cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/7193618
The “free fediverses” are regions of the fediverse that reject Meta and surveillance capitalism. This post is part of a series looking at strategies to position the free fediverses as an alternative to Threads and “Meta’s fediverses”.
Meta’s fediverses probably also won’t be able to compete with Threads on this. Threads plan to make federation opt-in is the right thing to do from a privacy and safety perspective, but also means that people in Meta’s fediverses won’t be able to communiate with most of the people on Threads. And Meta has the option of adding communication between Threads and the billions of people on other networks like Instagram (which already shares the same infrastructure), Facebook, and WhatsApp. Longer-term, it seems to me that this is likely to be a huge challenge for Meta’s fediverses, but fediverse influencers supporting federating with Meta have various arguments why it doesn’t matter.
Is it really Meta’s fediverses, when communication between them and their alleged owner is fairly little and actively gatekept by their alleged owner?
Here’s the definition I gave for term in the first article i the series:
“Meta’s fediverses”, federating with Meta to allow communications, potentially using services from Meta such as automated moderation or ad targeting, and potentially harvesting data on Meta’s behalf.
Are there cross instances communities in Lemmy? How does that work?
Lemmy communities work a bit weird when (de)federation gets involved.
By default, any community any server member is subscribed to gets mirrored to your home server. If your home server defederates/gets defederated, that local copy is still available. Local users can still post content, post comments, and have all kinds of interactions, the rest of the Fediverse just doesn’t know about it. It’s a bit like a “fork” in git/blockchain tech.
I don’t think you can subscribe to the local copy of a different server (although perhaps technically you could implement that relatively easily, I think?) but in a way any remote community you follow is “cross instance”.
Lemmy doesn’t implement supercommunities like Reddit does with subreddits (you can’t merge the “technology” communities of different servers under a single name), though that feature has been requested a bunch of times. That would be a solution where rather than following a bunch of different communities on different servers, you could merge a bunch of remote communities together under one single supercommunity that everybody can then follow, allowing for an intricate network of local communities that’s harder to break up (until, of course, said supercommunity starts removing subcommunities for whatever reason).
Yes, I’d say Lemmy communities are cross-instance communities - people can join communities on a different instance than their account.
Oh, I understand. That’s not what I was thinking tho, I misinterpreted the “cross-instances” thing, I thought it meant supercommuties taht includes communities from various instaces
