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.
But can I comment and reply in other instances? If that’s true then I guess who cares?
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 [email protected] and [email protected] - 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.
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.
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
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.
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/[email protected]. Two different communities, synced across both instances. The reverse would be true of you were on lemmy.ml.
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
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 “[email protected]” 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.
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.
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.
