Layperson-friendly explanations

  • Kichae@kbin.social
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    2 years ago

    Lemmy is a content aggregation server. It’s a piece of software that allows people to set up and run their own Reddit-like websites. By running Lemmy, you can host a website with open forum-like communities that are focused on a particular topic, place, region, or whatever you can imagine. Just like on Reddit.

    One of the features of Lemmy is that it can speak a type of Internet language, called ActivityPub, that allows website running Lemmy to communicate with each other. This let’s them to share and cross-post content, and Lemmy gives website owners, and their guests, the ability to form alliances with other websites running Lemmy, where they agree (usually implicitly, but it can be explicit, too) to share content between them, letting people on both sites see what people on the other site are posting, and even to interact with them.

    Lemmy isn’t the only piece of server software that speaks this language. It’s also spoken by kbin, which is a different content aggregator server, meaning Lemmy websites can also share content with kbin websites. And it’s spoken by websites running. Mastodon, Calckey, Misskey, Pleroma, Akkoma, Friendica, Hubzilla, PixelFed, PeerTube, BookWyrm, FunkWhale, and others, meaning peiple using websites running those pieces of software can also, at least in theory, see and interact with content on Lemmy-based websites, and vice versa.