What is an instance? what is a federation? what is a server? can someone please describe in simple terms how this all runs and how we as users navigate it?

  • paramaramboh
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    1 year ago

    Yes, and you can regard this as an advantage and a disadvantage at the same time: There will be larger instances where the iOS community will have more users than on other instances, and these will most closely resemble a centralized iOS subreddit. Sometimes it can be valuable to have discussions within specific parts of the community, though. For instance (pun intended), reddit is heavily dominated by US users, so European or Indian users might prefer to discuss iOS aspects within their separate communities, as some localized stuff doesn’t apply to US discussions. Maybe you want to have a place that allows piracy-friendly discussions and one that doesn’t. Maybe you want to have a local meet-up community that is more queer-friendly in focus than the main one. This existed on reddit as well, just that the subreddit names themselves would differ (r/ios vs. r/ios_piracy or something like that), and over here, it’s the instances (c/ios@lemmy.world vs. c/ios@piracy.net or whatever they’re called). That being said, in most cases, one community will very quickly win over the others for random reasons, if only one community is necessary, and the others might just link thereor something, like with subreddits that are called r/tearsofthekingdom vs. r/totk vs. r/tears_of_the_kingdom vs. r/zelda_totk etc.