User accounts are fragmented and just because you signed on at lemmy.world doesn’t mean your account exists on lemmy.ca.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1985
Communities are fragmented and /c/games on lemmy.world is completely different than the one on lemmy.ml with its own users, set of posts, etc.
Lemmy does not currently allow for instance or user migration.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3057
Nor does it allow for shared communities (ie the aforementioned /c/games is unified across multiple instances)
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3100
We are in the early days. If you’re eager feel free to join in the development on these any many other core issues. There’s real potential here.
Agree but at the same time it could be better.
BUT you can still upvote or comment on posts from different instances if you access them from within the instance your account is from!
So you don’t need to create one account for each instance.
Edit: commented from a lemm.ee account
Yea the post is misleading. The community is
games@lemmy.worldnot/c/games. That’s reddit language creeping in.Yes, saying c/gaming is meaningless. I pointed this out to one user yesterday and got the most unbelievable snark back.
It’s just a jargon speed bump. It’ll pass. Happens in any migration.
I think they’re equivalent: see the URL here - https://lemmy.world/c/games - that’s the same as saying !games@lemmy.world
I mean saying c/games without anything else is meaningless. You added @lemmy.world which is correct.
It’s like saying c/worldnews. Do you mean worldnews at lemmy.ml, or worldnews at lemmy.world, or worldnews at shitjustworks, etc, etc, etc.
But the OP literally said “c/games on lemmy.world”, so the criticism is not valid.
Are you serious? I said I made a comment to someone yesterday. I’m not taking about op. And even then Op said “c/games on lemmy.world is completely different than the one on lemmy.ml”. That’s the whole point of this conversation. They are different, someone saying c/gaming on it’s own is meaningless. Jfc follow the conversation.
This is a very important note, and I am afraid this post will confuse people. Yes, there are multiple c/games, but you can follow all of them from any of the accounts and comment, post and otherwise interact as long as your instances are federated.
It definitely confused me. I’m used to reddit so the idea that I would have to have multiple accounts was a huge downside. Thanks for clearing it up… At least a littl.
You don’t need multiple accounts. While there are two separate communities on two separate servers, you can see them both from any server that is federated together.
That actually explains a lot. I was searching for an ADHD community and saw 2 of them. Both had similar community numbers but were different.
I followed them both
The post clearly mentions “c/games on lemmy.world”, not just “c/games”. Cut them some slack.
Exactly - as long as the instance isnt defederated, you should be able to post/comment/upvote/mod in communities that are outside of your home instance.
Do posts outside of Lemmy.World not show up in my feed?
They do. This post is a bit misleading. If anyone on your instance is subscribed to
games@lemmy.worldorgames@lemmy.ml, which are two different communities, then those posts would show up on your instance.For instance, of you’re on lemmy.world, there are two communities:
https://lemmy.world/c/games and https://lemmy.world/c/games@lemmy.ml. Two different communities, synced across both instances. The reverse would be true of you were on lemmy.ml.
Wait, anyone on my instance? So does this mean that signing up for a larger instance, like lemmy.world will have a bigger chance of exposing me to more content, considering the larger chance of someone being subscribed cross-instances, in which case that content has a chance of showing up on my feed? Is that correctly understood?
In theory, yes. But in practice, any decent-sized instance is already exposed to all communities of the other decent-sized instances.
And you can always “introduce” your instance to communities that you find with external tools, like https://lemmyverse.net/communities
Keep in mind that joining a larger instance also has its cons, like more server load (lemmy.world is having issues with this), moderation, etc.
Wow, that is pretty neat! And thanks for introducing me to the lemmyverse explorer. This is honestly all pretty exciting.
Yes and no. Eventually smaller instances federate a ton of content, and it can happen very quickly. I wouldn’t be too concerned about this.
If you’re looking at subscribed or All they do, but the local feed is the default, and that only shows stuff on the local instance, in this case lemmy.world.
If you mean your profile, that will show all your activity on every instance.
You can change the default in your user settings.
Think of them like “Lemmy World Games” and “Lemmy ML Games”
You can browse by “all” instances, or “local” your instance. Some people say “all” has this complicated formula that it shows what your instances users subscribe to, not a true all. I have no idea.
You can choose to show “Subscribed” communities—only the ones you’ve chosen, “Local” communities—only the ones on Lemmy.World, or “All”—which will pull from all the communities federated with Lemmy.World.
So to answer the question, posts from outside your home instance will show up in your feed, should you choose for them to.
I swear upvote counts are isolated to individual instances too. I don’t think they are supposed to be… But one post on Lemmy.world viewed from Lemmy.world shows hundreds of upvotes, but on another smaller instance it shows 5 upvotes.
I hope that’s not the way Lemmy is intended to work.
It makes no sense at all
This can happen if federation breaks for a while, I think. For instance, if a lemmy instance goes down and can’t receive activity for a time, I don’t think there’s any mechanism to backfill that activity
I feel like the Reddit migration is really putting the protocol to the test. There’s no load balancing so if your instance goes down you’re kinda screwed
An individual instance can be load balanced pretty easily, but that’s on the admin of that instance to implement.
This is badly written - to someone who doesn’t know any of this it reads like they’re missing out on something. Yes there’s !games@lemmy.world and !games@lemmy.ml - but you don’t need an account on either to participate in both! You can just go there and browse, comment, etc.
Eventually one will become dominant, and it will all be fine.
One becomes dominant which is then tied to an instance and there goes your federation you’re all clamouring about. Man I’m enjoying Lemmy so far but Jesus there’s a lot of you need pulling your heads out your asses. It’s a cool platform and a cool idea but damn there’s a lot of core issues that need addressing.
What you’re describing as an “issue” is just the way the fediverse works.
There’s no central authority that determines the ruling /c/gaming instance or whatever.
If you tried to create one then anyone could just fork lemmy to disregard the central authority.
Lemmy is not reddit, nor should it attempt to be.
One community will be become dominant. It’s just the way things go. And it’s better for the user - why would we want discussions for some particular topic fragmented? It’s early days so some communities have competitors but one will be slightly bigger, more people will gravitate towards that, and the effect will compound.
As for federation yes a community is owned by an instance, sometimes a big instance.
But there’s no reason we wouldn’t have communities across a variety of instances. We already do. Most are on big instances sure since they have most users who create most communities, but there’s several larger communities on smaller instances. Like !houseplants@mander.xyz or !startrek@startrek.website
The benefit of federation isn’t that no community becomes dominant for it’s field, it’s that there is no central authority. It’s open source, so if a change is accepted that makes apps pay a ton for API access (random example), a fork can be made to roll back that change and servers can switch to the fork. It also means that if one server goes down, the rest doesn’t go with it, or one wild admin can’t destroy everything.
If one server becomes dominant for one thing and they fuck it up eventually, a new community can be created. This isnt a feature of federation though. The same thing can (and did) happen on Reddit. There are huge benefits to federation, but that isn’t one. Segregation of communities also isn’t one.
Imho a better option, which I’m sure if Lemmy is successful will get there, is a central app but with a public codebase and a federated ownership. A central platform owned by the people for the people.
What does “central app” mean to you? You’re aware the code base is shared right?
That’s literally what this is
Maybe do a bit more reading before you post
Isn’t that the point though? Not relying on a single entity by spreading out, but still being connected?
Fragmentation would be fixed by just integrating lemmyverse.net’s functionality into lemmy itself (like in this github issue), allowing users to see the true user count/activity of comms and incentivise them to join the most popular one.
Needs to be done asap imo; comm discoverability is not good right now and is probably the single biggest hurdle for new users
Anyone want to be the scrum master for them? Lol. Looks like they need a sprint planning session!
But can I comment and reply in other instances? If that’s true then I guess who cares?
Yeah, it doesn’t matter much except when you wanna view several communities on the same topic. I’d like to be able to see all the 3dprinting communities at once.
Then just subscribe to all of them
We do need a “multi-community” feature where we can view a bunch of similar subs in the same feed, however
I think the de facto community will take hold eventually for each subject, or we will simply have more than one. No big. Reddit had the same, each under different names. Here the name includes the instance.
When I see multiple communities on the same subject, I just subscribe to all of them. Either they’ll eventually differentiate into their own unique spaces, or one of them will become the dominant one and the others will become fringe alternates. It’s a good thing.
Like all the subreddits that have their “true” or “2” variant
What you have identified is a feature, not a bug. It immunizes us against mods getting swollen egos and going on a powertrip.
IMO thats the beauty of a federated network
Ok so I’m looking at a post to You Should Know. When I look at the community info it says “You Should Know.” The only way I know it’s on lemmy.world is because it says you need to adhere to lemmy.world policies. I see nothing in the app (Jerboa) that indicates which instance it’s on. What am I missing? If I am subscribed to a bunch of communities called “Games” how do I know which post comes from which community?
Is this an app-specific issue? I’m using wefwef on iOS and it shows “youshouldknow@lemmy.world” as the community. It doesn’t show it for the user, though, which is another worthwhile piece of information.
I’m on Jerboa and it does indicate as you quoted. I don’t know why the guy said that way. Maybe lemmy.world is his home instance.
I think that’s it! I just checked and local communities don’t show the instance on my end either.
This is definitely a gap on the main community pages, but in the interim, if you click into an actual post it shows the fully qualified community name at the top. At least that’s what I’m seeing.
Lemmy does not currently allow for instance or user migration.
This should probably be high up on the list of additions. I like the idea of Lemmy but for things like getting support no one is going to use Lemmy if the entire community and all the posts can just disappear one day and all the history go poof.
Instance migration, lemmyverse.net functionality in lemmy, and assigning new users to a good random instance upon registration (and letting them change it of course) so they don’t need to know about instances, are the three most important features lemmy needs rn imo
Misleading
I don’t think the post has a ton of merits for reasons that have already been described. That being said, there is one potential issue that I’m surprised that hasn’t been mentioned, which is impersonation.
Say someone takes the username jimbo on an instance somewhere and becomes super popular. Then someone else decides to create the same username jimbo on a similarly named instance and tries impersonating the other user. Sure, people can look and see “oh this isn’t that other jimbo” but you would have to look and see.
Probably not a major issue, but could theoretically become one.
I could see this becoming a massive issue when the Fediverse becomes popular enough for niche internet microcelebrities. People like u/SirLulzingtonEsquire, who invented a whole new genre of trollface comics on Reddit, could get impersonated on a platform like this. It also seems like it could be an issue for actual celebrities. Remember what happened when Elon started selling blue checkmarks?
As far as I’m aware, there’s no way to nickname/tag users. That would solve the issue. You could tag someone as the real one and the tag would only apply to that address specifically, not the username in general. It seems like a relatively easy solution, and any others are very hard with the realities of federation. We can’t have a central authority to check names or anything like that.
As other commenters have mentioned, this is technically true but pretty misleading. This is viewing the fediverse through an inappropriate lens.
Your account technically doesn’t exist on other instances but it effectively doesn’t matter.
Devil’s advocate but what if someone registers whoisearth on another instance and starts spewing vitreol? I’m sure many people would be concerned about any online reputation they’ve built then get cut down simply because someone wants to be an asshole. How would that scenario play out? Genuinely curious.
And what if someone registers whoisearth on Gmail, Outlook, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn or PornHub? Have you registered your name on literally every social media ever existed? This isn’t a new problem, or one that is created by the concept of federation.
As you are well aware you are giving examples of multiple different platforms not one single platform. Way to compare apples to oranges.
And before you try, this is not multiple platforms. It’s multiple federated instances of the same platform.
Federated services are like email. Just like your email address isn’t just “whoisearth” it needs the @gmail.com at the end to be the exact one to reach you, same as in Lemmy, it’s your name plus your instance that matters.
I like Lemmy a lot so far, and I’ve brought along a couple of friends… I do have a couple of questions though!
What happens if the server I’m on goes down for an extended period of time, or forever? Is my account data just gone? Or is that mirrored somewhere else?
I’m thinking it’s gone unless the owner of your instance makes backups
It’s gone. Portability is ostensibly a core goal of fediverse development, so I would assume we’ll see it arrive in code form fairly soon.
I wonder if that happened to me. I signed up a few weeks ago, but my account disappeared somewhere in the Lemmy ether. I made this new account the other day. Hope this one sticks…
This is the whole point…?
