We survived for decades without Reddit and we will survive without it in the future. There’s no shame in checking up on small subs there and a community here. And if there isn’t a community here yet. We can make one.

The problem with a copybot, aside from the potential legality, is that all the threads here will be static/stale. There is no reason to interact with them here as the comms are one way.

For a simple explanation, imagine instances as servers. Servers can host the lemmy code, think of it like an opensource reddit. Instances can connect and interact with each other when they federate and they can defederate (break the connection).

Stolen from another user:

Reddit sucks. Let's make our own reddit with blackjack and hookers.

Result: there are now 15 competing reddit knockoffs. Each one is small and lonely.

Solution: let the reddit knockoffs talk to each other. This solves the problem of a fractured userbase. This was always reddit's strength: disparate communities united, on the same site. This size and diversity meant there was a high likelihood of someone who knows what they're talking about or someone with a unique perspective stumbling across the post and chiming in.

By understanding the motivation, hopefully the concept of "Federation" makes more sense.

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My own explanation: you can find a message board for pretty much anything somewhere on the internet, but you’d have to go to a different website for each message board you’re interested in separately - they can’t talk to each other. What Reddit did was create message boards (subreddits) that could interact with each other on the same site. The fediverse is the equivalent of Reddit.com. Communities are the subreddits.

I think the complicated bit are the instances - Reddit doesn’t have those. Instances are like servers. You need to join an instance to access the fediverse. It doesn’t matter which instance you register to unless you’re really interested in the alt-right (for example). A couple of alt-right instances have been defederated because they’re pretty hateful. They have splinted off and can make their own message boards/communities/subreddits but you can’t see or interact with them unless you join that instance separately. Unless whatever instance you’ve registered to defederates (unlikely if you’re in a mainstream one like lemmy.world) you don’t need to worry about instances or join a second one.

Thank you, I appreciate the help.