I don’t remember what caused the Voat’s origin, except it involved Reddit HQ. And then it went under in 2020.

What’s different about this time and with Lemmy to make it a feasible alternative to Reddit? Is it random chance?

  • @mookulatorEnglish
    20•2 years ago

    People seem super jazzed about the decentralized nature of Lemmy and other stuff in the “fediverse”. I don’t really understand how it works but it seems cool that Lemmy isn’t a single company/website. Can’t have a power tripping CEO or a board that panders to shareholders that way.

    • V699
      14•2 years ago

      People over complicate federation. I write federated software so lemme break it down. Federation just means data sharing. When you post something on a federation enabled website it sends a copy of your post to everyone who follows you and tells their service to store your data in their database in addition to their own data. What this means is that you can’t just blow up a server to shut it down because everyone in the game has a copy.

      • @mookulatorEnglish
        2•2 years ago

        Thanks for the simple explanation. Maybe my naivety is even deeper than I thought…

        Dumb question - is Lemmy.World a server or is each community within Lemmy.World a server?

        • V699
          1•2 years ago

          lemmy.world is a server. When you post to communities on lemmy.world, each user that has an account on a different server that is watching that community gets a copy

        • @veraEnglish
          1•2 years ago

          lemmy.world is a server. When you post to communities on lemmy.world, each user that has an account on a different server that is watching that community gets a copy

    • Em AdespotonEnglish
      6•2 years ago

      Need to be careful though; just like with the web and email, it can have standards capture where a few corporations control the standard and the main clients used to access the service.

      And just like Gopher, Lemmy could conceivably just fade away via neglect.

      Personally, I’d love to see someone create an ActivityPub interface for Gopher so it could have its overdue resurgence :D