An instance effectively is the website. Just a more techy term. Lemmy.ml is your instance and hikki.team is mine. You write something on your site (lemmy.ml), I get it on mine (hikki.team), and vice versa. This is possible because our two sites interact between themselves (i.e. "federate").

The overall process is like this:

• I wrote this reply and hit "send".
• My browser (well, in my case, a Lemmy app, specifically Eternity) has sent it to hikki.team, the site I chose to connect to Lemmy from (i.e. my instance).
• hikki.team has sent it to lemmy.ml (and to all the other instances, too)
• lemmy.ml figured from the data it received that it's a reply to your comment
• Since your account is registered on lemmy.ml, it sent you a notification, so you wouldn't miss it among all the rest. Ping!

Now, if you decide to reply to me, it will go that same way in reverse.

Here's a quick doodle:

From a user perspective, the interaction within an instance or between them doesn't differ at all, and that's the whole point. No matter where you enter Lemmy, you connect to all of it. You see my reply regardless.

It's not just Lemmy, either. People coming to PieFed/Kbin/Mbin can also see this post, the comments, and reply to them. The software they use affects their user experience, but doesn't change their ability to connect with others. That's one of the key promises of Fediverse - ideally, all Fediverse instances (websites) running any Fediverse software should interact in this way, forming a single network that everyone interacts with in their own way.

No, that's accurate. It's basically that, except it's done through ActivityPub federation, aggregates a bunch of different types of activity objects, and makes them sortable / searchable / filterable / rendered in a pretty interface. It can even help provide a lot of that info to other instances connected to it.

Like, aside from some foundational bits, the technology itself is not super special. Actually, Bonfire does a ton of really cool things under the hood, but that's only a little bit relevant.

On the bright side, it does make a bunch of things easier to find, search for, and learn about:

• Groups
• Events
• Articles
• Collections of Actors
• Any type of media

Like, honestly it's an idea that sounds kind of stupid on the surface, but it's basically federated Yahoo with a grassroots bent. But I think there are aspects, from a community organizing aspect, that this could actually be useful. It's like hyperlocalism but for the network itself. You offer ways for people to find communities, read about what's being developed, find some mom and pop business, commission an artist, listen to some music.

I think what might really set it apart is that no one has built a Fediverse instance specifically geared towards that way of thinking. That's what we're interested in trying.

Seems to be a mix between what WeDistribute currently is, but aggregating content from different sources, and a Bonfire instance. So an effort to mix the old web with the social web. The best parallel to me seems to be websites with associated forums back in the old days, but a federated version.

I'm interested to see how it works out.

Should be good now, we redeployed onto a beta release to test out some feature fixes. We're basically dogfooding this every day!

It's going to be, group federation only partially works in Bonfire today. The devs are very close to shipping it in an upcoming stable release.