Lemmy announces alpha support for federation
wedistribute.org
A promising new link aggregation platform is gaining the powers of federation, thanks to the ActivityPub protocol.
  • @RandomSovietKid
    7•4 years ago

    Sounds great!

    Can you give a short explanation of what specifically that means? I’m not familiar with federation or ActivityPub.

    • Muad'DibberOPA
      6•4 years ago

      Sure, so federation is like email. You can sign up with different services, but those services can still send messages to each other.

      This is different than the way the internet has gone over the past few years: the biggest social media and communication platforms now are walled gardens. Facebook, youtube, reddit, twitter are all their own platforms that can’t talk to each other, and obviously the capitalist incentive for ad revenue demands that these platforms lock in users as much as possible.

      So fairly recently, the push against this lock-in and private corporate control in the free software movement has been to develop federated alternatives to existing social media giants. They are:

      The main nice thing about all these, is that they are easily self-hostable, and can talk to each other.

      So one of the main reasons I’m building Lemmy is because we have alternatives for a lot of these, but not one for reddit yet.

      Also Here’s a vid explaining federation / mastodon / the fediverse.

      • Muad'DibberOPA
        5•4 years ago

        What this means for a reddit alt, is that you can subscribe to a community on another server. So you could sub to startrek.lemmy.ml/c/news, and it would show up in your feed here.

        Here’s an early alpha we have of this working:

        https://voyager.lemmy.ml/

        • @RandomSovietKid
          4•4 years ago

          Thanks for explaining. Right now, I couldn’t sub to /c/main in voyager.lemmy.ml , but that’s because this instance doesn’t yet support the feature, only the voyager instance does, do I understand correctly?

          When it’s finished, will I also be to vote and comment on posts on other servers, or only subscribe?

          • Muad'DibberOPA
            4•4 years ago

            Correct, it’ll be a while before lemmygrad.ml becomes federated, the voyager / enterprise / ds9 instances are for testing federation right now.

            You’ll be able to do 99% of the functionality: voting, commenting, posting, private messaging, pretty much everything.

            • @RandomSovietKid
              4•4 years ago

              Well, awesome that you got that feature working, even if it’s still in alpha. Looking forward to when it comes to lemmygrad.ml and dev.lemmy.ml (I’m lurking on the latter instance sometimes, but don’t want to create yet another account — and federation would make that unnecessary), even if that still takes a while.

            • Camarada ForteA
              3•4 years ago

              How do you maintain so many website addresses? Hahaha

              • Muad'DibberOPA
                3•4 years ago

                Haha its not too bad, my memory is almost as bad as that guy in memento, so I have to just keep notes and automate everything as much as possible because I’ll probably forget it soon.

    • @pimento
      5•4 years ago

      I’m also coding this ;)

        • @pimento
          5•4 years ago

          Thanks, I’m very happy that we already have a small community here :)

  • Tov
    4•4 years ago

    Exciting news.