this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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I was a bit confused about the place at first too. Here's a comment I copy-pasted from a previous post of mine:
My friend gave me a great explanation:
Lemmy the platform is planet Earth
“Instances” like lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, etc. are like the different countries on Earth
When someone signs up, the user picks one instance to be a part of, like how an Earthling becomes a citizen of a country
If you register at lemmy.world, that means your home instance/ “home country” is lemmy.world, but you can “travel” to lemmy.ml, another instance / “country”, to check out and subscribe to their community
When you subscribe to a different instance that’s not your home instance, you can still participate in their content, and other people will be able to see which instance / “country” you’re from
Each instance can have its own version of the same “subreddit”, so you can have a c/Memes in your home instance that is different from a c/Memes in another instance. But you can subscribe to both separately
c/[community name] is the naming convention used here I think like r/[subreddit name] on Reddit. If talking about a community in a different instance, it's c/[community name]@[instance name] so like c/memes@lemmy.ml
Donations will help with the cost of running lemmy.world only and not lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, etc.
Someone please correct any of this if any of it is wrong, I’ll happily edit
Hope it helps even a little
i have a question: i've made accounts on multiple instances thinking i won't be able to post on them otherwise, is that okay?
You can make an account on each instance. That's OK, too!
but then i am a bit confused, if i can use an account on every instance, why is there an option to make accounts per instance in the first place?
Why isn't there a centralised account log in, and then you select what instances you want to browse?
Also what happens if say, two people have the same username, but are on different instances?
sorry for the myriad of questions i am still new to this whole thing
Instances do not care about users on other instances like that.
A user is not unique by username alone. A user is unique by username AND instance. There may exists another skye on another instance, created by someone else. But only you can be skye@lemmy.world
Think of it like email addresses.
You grab the name abc on gmail, giving you the user abc@gmail.com
Some other person can grab the same name on another mail provider (ie. instance), say abc@outlook.com
You don't need to have an account on every email provider to be able to send mail accross providers. But nothing is stopping you from making an account on every provider, it's just that it's redundant
Then there is a central authority that encompasses the Fediverse/Lemmy. That also means one single point of failure, eg Login system goes down. Right now if one instance goes down then all of the others are unaffected.
that makes sense, i didn't think of that.
Another caveat with instances is that some instances block each other. If you made your account in Instance1 that for some reason blocked Instance2, you can not interact with or even see any content from Instance2.
So that also fragments the world here. It may well be that if you actually like some communities in both Instance1 and Instance2, you are forced to have a separate account on each (happened to me already)
The username thing is the one lingering question I have not seen answered as well. I suspect there's just going to be duplicate people.
I dont understand this part either. Should just be a single login across the whole fediverse
using the email address analogy - every server maintains its users. You can't log in to Gmail with your yahoo email either, but you can still email a yahoo user.
Having multiple servers that you can sign up for helps keep things decentralised. If all the logins are centralised, then either one of two things need to happen:
One single entity controls all the logins. And if that entity decides to go on a power trip (say... a completely fictitious example where he decides to start charging all servers a ridiculous monthly fee to use the login, then gaslights people who call him out, and doubles down when presented with call logs that show otherwise), the fediverse is dead.
Everyone has to keep a copy of the same userbase. When 1 person signs up on 1 server, every server needs to acknowledge that signup. This is going to create massive problems if/when the fediverse becomes huge - imagine thousands of people trying to sign up across thousands of servers.
Makes sense, thanks
Pretty sure this is okay, but absolutely not necessary. You should be able to use the same account to access everything, but also like Reddit, you are allowed to have multiple accounts.
An account on an instance is like an email address - if you have a @gmail.com email and a @yahoo.com email, you can interact with people from both. The spam filtering might be slightly different (different instances have a variety of ways they get configured), but both generally get the same job done.
There are reasons you might want multiple to separate things, or you can abandon ones you don't need and just pick one to stick with!
If the Fediverse is planet earth. Lemmy is 1 country, each server instance is like a village town or city. Other countries where you can talk to follow users etc are Mastodon, Pixelfed, Misskey/Calckey, Peertube, Friendica, etc Like following Twitter users replying etc from inside Reddit.
I thought of it this way too and I think as long as people can get the gist we should be all good, though for me personally I prefer using the planet analogy considering all of these platforms are on the Fedi-universe, and trying out different platforms like Mastodon feels like it's "on a whole other planet" as a less tech-savvy person
A quick overview of some of the larger platforms in the #Fediverse
If you don't mind me asking: what's the importance of choosing a "home country"? Like what consequences does it bring signing up for lemmy.world in comparison to lemmy.ml? As a new user (refugee), how do I know where I belong?
Other than that, and the questions underneath your comment, this makes a lot of sense and helps getting started here. I can see myself wasting hours in this place
Not OP but from what I understand, the instances (home countries) you sign up with don’t really matter on the whole. It’s just that those are different servers. When a server gets too big it can kinda bog down the system and can cause things to get buggy and slow. So it’s better if we all spread out to alleviate so much pressure on one server.
With the reddit migration there’s a lot of us coming in suddenly. So some servers Are having a difficult time keeping up. Luckily with Lemmy.world Ruud is hosting our server and he has a pretty strong background with hosting other federated servers on mastodon. He has already upgraded Lemmy.World to its own designated server with more bells and whistles.
Some servers do have limitations on what they want and expect out of their people, but our server doesn’t have anything like that which I like, I feel like our community (lemmings?) are quite chill.
With big companies like Amazon, they have a plethora of servers, some that are on big tankers out in the middle of the ocean. So with a federated community we are kinda socialist in the way that we have volunteers that are giving up their time an space in order to host our servers. It’s much easier for us to spread it out to host as many people as we can. Speaking of hosting our servers, I know Ruud has set up a patreon so that we can donate to help keep the servers running smoothly. That way it isn’t coming out of his pocket only
Thanks for your reply. This seems like a logical and solid solution to the centralization other social medias end up with, and all the problems this brings with it (looking at you u/spez). I am brand new here, so need to find my way around, but when (if?) I do I sure will send some dineros over Patreon in order to help with the costs
Very helpful. I had a longer response typed out but lost it by clicking "next" instead of reply so I'll try to paraphrase. Is there a way to see a listing of instances and their size?
Not sure I get having communities spread across instances, seems like it would be rife for duplication and too spread apart but perhaps that's just the whole "fediverse" concept if I'm understanding that properly.
I created https://lemmy.world/c/paramore but I'm going to hold off on any other community creation until I understand things better and I'm confident I've found my home "country."
This is the only one I know of at the moment, though I'm still relatively new as well so there might be a better link for a list of instances and their sizes. Based on some posts I've read here, lemmy.ml has the most users, with lemmy.world at about half of lemmy.ml's and beehaw.org at about a third.
Also, yeah, I think we're on the same boat when it comes to why different communities are spread out. From what I've observed, "duplicate" communities in separate instances seem to all have their own "flavor" of that particular community. Taking the meme communities as an example, sh.itjust.works' memes have a bit of a French-Canadian flare to them, lemmygrad.ml's memes are made with a hammer and sickle, lemmy.world has more of that "general everyday memes" feel, etc.
On Reddit, it used to be r/memes -> r/memes, but here it seems like it's the opposite, like c/ -> c/memes. It's like having pizza in New York vs Italy -- they're both pizza but each country has its own twist to it.
I subbed to your community btw as I love me some Paramore myself. Hope to see everything work out easily for your community!
Thanks my dude! More helpful info.
As for the communities, makes me think like more back to message board driven web times, where yeah you could have a dozen Star Wars fan forums but each with their own flavor and eventually you'd find the one that's your own vibe. I did that and dove head first into a few specific places for retro video games (8/16 bit) and some other niche interests like a specific car model, etc.
There's an upside to it. I hope this approach gains traction, certainly has seen an injection of life from people jumping ship. But I imagine Reddit will keep plodding along in a week or two as there were a staggering amount of people who had a hard time even understanding why people would leave. Hope the blackout helps.
@CoolBeance @Velvet that’s a good analogy.