First of all, how is called this category of programs, instance engine?

Second, why there are 3 different, basically inter-compatible projects out there, what are the benefits of each one over the others? and why does Lemmy prevail all of them.

*i will be using feddit as a umbrella term for all the reddit-like fediverse.

I don’t have much of a technical Background to know how this things work under the hood, but I’m quite curious of where all of this is heading.

I see a lot of awesome features locked away in these other projects that would be just nice if it was standard to have them, like piefed’s hashtag-like system that allows people to seek things by topic instead of going to a specific community hosted in a specific instance, it would instantly fix the fragmentation problem across feddit, lol.

How the future of feddit will be? will be all be using Lemmy or other specific project, or instances will use whatever project they like and they will be cross compatible enough that it won’t be much of a deal what project is running underneath?

    • dbtng@eviltoast.orgEnglish
      1·
      18 hours ago

      Wow. I respect your opinion, which was obviously carefully considered, and I completely disagree with your perspective about instances being a dead end.

      As instances are currently structured, they are tied to web domain, and actually owned by somebody somewhere. That somebody has a level of commitment having setup hosting and configured the server itself, and likely to want to not lose their toys. If that somebody refuses to enforce order in their instance, they can be defederated. Thus, bad actors incur risk. There is power in this structure.

      This is all public. Somebody owns it. It goes back to real people, who can have real consequences if they do bad things.

      There’s a lot of people out there doing bad things. I don’t see a lot of that here.

      I’ve seen a lot of crappy ways to organize people on the internet.
      This one seems to work alright. For now.

      • rglullisAEnglish
        1·
        11 hours ago

        As instances are currently structured, they are tied to web domain, and actually owned by somebody somewhere. That somebody has a level of commitment having setup hosting and configured the server itself, and likely to want to not lose their toys

        In this system, the people that simply want to access the web MUST trust the server owner and the people that want to have full control over their identity MUST setup their own server.

        This is complex, fragile, expensive and a huge barrier of entry. Just this week the admins of the second largest lemmy instance are closing down their server and 5000 people are left with no choice but to move on from their identity and find a new home.

        Email doesn’t have that. The WWW doesn’t have that. Phone networks doesn’t have that. Bluesky doesn’t have that.