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.
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.
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
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
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