this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2025
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Fediverse memes

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Memes about the Fediverse.

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[–] staph@sopuli.xyz 4 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

An instance is literally just someone's computer with the software running. All your stuff lives on someone's computer. Different computers can talk to one another to allow people who put their stuff on those computers to see each other's stuff (federate) or they decide not to, like cutting off a computer with a lot of batshit insane people (defederate). They're running the same software so the language is the same. Like your stuff lives on lemmy.today, I don't know where and who owns that computer, while my stuff lives on sopuli.xyz, which is a computer that is owned by some random Finn, but those computers talk to one another, so we get to talk to one another.

[–] YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today 1 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

You mean like a server? I hope it's not just Joe blows laptop with a cracked screen and bulging battery.

So federated is basically "you're allowed to post shit" within this list of other server?

If that's it then thank you, it makes a lot more sense now.

[–] Tuuktuuk@sopuli.xyz 1 points 4 hours ago

Yes, "instance" is the word used on Lemmy for what is usually called "server" elsewhere.

[–] staph@sopuli.xyz 5 points 10 hours ago

A server isn't necessarily all that meaningfully different from Joe's laptop, it's just that Joe's laptop isn't exactly practical for running big things. My website runs on a real server, but it doesn't really act much different from a computer I have in my living room when I remotely log into it, I can access all the same files, run all the same software if I wanted to.

Federated is just jargon for "the posts and comments from here will display over there too because my computer knows yours exists and runs the same software and the software does the legwork of meshing all of that shit together with mine"