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.
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.
Isn’t that the whole 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!
IMO thats the beauty of a federated network
Agree but at the same time it could be better.
It will improve over time. Hell, even reddit got better over the years, before it started getting worse for other reasons.
Here’s hoping. The devs are going to be extremely active thata for sure.
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
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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”
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.
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.
It’s just a jargon speed bump. It’ll pass. Happens in any migration.
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 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.
Is this spez?
Fuck that myopic dweeb
Spez: furiously tries to shadowban user / change their comment
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
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.
Removed by mod
This double posted fyi
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?
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’m thinking it’s gone unless the owner of your instance makes backups
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…
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?
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.
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.
Hello there, and welcome to our community! I hope you like it in here.
Could you please include some body text as to why should people know this, and how would that help them? It’s our second rule. Thank you :)
So there is a !trees@lemmy.world and !trees@no.lastname.nz (pluss probably others)
The first is more or less r/trees the second I set up for therapeutic uses of ‘trees’ and shrooms
Each instance will have it’s own ethos, mod policies and code of conduct. Choose your communities based on what gets posted to them.
The same could be said for [hypothetical]
!worldnewa@beehaw.organd!worldnews@lemmygrad.ml. They would be very different communities to readAs 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.
And being different platforms means that your identity is safe?
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.
We need a more unified login experience. OIDC/Oauth would work wonders for this.
- User registers at X lemmy/mastadon/peertube instance (activitypub app, [APA]) and gets malloc@lemmy.xyz
- Users visits Y APA
- Logins to Y APA using X user
- User redirected to X APA instance to login (knows user registered at lemmy.xyz)
- Upon successful login, user returned to Y APA
User now able to browse/post/comment in Y APA without having to manually go through original APA app where user account lives.
Basically each APA acts as its own IdP (identity provider); and would go a long way in improving user experience and reducing frustration.
If you are not familiar with this flow, then look at any web service with a login. They are usually accompanied by a Google/Apple/Facebook login option; and that’s that we are trying to replicate here. One set of credentials across the entire fediverse.
I think this would have to start off as some kind of defined standard in ActivityPub before it could be implemented across all ActivityPub services and be interoperable.
Otherwise, it will result in fragmentation.
But yeah, having one ActivityPub account for many services is ideal IMO, along with being able to follow any content on your platform of choice (like interacting with Peertube or Mastodon postings in Lemmy, or even something rediculous like interacting with Lemmy posts in PeerTube)
Sounds like Stack Exchange
honestly i feel that lemmy should just have been matrix-based rather than activitypub, sure it’s nice to have native federation with mastodon but the forum structure is PERFECT for the matrix model.
By using matrix you would have communities be independent of servers (thus actually owned by the moderators and not the instance admins), and there would be a possibility of decentralized user accounts somewhere in the far future.
Such an easy answer to basically handwave away problems. Will potentially work for idiots I guess.
“It’s not a bug it’s a feature!” - lazy developers everywhere
So what software exactly have you developed? You seem to have very strong opinions about “lazy devs,” but you also don’t seem to know much about how any of this works.
