On the technical side, you post a bunch of actions to your local server (posts, comments, votes) and others who are interested pull copies of them to their server where they can respond or not.
On the social side, you subscribe to communities both locally and on other servers. Moderation is public, unlike reddit. And even if you’re banned from a community or even a whole server, as long as it’s not your home server (where your account is) you can just keep going without content from that server.
On the flip side, there’s no real block function, the “block” is actually a mute. They keep posting but your server just doesn’t show it to you. And if someone’s enough of a shitkicker to get banned from their home instance, nothing stops them from joining another. Most veteran fedizens have three of four accounts already (in my case, to cover server downtime). And servers can outright ban whole other servers, including all their communities and users; this is called defederation.
To go back to the technical, all these blocks and bans and defederations come back to the same thing: someone saying “I’m not interested in the actions of this user / community / server, don’t pull copies of it for me.”
others who are interested pull copies of them to their server where they can respond or not.
To be technical, most ActivityPub federation is push, not pull. The server sends actions to other servers with members that have subscribed to the relevant community. In some cases, a user asks for something a server doesn’t have and it attempts to pull it from the server that hosts it.
On the technical side, you post a bunch of actions to your local server (posts, comments, votes) and others who are interested pull copies of them to their server where they can respond or not.
On the social side, you subscribe to communities both locally and on other servers. Moderation is public, unlike reddit. And even if you’re banned from a community or even a whole server, as long as it’s not your home server (where your account is) you can just keep going without content from that server.
On the flip side, there’s no real block function, the “block” is actually a mute. They keep posting but your server just doesn’t show it to you. And if someone’s enough of a shitkicker to get banned from their home instance, nothing stops them from joining another. Most veteran fedizens have three of four accounts already (in my case, to cover server downtime). And servers can outright ban whole other servers, including all their communities and users; this is called defederation.
To go back to the technical, all these blocks and bans and defederations come back to the same thing: someone saying “I’m not interested in the actions of this user / community / server, don’t pull copies of it for me.”
To be technical, most ActivityPub federation is push, not pull. The server sends actions to other servers with members that have subscribed to the relevant community. In some cases, a user asks for something a server doesn’t have and it attempts to pull it from the server that hosts it.
Real random but how the heck do you type in that username when you’re logging in 😭 It looks very nice but that can’t be practical right?
People type usernames more than once in 2026? I thought everyone had password managers by now.
Either way, the real username there is
Nemoin standard Latin characters andℕ𝕖𝕞𝕠is a display name configured in the settings.You know how your username is @ollie@pawb.social? But your name as displayed includes “the otter ~ 🦦 (they/them)”?
Same deal.