this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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Reddit Was Fun
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Lemmy is all open source.
Instances can each have their own communities. It's important to find out what instance you want to register with and associate with. Take into account reliability, politics, and legal concerns. Instances that don't hold a standard are at risk of being defederated.
Federation is how instances share posts. You can see and interact with posts and communities from other instances that are federated with your instance.
Federation can be a two-way or one-way street. If you belong to instance A and it is federated with instance B and vice versa, B to A, then all posts and comments are visible to each other and all other federated instances.
If instance A is federated to instance B but B is not federated with instance A, then A can see B but not vice versa. A can interact on B posts but they will not be saved on B's instance, only A's.
I hope I didn't get too complicated with the explanation. I just got familiarized a couple days ago myself.
As a user, does this federation actually make a difference or make things look different?
Each instance is actually an independent site running a copy of the same source code. What's different is that they are cross-linked, so if you are on one, you can interact with any others that are federated.
Note that federation isn't universal. Some instances choose not to connect to others (due to things like getting problematic users from ones with less strict review and such). I had to make a new account on here since I had been using one on Beehaw, which is a relatively stricter and more limited community, and they had unlinked lemmy.world.
So it's a bit more work to use, but you get the benefit that there is no single central authority who can dictate things. You can move to the same topic in another instance or start your own instance.
I see... So how can I tell which instance I am in, and whether or not I'd need to make a new account in other instances?