this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
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Lemmy is just the software this website uses. You could download lemmy, install it on your own server, and have your own community -- AKA instance. It would be your website, but running the standardized "lemmy" code/interface.
This instance (website) is federated with the one I made an account on. I can browse communities, read posts, and comment on this lemmy website (lemmy.world) through "my" lemmy website (midwest.social), and vice versa.
"Federated" means two sites running lemmy have that agreement. "Defederated" means they don't allow their users to interact -- you'd have to make an account on each site.
The distinction between communities and instances is often poorly displayed in many cases which adds to the general confusion I feel. For example, feedit.de describes itself as "Deutschsprachige(German-speaking) Lemmy Community" and their Logo also states "lemmy community".
But it's not a community, it's an instance. The "subreddits" inside that instance are the communities, so feddit itself shouldn't be called community to avoid confusion.
Edit: Of course there's also more added confusion when we talk about the Fediverse as a whole, where users on /kbin use the terms magazines and articles instead of comunities and posts and they also have different names for likes and dislikes.
Community is not the same thing as an instance.