welsh), or someone from the Argentine Republic that they’re Argentinian, or someone from the Boliviaran Republic of Venezuela that they’re Venezuelan, or someone from the Republic of Korea that they’re South Korean (although most people actually just refer to this country as Korea, but that might depend on regional differences too depending on which country you grew up in and were taught from).

    Another reason might be how the USA’s government is structured. We have a federation where the overall government is a sum total of Tribal, State, and Federal governments. People of indigenous tribes in the USA refer to themselves as Native Americans or Indigenous, while people from different states have names for themselves (e.g. Michiganders from Michigan, Californians from California, Kansans from Kansas, Hoosiers from Indiana). You might think that because the federal government, officially called the “United States” in our constitution, covers the entirely of the geography of the USA that that’s how you would refer to people from that nation. And you would be somewhat right because the US takes on international relations per the duties outlined in the constitution. But it would be false to refer to the whole country as just the US. The whole country is the USA, and perhaps that is why people from that country refer to themselves as American.

    Why can’t we have a more nuanced discussion where we talk about how each country/culture prefers to be referred to? I think it’s pretty asinine to refer to the people of, for instance, South Korea as South Koreans because that’s my American conception of that country, when in reality people of the Republic of Korea refer to themselves as Hanguk-in or Hanguk-saram. I would be perfectly fine with referring to that people using that terminology.

    Why do we have to force labels and categories onto peoples when we could just listen to them for what they prefer themselves