this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2024
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Privacy
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Lemmy is not a service or “instance” on its own, it is a software that works with itself on different computers, as well as other Activitypub softwares.
You don’t seem to know how the Fediverse and Lemmy works, so please read on.
Really long
Each instance is running Lemmy on different (hopefully their own) computers.
They can say what the user can and can’t do on their instances because they are in charge of the computers (or have permission to do so on someone else’s computer).
Most instances have different rules.
For example, there are instances that allow extreme political opinions and others don’t.
Same goes for NSFW and other content.
The most important part of the Fediverse (the group of instances that can work together) is that it is made up of many instances that can work together fairly well [^1], so that users don’t have to use the same instance to talk to each other.
By your logic, the provider should be able to kick you off of every website that uses a certain server software (e.g. Apache, Wordpress, Mediawiki, etc).
Of course, this is not how it works.
Your comment shows the Fediverse works, because you thought it was the same service or instance.
Technologies like eMail, the WWW, and RSS also work like this, and the Fediverse is simply a natural continuation of these technologies.
The problem of the WWW is that the first big commercial instances[^2] cannot easily send data to and from each other.
This meant that the later users had to join one of the big commercial instances because everyone they knew posted in these instances and some commercial instances even stopped you from being able to see anything on the instance without an account on the instance.
The big commercial instances’ owners would do evil things like make you see things that agree with you so you spend more time on them.
The Fediverse fixes this problem by having a common language[^3] that the instances speak, called ActivityPub.
ActivityPub’s special power is that any user on any instance that speaks ActivityPub can talk to any other user on any other instance that also speaks ActivityPub as long as the instances are willing to talk to each other[^4].
If a federated instance did evil things to its users, the users can switch to a less evil instance and still be able to talk to everyone they talked to.
Some big commercial instances show off that they talk ActivityPub, but most people on the fediverse don’t trust them as corporations are not your friends.
You should really consider searching online before replying to a topic you aren’t 100% on.
Thank you for reading. [^1]: Works together less well across softwares, YMMV.
[^2]: As of writing, most users still have accounts on them.
[^3]: There are other languages but no one really cares about them.
[^4]: There are certain forbidden instances that most other instances don’t talk to.