Day 2 here, and I can see the growth already. Personally I really like the notion of how its gonna shape up in the future but at the same time I really feel for the average user as of now its too complex to understand the working and how the cross servers thing is working. I mean yes still early days, UI will improve further leading to a better UX but the core mechanism yet is little tough to get along. For instance, still unclear if I made the right choice by signing up on lemmydotworld why not lemmydotml , beehaw etc… and where does this stop? like in the coming times i it would be like a thousands of servers lemmy.this lemmy.that lemmy.etc or anything.anything. That’s soo confusing for someone who just wanna join a server. Would be interesting to see how “signup anywhere, its the same thing” evolves.
The instance you sign up on doesn’t really matter. For technical people, the server you sign in on, can be important, but for the average user it doesn’t. In fact, you could make an account on mastodon.social and comment on this very thread. That’s pretty much the goal of federation.
Unless your instance blocks or is blocked by that other instance, which is exactly what beehaw did to lemmy.world and sh.ithust.works, and exactly what I saw happen a lot on Mastodon.
Ultimately, yes, the server admins have final on what content their users see. Not too different than mods within a community. A user, should they want to, can just make an account on a different server though. Should the user not agree with the content moderation of their original server, and can even migrate all their user data with them most of the time.
So there’s nothing like hosted instances are using resources, and that can vary?
The server that hosts your account, and the server that hosts the content are independent. They all speak the same language and talk to each other regardless of where they are. So if the server hosting a thread is overloaded, then comments might take a bit to load, but you can still post on another thread on another server no problem. Eventually they all sync up. If that’s what you mean?
This feels disingenous to say. Each community has its own rules and culture, which you may agree or disagree with. Beyond that, there’s the matter of trust as the instance admin holds everything on their server. This isn’t even getting into the whole mess of defederation. like with Beehaw, who seems intent on forming an isolative culture despite having some of the largest communities on the site.
I believe it will improve over time as the Fediverse matures and grows to handle larger loads and less techy people, but I think saying that to people will do more harm than good. A lot of the newer people have been reasonably freaking out in response to losing access to several large communities they frequented because they were told “instance doesn’t matter”, when quite frankly it does at the moment.
Entirely fair, we are in the midst of significant drama between the reddit burndown, and the infancy of the lemmy platform as a whole. For someone wanting to talk to people, and get their feet wet in the fediverse, I think its reasonable to say that the server doesn’t matter. Once you have used the platform, and know what you want then exploring the options is highly encouraged. The exact circumstances of server federation will absolutely change, probably a lot, in the near future.
I treat it akin to someone saying “I want to learn how to play guitar.” I think reasoanble advice is get a cheap used guitar and start learning cords. Once you know if you plan on sticking with it more than a few weeks, go right ahead and start looking at better equipment. I don’t think expecting someone at this stage to start taking musical theory is the best advice. Maybe that is a weak argument, but I don’t think its entirely wrong.
Nah, I get it. I expect it to be a much better situation as the platform matures, but right now it’s really hard. Just like Mastodon, Lemmy will have to go through a ton of growing pains to meet the demands of a rapidly growing userbase. Hopefully we as a community can make this a much better situation for newbies going forward.
@shinnoodles @meteokr This is more or less the big point. You *cannot* sign up for an account on mastodon.social and see the post I’m making right now, but you *can* sign up for an account on whatever site you’re using to view this right now and see this post.
I’m new here, can someone explain how this whole federating thing works?
Someone on my server came up with a mall analogy which I am extending upon, might be helpful:
Sites are like cities (kbin is a city, lemmy is a city, etc)
Instances are like malls (kbin.social is a mall)
Stores inside a mall are like magazines
Cities can have multiple malls, and the malls all talk to each other and give each other information about what’s happening in their mall in relation to their stores, which is why we can see posts from other instances of the same site.
And what’s more, malls (instances) in different cities (sites) can also talk to malls in another city and pass information about their malls to the other cities’ malls. Cities talk to other cities. Translation: The sites share content with each other.
another analogy: Federation in the fediverse is like a group of islands with bridges connecting them. Each island represents a different platform, and the bridges allow people to travel and interact between the islands. Even though each island has its own unique features and rules, the bridges enable communication and sharing of ideas across the entire network of islands.
I hope this didn’t further confuse you lol. my protest server has extensive explanations and one on one help with this if you’d like.
You know how discord has multiple servers?
Now imagine if those servers where actually owned by a person (self-hosted), and each server could connect with the other servers, so you can see content on whatever server you are.
Or lib.lgbt!
More seriously it’s basically all the same. Just depends what @ you want after your username.
I would say that it depends on that and on if you want to use the local feed or what you want to see there.
But pretty much that’s it.
on kbin there was a long period of no federation and so I think we kinda ended up with this “kbin is kbin and then there’s this other stuff” mindset. I think it helped ease a lot of us into this fediverse stuff lol. the analogy I use is email :) why pick yahoovs gmail vs protonmail? same idea.
That analogy doesn’t hold when yahoo can block gmail and proton can block all yahoo content, etc.
they can do that though. it just doesn’t happen with big email providers. but many large email providers auto-block smaller ones.
Why did you post this to selfhosted? lol
