Crash course in digital decentralization!

Basically Lemmy is the social platform right? These are maintained in servers, but here’s the catch: anyone can run lemmy on their own homeserver!

You and I are right now conversing on https://www.lemmy.ml but this is only one instance. Each instance is basically its own platform but uses the lemmy source code, each has its own rules, communities and moderators.

Here’s a list of instances you can sign up to (right now you have a lemmy.ml account)

But not only that, here’s the wilder part: those instances federate with each other! This means you can communicate with people from other instances without leaving yours. This is why you occasionally see here people with usernames that end with “@lemmygrad.ml” or “@beehaw.org” and etc.

Here are the instances that lemmy.ml federates with.