This is just a reiteration of a comment I left on an earlier, probably more useful article, but I’m posting as its own article for visibility. I hope it can help make sense of the fediverse to at least a few more of my fellow migrants.
Basically, rather than having one Reddit with a bunch of subreddits, you have a bunch of Reddits each with their own set of subreddits. Each Reddit operates with its own admin, features, UX, etc. so you just join any Reddit that feels good to you.
Let’s say you make your account on “Reddit.one” because not only do they have killer memes, they also have a dark mode!
What makes the fediverse so great is that you don’t have to worry that “Reddit.two” actually has a far more active r/gaming community than Reddit.one, or that “Reddit.three” has the only r/catsatwork subreddit on the fediverse, because you can actually just subscribe to those subreddits from Reddit.one anyway. Now you can have r/memes as well as r/gaming@reddit.two and r/catsatwork@reddit.three all in your feed at Reddit.one with dark mode on!
Some reddits even let you follow your favorite twitter personalities as well!
It would be like being able subscribe directly to 4chan’s /b/ and then follow elon musk’s Twitter account directly from Reddit and vice versa. I don’t know why you would actually want to do those terrible things, but you’d have the freedom to do it at least.
Now imagine if Reddit.one’s administrator goes all u/spez on everybody and you just can’t even anymore. You can easily jump ship over to Reddit.two, or any other Reddit you prefer, and resub to all your favorite subreddits again. it would be like you never left.
Hope this helps. Feel free to set me straight on some points or just post your own explanation in the comments.
TLDR: Lots of different Reddits. You join the Reddit you like, but you can subscribe to any of the other Reddits’ subreddits as well!
I really wish there was a way to federate your user account. I think it'd be really neat to not have to worry about the instance admin being an ass. If I just owned all of my data, all of my subs, comments, etc, and could just interface across the fediverse with a single account, that would be the dream!
Don't need a different account for Mastodon and BookWyrm and Kbin, I just have one account and can access each of those things independently. And I own everything that I post or say, and maintain it myself.
Probably more than many casual users would want to be responsible for, but I love the idea!
I think I could hypothetically do this by creating my own personal Kbin instance, for example, but I think I'd want it to be even more granular!
That is what I'm looking for, some way to own my own account. The comparisons have been made to email so why couldn't I just start my own server up to be airlynx@airlynx.social? I would have to buy my own domain but I would have to do that for email anyways. Kbin.social is where my account lives right now but in the surge and in my own exploration I've also created accounts on Mastodon.social and some random lemmy instance. Now that things are starting to settle down and I'm beginning to understand what I'm doing I kind of want to merge those accounts.
The main issue I see with that is the privacy issue. You can host your kbin instance with your own domain yes, but then everyone can see your domain after your username. And it becomes quite easy to doxx you then...
Could you not just spin up the same server at a different domain? If it's your own server that's not really hurting anyone other than people who follow you or your magazines directly (I'd probably do more commenting than creating, tbh)
Not sure what you mean. Sure you can buy any domain and put it behind. But ultimately you are much easier to doxx. Between whois, server IP etc. Then there is the issue of the security on that server too, but that's another story. What would be better is to have a way to put this behind TOR/I2p, that would make things a bit better.
On a centralized website the issue is less present as only the admins of the server can see the details about you, ip etc (maybe mods can too on reddit, not sure), here everyone can see everything, it's a lot more invasive imho. Everytime you upvote/downvote something, your account handle is saved on the post as upvoter/downvoter. This is very juicy data to build profiles and analytics on people.
I'm worried that if I host my own server, I'll have to have stupid amounts of storage because it'll want to have copies of all of the fediverse on there.
I definitely feel like that's the next major step for this technology. And for online ownership! Stop letting other people own your data. Own it yourself!
Have you checked out Nostr? Nostr works somewhat like that. You own your public/private keys. You sign in with your private key in different instances and your profile, your subs and everything follow you. That I think the Nostr relay model is superior to the Fediverse framework.
I haven't heard of that! I'll check it out, thanks!
If @christianselig were to make another app after Apollo, I'd want it to be something that does exactly this. Your account address would be something like
@username@apollo.appor something, and the app would simply aggregate any feed you want from across the fediverse without needing to be its own community.