For years, the internet has been shrinking. Not in size, not in data, but in ownership. A vast, decentralized network of personal blogs, forums, and independent communities has been corralled into a handful of paved prison yards controlled by a few massive corporations. Every post, every “friend,” every creative work—
You navigate from your local instance. So like you just use hyperlinks (like here on lemmy, I’m clicking around, but my URL still shows
slrpnk.net/...
- yours probably showssh.itjust.works/...
), or if you try to do something like follow/reply/boost/etc on another instance, it’ll prompt you to connect from your own.So like here I’m looking at a post on mastodon.social, which I don’t have an account on. If I just type in my home instance in the pop-up modal there, then it’ll complete the action from my home instance. If you’re already signed in on home instance with a cookie then it’ll to it automatically.