Defederation blocks communication both ways, I believe.

You were into Warhammer at age 4? Man, I couldn’t even read.

Conversations with my spouse are almost entirely of the following:

1. planning and coordinating
2. infodumping
3. little love phrases (“I love you.” “You are a good wife.” “Come give me a kiss.”)
4. listening silently while my wife shares the latest gossip and about her day
5. spontaneous deep conversations

I love her.

If I see a URL like this, I, and… polling my coworkers here… All 52 coworkers on my group chat would say these are highly suspicious and would not click on them. I imagine this is the general consensus for internet-savvy people.

• I’m happily reading a post on Reddit, and see a link like that: clearly dangerous.
• I’m happily reading a post on Lemmy, and see a link like that: probably dangerous, but possibly a Lemmy instance? Impossible to tell. I want to read Lemmy, not whatever “stoneclub” is.

It would be great if links to remote Lemmy instances had some kind of styling applied; a little icon, etc., that would make it clear this link is within the fediverse.

I don’t mean to be glib

No worries. I appreciate the time you have taken to explain things. I have watched a few videos and Googled around, but unfortunately most of the results I find are either way too vague (Lemmy is part of the Fediverse. What is that? We don’t know either!) or give the analogy of “It’s like email” and then proceed to basically explain the API gateway thing I was assuming.

I will dig into this some more now that I know what I’m looking for; thank you. I’m hopeful there will be some more/clearer/accurate resources for the Reddit refugees before the current frenzy dies down to help build up the network.

Thank you for taking the time to answer. I hope you might be willing to clarify a bit more for me. By “window”, I meant just… having access to a remote community via an API gateway, I guess.

I was under the impression that if I try to subscribe to a remote community hosted on lemmy.world from vlemmy.net, that is simply registering the URL of that community into some local directory in my instance, not duplicating the entire community contents into vlemmy.net. And then when I view a thread in that remote community, I am just retrieving the thread data from the host server at lemmy.world straight to my browser, not loading some local duplicate of the thread from vlemmy.net. Seems like it would get out of sync quickly if we are all reading separate local copies of the original.

So based on your answer, I am still misunderstanding something. What is the purpose of all the duplication then? Is it just for local caching purposes? Does this not needlessly drive up the amount of traffic because each instance is frantically trying to keep up to date with every other instance, rather than just letting each instance handle the requests for its own communities?

Each instance would have to handle the replication and storage of the entire lemmyverse.

Do instances fully replicate and locally store remote subscribed communities? My understanding is they are still solely hosted on the original instance; subscribing just opens a window to the community by making your instance aware it exists.

Trying to figure out Lemmy. It’s not easy…

Also, replying to users who keep requesting access to our blacked out sub.