This is really great! I’ve also been quite lost but am enjoying the learning process!

One thing I’ve just learned is that all the different instances don’t neccessarily ‘federate’ with each other in real time (there can be some lag in content showing up in your instance) or at all. Only instances your instance federates with sync up? I think? :-) I see beehaw.org have had to cut ties to a couple of instances to help with the flood of new users and content happening right now. It seems while you can still view their content from your instance you can’t comment or post to it? I think? :-)

You rock!! As soon as I find a way to pin this I will.

Good infographics! It is better to change the screenshots to light theme (instead of dark) since the links and buttons are hard to read in the photo.

Awesome post. Cleared things up so much for me

Great post, but here are some questions those graphics raise, that I couldn’t find an answer to, and which have only my experience with email, usenet and irc for reference (all of which are federated, easy to abuse, had a host of problems, and have slowly migrated to centralized versions to solve these issues):

• how do you ban someone?
• what stops him from spinning 100 amazon ecc instances, federating 100 servers and spamming his thing 100 times from 100 different instances?
• how do you even block an instance?
• what happens with the federated content once the source instance goes down?
• say lemmy.ml and memes goes down, how do you post a new reply in memes@lemmy.ml? does it even work?
• i haven’t found any info for syncing accounts across instances (to prevent this loss) or if this is even possible at low level
• what happens with comments and pictures once a federated instance goes down? say, if i selfhost and i crash without backups, does my content and posts disappear?
• can i pull it back?
• what kind of capacity planning would I need to selfhost say, a decade worth of reddit browsing? assuming I only care about my posts and what I save, would they be accessible for me?

Right now i’ve had an issue myself where the potential answer to my issue is in a privated subreddit. So, i had to search even more. Frankly, it highlights the downside of having this become a thing. So i am on the fence whether i want that to happen at all.