PieFed Meta

Lemmy is software. PieFed is software. And they have the same content. Okay, people hate the email comparison, but I'm gonna make one anyway :)

So: Google has programmed a web service that receives and sends so called emails for its users. And then another company, called Microsoft, has programmed another web service, that receives and sends those emails as well. "Email" is not a product of either Google or Microsoft. Email is not even software. Email is kind of... Nothing. It's just a protocol. Email as a concept is just the data that travels between various email servers. Email is nothing more than an agreed-upon standard that various web servers programmed by a lot of different teams are all able to interpret more or less in the same manner.
The word for that is protocol. Email is not a program programmed by either Google or Microsoft. Email is a protocol.

And the same goes with this thing called ActivityPub. PieFed is one server software, programmed by a certain Rimu.

And then there's also MBin. And bunch of other similar server softwares. This conversation we are now having is being relayed to the world by a server in the address http://piefed.social/. It basically shouts out all the activity that takes place under this post to whatever server cares to listen. And then the other server can replicate the content.
The "shouting out all activity" is done using a protocol called ActivityPub.

So, here's this very conversation you are reading, seen from:

• A PieFed server at http://anarchist.nexus/
• A Lemmy server at http://sopuli.xyz/
• An MBin server at http://kbin.melroy.org/
• A Lemmy server at http://lemmy.world/
• A PieFed server at http://piefed.blahaj.zone/

As you can see, each of the links points to a different server. But it's still the precisely same content.

When it comes to moderation: The admin on anarchist.nexus can only moderate stuff that is either:

1. published by users of that server
2. published in communities hosted on that server
3. plus: if the owner of some community has appointed them as a moderator on that specific community, then also there.

If a user from lemmy.ml is being an ass on a community hosted on kbin.melroy.org, the admin of anarchist.nexus cannot really do much anything at all about them. However, they can completely severe the connection to either of those two servers. That is called defederation. For example, many servers have indeed defederated from lemmy.ml, because the admins of that server allow their users to behave like asses towards people living under occupations by authoritarian colonial empires. And either you basically give those people free reign, or you severe the connection to the offending server. Users of servers that have defederated lemmy.ml have a much better experience, because they miss most of the tankie content. And people who are not pro-authoritarianism don't really have any reason to stay on that server, so they tend to migrate to something that is okay with the concept of human rights.

For example piefed.social ~~has defederated from lemmy.ml~~ (EDIT: correction, no, it hasn't But it has defederated from two instances that are even worse). That means, you are very unlikely to see tankie shit in the comments of this post. Anything coming from communities hosted on piefed.social (such as this one is!) or from users on piefed.social is invisible for users of lemmy.ml. And the other way around.

It's a very interesting way to do moderation: You either moderate your server's users in a sensible way, or your server gets cut off by other servers.
Defederations are done on a per-server basis. That means, comment chains can look very different depending on where you're reading it from. Piefed.zip does federate with lemmy.ml, so a community running on piefed.zip is able to have comments from users of lemmy.ml. But a user of piefed.social will not see the comments made by users of lemmy.ml – nor any replies to them! That's why many people don't like to reply to users from lemmy.ml: A lot of people will be unable to see your reply! If you want to say something to a user on lemmy.ml, better write a top-level comment and tag them. Of course, any replies to their comment is invisible for a huge share of Fediverse readers.