Is there a major difference between Lemmy and Beehaw (or other federated instances)?
Is there a major difference between Lemmy and Beehaw (or other federated instances)?
Hello everyone! Long time redditor, first time poster to Lemmy.world. As I'm learning more about the Fediverse, I'm seeing there are several instances that seem to serve the same purpose. For example, Lemmy and Beehaw seem to be similar, yet they are still separate.
Are there any big differences or factors I should be looking for when browsing different instances? So far, it looks like the number of communities and rules are the biggest differences between instances.
Bonus question: are there any good sources for learning more about the Fediverse? I've found these links so far:
https://opensource.com/article/23/3/tour-the-fediverse - Gives a decent explanation of the Fediverse. https://fediverse.party/ - Provides a link to different Fediverse instances, not specific to Reddit replacements.
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Lemmy and beehaw are not separate. Beehaw is Lemmy. It's a Lemmy server/instance. Beehaw just chooses not to participate with a bunch of other instances.
The main difference between instances is how they're run. Like you're asking about just now, beehaw is run very conservatively where they tend to block more quickly and try to make their instance as safe a space as possible, while others may be more laissez faire or something in between. Some may have a topic focus. But which communities and how many are on an instance basically doesn't matter.
Thanks for the clarification! From what I understand, it sounds like as long as all the instances stay connected, the number of communities per instance doesn't matter, but if a major instance defederates (like Beehaw I think), then you could "lose access" to the communities on the deferated instance. You can still view the content by going to that instance though, so it's not like it's the worst thing to happen.
You're right that access is lost. I understand the decision by beehaw, but I think the solution should be to try to find more moderators/admins instead, as far as I see, they haven't even tried.
It sucks because Lemmy currently has ~54k active users, and the 2 instances they defederated have a total of ~16k active users, so a pretty large split now. Especially because the other 38k users still see beehaw content, so they're even unwittingly excluding lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works users from their own content if they interact with stuff posted to beehaw. I try to avoid communities hosted on beehaw because of that.