Hello everyone! Long time redditor, first time poster to Lemmy.world. As I’m learning more about the Fediverse, I’m seeing there are several instances that seem to serve the same purpose. For example, Lemmy and Beehaw seem to be similar, yet they are still separate.
Are there any big differences or factors I should be looking for when browsing different instances? So far, it looks like the number of communities and rules are the biggest differences between instances.
Bonus question: are there any good sources for learning more about the Fediverse? I’ve found these links so far:
https://opensource.com/article/23/3/tour-the-fediverse - Gives a decent explanation of the Fediverse. https://fediverse.party/ - Provides a link to different Fediverse instances, not specific to Reddit replacements.
Beehaw.org places a high priority on censoring content that would offend folks like the LGBT crowd; they’ve been more-willing than most other lemmy instances to defederate from kbin or Lemmy instances that they consider sources of problem users. For some folks, that’s great, and for others, that’s not what they want.
It is currently a little hard to find the community rules for instances that give you at least a basic idea of what an instance is “about”. And not all instances are aiming for something, but for those that are, it’s nice to know about it. Sign up for pawb.social, and you’re on a furry-oriented instance, for example. For Lemmy instances, trying to join normally shows a page that talks a bit about the instance rules. For kbin instances, you can see a short writeup from the instance admins at /terms, like:
You can get there by clicking “Terms of Service” at the bottom of any page.
Beehaw is a Lemmy instance. However, they defederated from two huge instances, because they’re open registration, and the four BH admins felt overwhelmed with the incoming traffic and unable to manually block trolls, so they decided to just separate from a large chunk of content rather than get it under control.
I’m on one of the two defederated instances, sh.itjust.works, and I can neither see what’s posted there, nor can a BH user see what I post (or what’s up on our server, for that matter.
The other big instance is lemmy.world.
BH has very specific rules for what’s okay over there and what’s not. Check them out and see if you’re willing to live with the defederation for the sake of what their admins define as safety.
Beehaw seem to have refederated lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works
No, they have not.
If you compare your link, on Lemmy world to https://beehaw.org/post/931057 the same post viewed through beehaw directly, you will see completely different comments. And the Lenny.world link only has comments from Lemmy.world users.
Defederation behaves in a very confusing way. It blocks interacting with a community, but not the content itself. You can see beehaw’s posts, they can see Lemmy.world’s posts. Comments are not shared, and any posts to unfederated instances never leave the instances they were written on.
I am new here so this is a little confusing for me. In the Beehaw post you linked someone writes that they see only lemmy.world posts that where synced before the defederation. But lemmy.world users should still see the posts of Beehaw since lemmy.world has not defederated from Beehaw only the other way round, isn’t it?
