shiggityshwat

Actually ELI5: You know those really old buildings with a paddle wheel on the side, sitting in a river? The river water pushes the wheel to turn it, and then we can connect the wheel to stuff like a sawmill or whatever.

Now, let's say you want to have a sawmill down the road instead of right on the river. If you're smart, you can find a way to stick a big hose in the river and take all that water to the other sawmill, and push a wheel there, then use another hose to put the water back in the river. That's basically what a wire does.

I'm still crazy new here, but why can't we browse comments by Top? I'm wondering if a choice was made not to allow that (the way that Mastodon made some choices not to support some Twitter features), or if it's hard because of federation or something. That's the only thing I'm still jarred by here.