Oh, definitely understandable. It takes a little while to wrap your head around how all this actually works. I learned most of it with the Twitter exodus when I moved to Mastodon. Once you do get it, though...it's kind of like taking the red pill and realizing how railroaded the internet has actually been for the last 15 years. I genuinely think the Fediverse and ActivityPub will be a massive turning point in how we use the internet, and over time (think a decade time of time-scale) will redefine how social engagement occurs on the internet.

Technology -- and the efforts of open source developers -- got to the point where we can make Facebooks and Reddits and Twitters and GoodReads and Instagrams and more that can run on a server anyone's willing to spin up, and content no longer needs to be gated to one community thanks to the ActivityPub standard.

And think of it this way: a piece of content on kpub is really no different than a piece of content on Pixelfed or Mastodon. They're all embedded within an ActivityPub "container" that has a standard form. All these websites exist now not because you have to be super-specific in how to read the content, but rather to craft experiences that are optimized for different types of content. kbin has microblogs, which is really just Twitter/Mastodon. Some will like it here, others will find the experience that a dedicated microblogging client like Mastodon far more favourable for viewing that kind of content. When sharing a photo on Pixelfed, you can assign licenses, attributions, and locations, which makes sense given its intent to be a photography website. You don't really need that for a lot of images shared here or on Mastodon , but all that info is stored inside the exact same ActivityPub "container" as a link you put on here; nothing is stopping kbin or Mastodon from reading that data, or being able to write it if they wanted to. At the end of the day, it's all the same stuff, and you just need the application you're building to interact with the right parts.

That's why you can do things like follow people from entirely different "platforms" on other Fediverse platforms. For example, here's someone I saw trending on Pixelfed who had some nice pictures: Charlie as viewed from kbin. It may not be ideal following them here -- it might not be the optimal experience for photo sharing -- but you can do it. Likewise, you can boost content from one "platform" into another.

The more I learn about it all, the more I find it impressive how forward-looking and comprehensive the ActivityPub standard was. And I'm sure it will flex and expand as needed heading forward.

Last thing I'll say because I'm way too wordy...one of the things I did when I was learning all this was set up a similar username on multiple accounts. I'm on here, Mastodon, Bookrastinating, and Pixelfed. I put a 💬 after my display name on Mastodon, a 📖 after my display name on Bookrastinating, and a 📷 after my display name on Pixelfed. From my Mastodon account, I followed my Bookrastinating and Pixelfed accounts. Now I post content into the relevant platform that's optimized for it: Mastodon for microblogs, Bookrastinating for reading stuff, and Pixelfed for photos. Those communities naturally develop interest for those specific types of content. But now, if I post a picture on Pixelfed that I really think my followers on Mastodon would like, I can just boost the content into my Mastodon feed. Not a link to the content, but the actual content itself. And it can move on into that community as well. I'm content right now having these different places optimized for different types of content, but on a technology stack that allows that content to seamlessly transition between applications. It's great!

Beehaw is big enough to be self-sustaining -- they don't allow users to create subforums there -- and it only takes a few hundred active users to actually create a self-sustaining community.

They have thousands.

At the same time, they only have like 10% of active Lemmy/kbin users. The rest of us will also be fine. People are mostly just irked because they have very active gaming and technology forums, and people are still habituated to seeking out the biggest community on a topic and treating it like it's the only one that matters.

This is an opportunity for everyone else to understand the importance of not relying on single points of failure -- this is the fundamental lesson behind the Reddit and Twitter migrations that people mostly haven't really processed yet -- and to subscribe to multiple manageable communities on topics they care about, and to treat them as communities, and not just a faceless content stream.

The fediverse has, generally, done a very poor job of explaining itself and how it works. There's a huge disconnect between most peoples' mental model of the space, and what actually happens.

During the Twitter migration, the mental model that people seemed to have was that of a mainfarme. That is, that "Mastodon" lived in one specific place, and that everyone was just "logging on" to it via portal, or dumb terminal.

Here, people seem to be better understanding that things live on multiple different websites -- in big part, I think, due to remote community/mamgazine names having the full address shown in the sidebars (Mastodon's UI goes to some lengths to hide when people are on other instances). But how it ends up looking is that you are viewing remote websites through your local instance, kind of as if your local instance is a Fediverse web browser. In this sense, viewing, say, politics@lemmy.ml is the equivalent of browsing to a separate website and viewing or interacting with that content directly.

This is not what happens, though.

Really, that's not what happens with Firefox or Chrome, either. When using a web browser, you request content from a remote computer (the web server), that content gets downloaded and stored on your local hard drive as your browser cache, and then you view the local copy of of that page. If the website is dynamic in some sense, updates from that website get repeatedly pushed to your computer.

This is also how federation works here.

When you view politics@lemmy.ml from, say, lemmy.world, or kbin.social, if you pay special attention to the address bar, you'll notice you're actually viewing kbin.social/m/politics@lemmy.ml. That's a magazine hosted locally on kbin.social. All of the posts and comments you see there are stored locally on kbin.social; when you engage with them, you're merely engaging with a local copy. These copies remain synchronized with other sites by passing messages back and forth.

Defederation is just refusing to accept messages from, or send messages to, a certain website.

With this in mind:

Someone from Server B originates a thread. Someone from Server C sees it and comments on it. I assume people on Server A don't see the post at all, even though there are comments from Server C people.

This is likely correct, yes. Server C will likely send a message to Server A with the comment, but Server A will not have the post in order to properly assign it, so it will probably just get dropped.

Someone from Server A originates a thread. I assume people from Server B can see it and comment on it? That is, the blocking is only one-way?

No. Server A is not sending messages to Server B, so Server B does not get the post, and the copy of the community that is mirrored on Server B will never be updated with that post.

Someone from Server C originates a thread. Someone from Server B comments on it, and someone from Server C replies to that comment. What can people from Server A see?

Server A will receive the messages send by Server C, so the original post, and the comment originating on Server C. It will have blocked the comment from Server B, though, so it will not know what to do with the comment from Server C. The comment from Server C will include metadata that tells Server A that it's a reply to a comment that Server A doesn't have a record of. So, in all likelihood, the comment will get dropped on Server A.

None of the content from beehaw.org would update on lemmy.world, so if you (a lemmy.world user) subscribed to a beehaw community, no posts would ever be sent unless beehaw refederated lemmy.world. Essentially beehaw's server is not talking to lemmy.world in any way currently

To further what rideranton said, the way federation works is by mirroring content across different websites. You're interacting with copies of posts and comments that have been sent to lemmy.world, and when you reply to someone, or post in a remote community, all of that is happening locally. You're exclusively engaging with the local copy of everything.

When sites are federated, they then sync up their content. If they defederate, that syncing merely stops occurring.

Let's say there are five websites all federating, A, B, C, D, and E. There's a popular community, Junk, on B that people on all 5 websites use. This means all 5 sites house a local copy of Junk, and whenever someone posts to Junk their local site pushes those posts out to the other 4.

But one day, B defederates from A, because they decide that there are too many assholes on A. Now, anything people on B post to Junk just never reach A, and similarly anything people on B post to Junk never gets sent to A. But A is still communicating with C, D, and E. Their updates still flow out to those 3 other websites, and updates form them continue to flow back. Similarly, B is still in communication with C, D, and E, so they stay in sync as well. And really, from sites C, D, and E, it kind of looks like nothing happened (though if people pay close enough attention, they may notice that people from A never comment on posts from people using B, and vice versa).

Now, users on A may still be able to see posts and comments from users on B if they arrive on A via C, D, or E, but it won't work the other way: Because site B has explicitly blocked traffic from site A, any content whose author is on site A will be filtered out when syncing with C, D, or E.

Me too, love that

The popular choices seem to be either kbeans or kbinauts. I prefer the latter personally.

….with the unifying term The Feds being tossed around as well, though I’m not entirely sure I feel comfortable being associated with that word.

It's like The Force: You need a certain concentration of fedichlorians before you can gain an understanding.

Each website is independent from each other. They merely have the potential to automatically mirror content from other websites made using compatible software.

So lemmy.ml, lemmy.one, lemmy.world, lemmy.ca, etc. are all totally different websites that run Lemmy. Being different websites, they have totally different admins, and have different rules.

Meanwhile, kbin.social, kbin.run, kbin.place, kayb.ee, fedia.io, and readit.buzz, are totally different websites that run kbin. They similarly have totally different admins, and different rules.

Lemmy (the software) and kbin (the software) use the same communication language, so they can exchange content, but they're still being used by totally separate websites.

vulnerable populations feel free to open up and share how they feel without fear of reprisal

Blocking everything that isn't sunshine and rainbows dose not make me feel open, and makes me fear offending the admins.

Still a new platform, so we're all still searching for the right group. It's just frustrating figuring it's a bad fit later or it changes for the worst. I assume it's the same reason most of us are here.

And I'll reply back so you're sandwiched by kbin users.

Can either of you beehaw users see his post?

Not yet at least. I believe kbin registration is generally open, so it's probably just a matter of time / growth.