I mean, there’s limited content, and Lemmy hasn’t attracted the same kind of personality as modern Reddit. It makes total sense that things would be upvoted quickly, but comments would be sparse or short.

People patted themselves on the back when they showed up for being “old reddit” and “power users”, but most of us were just cranky phone users who didn’t want to use the official app. Lemmy users are not the boistrous, verbose philosophers people wanted to believe they were.

We’re scrollers, sitting on the toilet.

https://www.vpsserver.com/

Well, the different “instances” are different websites, each hosting and serving their own copy of the original post and comments. You’re interacting with your local copy, and your comments are forwarded along to the original website. The original website then sends out copies of your comment to all the other websites that have requested updates.

If your website has banned someone, it will reject content from that user. That’s what being banned means: I refuse to host your posts. Just because your posts are being routed through a 3rd party doesn’t mean I want to host them.

Like, if you got banned from Reddit, they wouldn’t let you post there, either. If you commented on a mirror of a post, hosted on a different website, you wouldn’t expect that comment to show up on Resdit, would you? Well, that’s what the fediverse is: a network of content mirrors. Yes, they’re mirrors that, generally, tey to synchronize with each other, but they’re still mirrors. And independent mirrors at that.

They will never be perfectly synchronized. There’s no true Lemmy to reflect. No whole. There is only what is locally hosted.

Well, it really depends on what one wants the fediverse to be. Should it be homogenized? Or heterogeneus? Having new servers auto-synchronize with the “top” (however one defines this) existing sites promotes homogeneity and the simulation of centralized social media. This seems to be what people here today want.

But if you’re creating a simulacrum of centralized social media, you have to answer the question: Why wouldn’t I just stay on an actually centralized service?

The fesiverse has the chance to be something new, if we just abandon the desire to make believe that it’s like what we already have.

I really think we need to stop looking for a single-service solution to everything.

Because the influencer market knows how to leverage microblogs to generate an income.

It’s not recent. It’s been a common misspelling for years. You’re probably experiencing the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon.

Adding servers to the federation list is just white-listing them. It’s not actually establishing syndication in any way. You don’t syndicate at the website level, you syndicate at the user level.

The way the system works is, a user on your website subscribes to a user on another website, and from that point forward the remote website starts sending your website that one user’s posts, addressed to any and all users on your website who requested them. Your website then receives and stories a copy of all future posts from the remote user, and adds them to the subscribing users’ feeds.

This subscription is very much like a magazine subscription. Your site does not receive the back catalogue. It does not automatically receive other magazines (users) published (hosted) by the same publisher (website). You only get what has been requested, from the point the request has been accepted onward.

There is no canonical fediverse that you can just see. It’s not a centralized system, which means there’s no source of truth to tap into. It’s a mass, opt-in content syndication technology, where you have direct access to the locally hosted content on the single website you are using. The fact that much of that content originated elsewhere presents the illusion of some centralized whole, but it’s just that: an illusion.

2. So, the thing to keep in mind is that “PixelFed” is not a place where you can go to see things. It’s the name of the software that powers a bunch of websites. You’re using a website. That website knows about what is hosted locally. Your friend? They’re using a different website. When you look up their account/ you’re looking up a copy of that account that’s been sent to your website. If things are happening on other websites, your website doesn’t know about any of that, any more than Reddit knows what your friend posted on Facebook.

The whole fediverse works by requesting remote accounts to send your website a copy of whatever they post. This works like a magazine subscription. Your dentist (the website you’re using) says “please end me Kichae Quarterly” and the publisher sends them a copy every time a new edition is publisbed. When you go for a cleaning, they have a copy of every edition starting at the time their subscription started. They do not have the back catalogue, and they certainly don’t have copies of everyrhing the publisher has received in the mail (comments, favourites, etc.)

3. Are you using the same server? Which website are you using? If you create an account on a different website, it’s a different website. If it’s the same website, well, storage costs money, and your account was inactive. Maybe they just removed the old posts?

Pixelfed isn’t private. Mastodon isn’t private. Lemmy isn’t private. All privacy is account privilege based.

The person who’s paying for the hard drive gets to see what’s on it.

The biggest Lemmy instance still isn’t going to let you follow Mastodon or Pixelfed accounts.

A bridge isn’t really necessary. Both Lemmy and Pixelfed use the same communication protocol. Lemmy just doesn’t let you follow users, and PixelFed is a user-based, rather than group-based, program.

If you want to follow both groups and users, you should just use a site that’s running software that supports that. Mbin, or nodeBB, or something.

True. But we are not the open source community. And the fediverse is not inherently open source by nature. ActivityPub is designed to be used by anyone.