Hello, and welcome to halubilo.social! This is JC and Faye’s little corner of the Fediverse. Here you’ll find a curated list of the most popular communities from other Lemmy servers. Just make sure you switch from “Local” to “All” when you’re browsing.

What is Lemmy?

Lemmy is a link aggregator, similar to Reddit. This is one of many Lemmy servers that are part of the Fediverse. With an account here, you can make posts in various communities hosted on other Lemmy servers, and doomscroll through All until you pass out.

What is the Fediverse?

The Fediverse is not really a single “thing,” but a network of websites. These websites all come together to share content with each other. For example, if you browse “All” you’ll see posts from communities on other websites like beehaw.org or lemmy.world. You can still post in communities and comment on them here, and your comments/votes/posts will all be copied over to the “main” website that these communities belong to. Those other websites also give us real time content updates, so generally speaking if somebody posts on there, it’ll show up here immediately. This process is called federation, and these websites are called instances.

This website runs Lemmy, but it’s not the only federated link aggregator. There’s also kbin and some others. Also, link aggregators are not the only use case for federation, you may have heard of Mastodon which is a federated social networking platform.

But, Like, Why?

This might all seem like we’re just throwing data at each other and duplicating it unnecessarily, and you know, maybe we are. But, these are, at least in my view, the benefits of federation.

Shared Load

You have to remember that federation is, technically, how huge sites like Facebook/Instagram/TikTok ensure reliability. When you open one of these websites, you aren’t just connecting directly to some giant server that the company runs and is constantly upgrading. These websites have multiple locations around the world, and data is constantly copied between these locations. This is so that one server isn’t the single point of failure that takes down the whole operation. Federation spreads out the load (in theory at least, at the time of this writing people have flocked to a few very large instances), and ensure that even if an instance goes down, its content isn’t lost forever and can still be browsed.

Though we already have standard protocols, the technology is in its infancy, and will get better and more reliable. Remember, one of the most popular federated technologies is email, and it took decades for it to reach the level it’s at now in terms of reliability and use. We’re doing pretty good for technology that isn’t even a decade old.

Decentralized Control

One guy named Steve can’t just unilaterally decide the direction of Lemmy or the Fediverse. Consensus must be established before any changes are made across the board, and some instances may decide they just, like, don’t want to, man. That isn’t to say that there isn’t a hierarchy of sorts, after all this instance does take basically all of its content from larger instances. But it does mean that every instance owner can just decide for their community what they want. How they want their communities to be moderated, what communities they do and don’t want on their instance, what people they do and don’t want on their instance. This is good for instance owners, but it’s also good for users. If you don’t like the way one instance is run, you can leave. It’s not easy yet to move all your data over, but that’s gonna change really soon.

Past the community management parts, there’s also the fact that every instance owner can decide how they want their instance to function. Sure, at the moment, pretty much every Lemmy instance looks and acts basically the same. But I intend to change that, and I’m sure more niche communities will follow suit once we all get comfortable.