"What's he building in there?" echoes through my mind. In our latest experiment, we are building a new type of Fediverse experience geared towards aiding discovery. Here's how we get there.

We Distribute is teaming up with Bonfire to develop a new kind of social instance - one that elevates curation and discovery to promote all things Fediverse. It’s a social instance, but also a discovery portal.

  • David WBL@lemmy.mlEnglish
    11·
    19 hours ago

    Sounds cool! Although I do not really get it.

    I always miss the basic grammar of software platform announcements - making things hard to understand. Especially fedi-projects can be confusing.

    So, it is an instance. How do I interact with it? As a user on that instance or any fedi instance?

    Do I use the website or my own instance?

    Basically who am I (the user), and what do I do? And where do I do it?

    Thanks

    • Pika@hikki.teamEnglish
      2·
      11 hours ago

      An instance effectively is the website. Just a more techy term. Lemmy.ml is your instance and hikki.team is mine. You write something on your site (lemmy.ml), I get it on mine (hikki.team), and vice versa. This is possible because our two sites interact between themselves (i.e. “federate”).

      The overall process is like this:

      • I wrote this reply and hit “send”.
      • My browser (well, in my case, a Lemmy app, specifically Eternity) has sent it to hikki.team, the site I chose to connect to Lemmy from (i.e. my instance).
      • hikki.team has sent it to lemmy.ml (and to all the other instances, too)
      • lemmy.ml figured from the data it received that it’s a reply to your comment
      • Since your account is registered on lemmy.ml, it sent you a notification, so you wouldn’t miss it among all the rest. Ping!

      Now, if you decide to reply to me, it will go that same way in reverse.

      Here’s a quick doodle: 2938

      From a user perspective, the interaction within an instance or between them doesn’t differ at all, and that’s the whole point. No matter where you enter Lemmy, you connect to all of it. You see my reply regardless.

      It’s not just Lemmy, either. People coming to PieFed/Kbin/Mbin can also see this post, the comments, and reply to them. The software they use affects their user experience, but doesn’t change their ability to connect with others. That’s one of the key promises of Fediverse - ideally, all Fediverse instances (websites) running any Fediverse software should interact in this way, forming a single network that everyone interacts with in their own way.