Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…
What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.
Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.
I don’t have anything technical to add to the discussion, I have absolutely no idea how Lemmy works, just that I despertately wanted somewhere else to go to that wasn’t Reddit.
Still not even sure I understand how any of it works, although I do understand why there are privacy concerns and concerns around ‘syncing’ changes etc.
What I do want to say is that analogies aren’t supposed to be taken too literally. That’s kind of the point of them. :)
Yeah I’m just bad at making them without them being too literal, haha.
I’m sure loads of people have tried to explain it already. For what it’s worth, my basic explanation (as I understand it) is as follows:
Reddit is run off servers owned by a single company, and those servers all talk to each other relatively nicely because they’re all owned by the same entity. Lemmy is run off servers owned by lots of different people. These servers talk to each other because their owners have agreed to be “federated”. However because of this they can also have more difficulties talking to each other, and individual owner’s opinions can also get involved.
