this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Why not "servers"? That's all they are. They serve content.
Because technically, one server can host multiple instances. Instances are containerized— literally an instance of lemmy.
Is there any practical reason to actually do that, though?
Great question! Yes; hosting providers will undoubtedly exist, and some power users may want to host more than one instance on a single server to cater to slightly different audiences.
In modern server infrastructure, there’s no need to maintain the overhead of a fully virtualized operating system just to run a different instance. Containerization is the modern best practice, and with Amazon EKS or Azure Kubernetes Service, the containers just live directly in the cloud on a PaaS backend.
I'm sorry, I don't really understand, what would be the advantage of this over hosting another community?
Can you give me an example of this catering where the server would want different rules per instance?
Sorry, i'm not trying to be rude I just genuinely don't get it.
Not rude at all.
Think of the domain names. I can register multiple domains, and point them to the same server. The domain name is the instance name. So while I could have multiple communities on like SpacePirate.xyz (I don’t own this domain, fyi, just an example), and have flying and sports communities with similar rules and things, this may not make sense if my domain name is something more specific, especially if if want communities to have far more specialization.
I saw an instance called lemmyfly.org, with all sorts of communities about different, more specialized/technical aspects of flying; gliders, simming, cockpit videos, etc. If I owned this domain, but if I’m also a fan of sports, I could also have lemmysports.org, with communities for football, baseball, basketball, etc. While the owner could combine those sports communities onto lemmyfly.org, it may be more appealing to their users to make their home on an instance best reflects their interests. So if I was predominately a sports fan, I probably wouldn’t want my home instance to be lemmyfly.org. In computer science, this concept is called coupling; you want to group similar things together in one place, and similarly, not group dissimilar things together.
While mega instances might have all sorts of unrelated topics, they will not have the specialization or level of granularity that some people may be looking for… or maybe in the fediverse, it won’t end up being so appealing to tie yourself to a megainstance, lest they go the way of Reddit or Twitter (or risk of brigading, or ddos, etc). It so far seems to be idealized to have lots of smaller, specialized instances, and your home is whichever suits you best, but because you’re federated, you can still participate and subscribe to your favorite communities across instances no problem, but you may have some greater sense of pride or camaraderie in being from your home instance. i.e., in Reddit, very rarely, people will say, hey, I recognize you from such and such sub! But here, you will see people from lemmy.ca, or midwest.social, etc, and it’d be more explicit that this person is from the same instance as you, and that’s pretty cool.
I understand now, thank you so much!