When I look at https://lemmy.ml/c/startrek vs https://kbin.social/m/startrek I see two entirely different lists of posts. Why? It’s the same topic, just on different instances. How can we have communities about topics without having them siloed into their own instance-based communities? Is this just related to that 0.18 issue with Lemmy/kbin not talking nicely, or is this how the Fediverse is?
Is it (at least theoretically) possible for me to post an article on https://kbin.social/m/startrek and have it automatically show up on https://lemmy.ml/c/startrek, or are they always going to be two separate communities?
The old content would not disappear. Federated content is in fact stored on every server, and is not fetched from the “main” server every time someone wants to interact with it. Only changes are transmitted to and fro. Defederation entails the ceasing of this synchronization.
If startrek.website had genuine reasons for shutting your instance out, you probably don’t want to stick around on it either.
If it didn’t, that will mean people likely wont want to stick around on it.
The third option is something like what happened with beehaw, where an instance was unable to deal with the moderation load of large outside instances. In these cases, the defederation is likely to be temporary.
Either way, the content moves around a little… Establishes new homes on new instances… And you’re back to business as usual after a bit of turmoil. A lot less of it than with a commercial centralized services going down though.
Oooh, okay. So if I subscribe to !startrek@startrek.website, then kbin would store that data, and I would be able to point everyone to !startrek@kbin.social and we’d all be able to pick up where we left off? Still an issue of getting users to change where they’re posting to, but that’s better than I thought, at least.
Also, I imagine the problem with how difficult it is to migrate away from commercial centralized services is that it’s hard to spin up a new version of that site with the code and database. Being quick to spin up a new kbin instance or Lemmy instance helps immensely, though the issue of directing the users to those new instances would be just as difficult.
In a federated system, once up and running, “jumping ship” is much, much easier. Changing entire sites goes from new accounts, apps, and people, to just seeing where the users go, and following.
A community is its users, and in the fediverse, when a site goes bad, the users don’t have to go with it.
I would argue that a community is the content and its users. People don’t use a new site/instance unless it’s active with content to their quality standards (it’s why so many people refuse to use new options that the far-right creates). The only exception is when there are major events like Musk purchasing Twitter to get Mastodon going, or the API changes leading to kbin/lemmy getting more popular. As an example: I’m still using https://reddit.com/r/worldnews because they have the daily update thread on Ukraine, but !worldnews doesn’t.
You are very right with the apps, though. Creating a new account is easy, but having to install new apps and set them up is a royal pain. Another pain point is having to learn an entirely new interface, whereas I can spin up my own instance of kbin after using it for a couple of years and feel comfortable with the interface of the new instance, as opposed to going from Twitter to Mastodon which is quite the adjustment.