this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2025
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I would think the jargon would be "I chose fedia.io as my Lemmy provider," or similar for other federated platforms.
Oh god no. That's like "I chose Burger King as my McDonald's provider."
Not really. In that metaphor it's more like, "I chose the McDonald's down at the corner to get my Big Mac instead of the one across town."
"I can get a Whopper from McDonald's and I don't have to see any crap from Papa John's because McDonalds is defederated from them."
Provider doesn't make any sense when the content is coming from other places.
But Burger King and McDonalds are the same type of entities.
Fedia.io and Lemmy are different. Your example would be "Lemmy as a Piefed provider", or "Feddit.org as a feddit.uk provider"
Fine, "I choose Burger King as my hamburger provider but I expect to be able to access a Big Mac from Burger King unless they are defederated."
Ok, have it your way then
"I use Vodafone as my phone provider. Can't call people in North Korea because they cut that connection. I might have to choose another provider that still allows me to call there".
Yeah it's even worse than that.
fedia.io is a specific "provider" in this context. fedia.io runs on mbin. Lemmy is analogous to mbin. Many "providers" run on lemmy: lemmy.world, lemmy.dbzer0.com, lemmy.wtf, etc.
What is being provided is fediverse access. "Fediverse" is not my mostest favorite term, but it's the one that's most accurate.
There's a discussion on !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com about a name for Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed, as they are actually compatible. Mastodon and the others always feels a bit finicky. Feel free to contribute.
I mean, it's not like that at all, but it's ok to not care for it still. Lemmy is a federated platform, just like Pixelfed is, and Mastodon, etc. Those would be the providers in the example from before.
Edit to add: Literally every time the word "instance" comes up in the manner noted above, it's woth regard to a Lemmy instance, or a Mastodon instance, and rarely if ever have I noticed a reference to a "fediverse instance". I have no clue where your comparison comes from.
Lemmy is a server application. Mastodon is a server application. Pixelfed is a server application.
I don't use Lemmy. Never have. And yet here I am.