• 4 Posts
  • 14 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • A close cousin of Lemmy is Mastodon. If you consider Lemmy a federated version of Reddit, then Mastodon is a federated version of Twitter.

    The largest Mastodon server is probably Truth Social, on which former president Trump posts his messages after being banned from Twitter.

    Truth Social uses the same protocol as Mastodon of Lemmy: ActivityPub. The difference: the Truth Social administrators blocked the Truth Social server from sending out messages to or receiving messages from other servers. So it’s a private Mastodon.

    Bottom line: if you run your own Lemmy server you can block whatever server you want or none at all. And others can block your server if they want. If you create ab account at somebody else’s Lemmy server, the administrator can decide to block other Lemmy servers.

    If you use a Mastodon account, it’s very easy to migrate to another server including your followers. Lemmy accounts do not appear to offer that functionality (yet?), but I expect a migration tool will be created in the future. So if an administrator decides to block another Lemmy server, but you don’t like that, you might easily move to another server. As of yet, you can’t however and need to create an account on another Lemmy server.


  • The beauty of federating servers is that everybody can setup their own server, provided they own a domain name.

    In theory I could start a server registered to unanimousstargazer.social and create an account called @unanimousstargazer@unanimousstargazer.social and participate in the fediverse. If I choose to block Meta, then that’s my choice.

    I agree people are unnecessarily making a fuzz about this, as it’s their own choice to join a server or not. The fediverse is open, so why can’t Meta join. That’s up to them. And if I want to block them, that’s up to me.


  • Which, by the way, is also a great way to verify certain people. If a Lemmy account is registered on a server with a domain that is owned by a large broadcast company for example, it’s easy to check whether the user of that account is who that person claims to be.

    The municipality of Amsterdam set up their own Mastodon server registered to amsterdam.nl, so it’s clear their Mastodon posts are genuinely from the municipality without any external verification schedule. If the mayor would want to post herself, she could simply get an account on that server and everybody knows it’s genuinely her.


  • From a functionality perspective there is no difference. I’m registered to a Dutch server with this account and can comment on all OPs that are visible to me.

    The administrator of a server (domain or instance) can block other servers (domains or instances) however. So if Meta not only starts it’s own Twitter-like platform, but also it’s own Reddit-like platform, it could be that administrators block access to the Meta server.

    The best example for Mastodon (which uses the same federation protocol as Lemmy) is the Truth Social platform on which former president Trump publishes his posts. The administrators of Truth Social blocked access to all other servers on the fediverse, so Truth Social doesn’t federate at all. And I presume administrators of many other servers block access to Truth Social.

    So from that aspect, you might think through on what server you register. Might the administrator block access to certain servers? Do you want that or not? etc.

    But you can also take location into consideration with regard to legal questions. I personally do not want to register on a server in certain countries if for example the GDPR is not enforceable.