Asklemmy

43833 readers

927 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

EILI5: How does Lemmy work? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by ron3ats@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

17 comments fedilink hide all child comments

As the title indicates, how does Lemmy work?

I recently inquired in a couple other communities about necessities (whether it be hardware or software, ect) and guidance to create a server/instance and decided I may be better off understanding how this realm works and operates as my starting point, then move into the hardware side, then continue to the Sofware and setup.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] mrmanager@lemmy.today 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It uses ActivityPub to send and receive all messages to any instance that has subscribed to a community.

So I'm typing this message on my own instance (Lemmy.today) after my instance made it pop up in my feed since I subscribed to the AskLemmy community on lemmy.ml.

Also ActivityPub is the common protocol for all fediverse software, which is why you can even read Lemmy posts from Mastadon for example.

It's the coolest tech I've seen in a long time because users have their own platform instead of it being centralized. They make the rules for their own instance, or they join an instance they like.

[–] ivy@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How do usernames work? If someone has a username on one instance, can someone else register the username on another instance? If so, how are they distinguished?

[–] Barbarian@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yes, you can have same usernames on different instances.

The full username is always @user@address.

So I'm @barbarian@sh.itjust.works. There's also a @barbarian@lemmy.ml (that's also me, I stopped using it to help with server load, but ignore that part :P). Servers and people can distinguish between the two users because it always includes where the user is from.