We are happy to announce that we have finished the initial version of our ActivityPub implementation. At the moment, it can only federate a limited set of data, like communities, users and posts, but not comments or votes. So this initial version is mainly interesting for those who are familiar with the ActivityPub protocol, and those who would like to contribute to Lemmy.
These are our test instances, Be aware that they are not permanent, and we might wipe the data at any time. Federation uses a whitelist for now, until we are confident that the implementation is secure.
If you are interested in contributing to the development, check out this issue and the dev instructions. Please use the issue tracker to report bugs, so that we can keep everything organized.
We also want to give a huge thanks to Aode, whose ActivityStreams library and advice have helped us immensely.
If you like what we are doing, please consider donating towards Lemmy development. Besides Liberapay and Patreon, we are also on OpenCollective now. Donations are a big help for us, because they allow us to spend more time to work on Lemmy, instead of selling our labour to a company just to pay for rent and other necessities.
So, what is this place? I just found it from a reddit link that showed up in my feed. It seems like a nice place so far, but I have no idea what the “fedeverse” all about, or how stuff is “federated”. I might not be posting this in the right place, but I’m still trying to get to grips with this place.
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Cool, thanks! I didn’t realise there were that many websites lol
The fediverse is a decentralized social network comprised of independent servers (called instances) that can talk to each other. When you’re registered on one fediverse site, you can see and interact with users and content on many other fediverse sites, depending who your instance connects to and who is blocked, also what other platforms the service you’re using is intercompatible with (think the differences between Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, all of which have “clone” platforms on the fediverse that you can just download the source code for and host on your own server). Each instance can focus on a specific niche or topic, or they can be general purpose, and all of them can make their own rules (though the toxic or offensive ones tend to be blocked by many or maybe even most other nodes in the network). The main problem the fediverse tries to solve is problem of a single point of control. For example, Reddit’s administrators have absolute control over the site, which means they can do anything they want on it, often with the main intent being profit. The Fediverse aims to spread that control over many people by allowing independently controlled servers to communicate with each other, so if instance’s administrators does something atrocious, people can simply move away from that instance and even block it from communicating with their own instances. Is it perfect? No. Does it still have a lot of problems? Yes. But in my opinion, it’s better than traditional social media platforms where a single for-profit company controls everything.
Lemmy isn’t a fediverse platform yet, but federation is being actively developed. It’s designed to be a Reddit-style forum with nested comments and independent communities. You can basically think of it as a Reddit clone that plans on becoming decentralized. Such a platform is currently missing from the fediverse, which is why Lemmy exists.
Ah, I really like that idea. I get so annoyed when Reddit admins do what they want, even when the userbase itself has said multiple times they don’t want that, just for the sake of profit. Spreading it all out for more people to run it seems like a much better idea, so, like you said, if something bad happens, we could just leave it and move on. Thanks for all the help!
We’re still working on federation, but just think of it as a reddit alternative for now. Fediverse explainer.