this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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Kinda, but not exactly. Imagine there's a sea with different ships. The ships have different crews, all with their own interests - some may like sleepy cats, others might like painting etc. And the sailors set their communities. Each community must take a room on that ship, and they can have whatever rules they want, unless they don't break the general rules of the ship they're on. Now, imagine the rooms have hardware that can create a hologram version of you, through which you can communicate with others - just like in Star Wars or Star Trek. By using that particular thing, any sailor can have a holographic version in any of the ships at will, and attend the discussions.
That fleet of ships is Lemmy as a whole. And every ship is a server.
Now on to something a bit more complicated: out there, there's also a group of airplanes, and there's also a group of UFOs, but fortunately controlled by humans. Their crews similarly have different interests, different hobbies, whatever. They also have this thing that allows their hologram into the room where your community gathers. They might however have their voice distorted, or there might be some latency, their image might be distorted a bit, but that's okay. You generally get their message. That is because they use a different implementation of that thing, or they work differently since they're not ships - they're planes, or UFOs, serving different purposes, working differently. There is usually, however, no issue in ship-to-ship communication.
The other vehicles are the other platforms such as Mastodon, Kbin, Friendica, Pixelfed etc. - they all use a protocol (think of it as a language) called ActivityPub (that would be the thing allowing you to be on any ship through your hologram); these platforms usually work together in order to facilitate communication from one-another, but they add different features, they cather to different people, so issues may arise from time to time. That's fine. The message should get through.
Let's return to my previous example: Each ship has a captain. The captain can decide to cut all communications with all ships, allow communications with all ships from his end (mind that other captains can have the same power, but on their ships), or only allow communications with certain ships (which is generally what is done around this place).
When any captain decides to cut communications with any ship, the process is called defederation - it's more of a red button.
Besides that, you can also block individual users yourself from contacting you, so you have some power as well. :D
Hope my example makes things more clear :D