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 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
Yea the post is misleading. The community is !games@lemmy.world not /c/games. That’s reddit language creeping in.
Yes, saying c/gaming is meaningless. I pointed this out to one user yesterday and got the most unbelievable snark back.
I think they’re equivalent: see the URL here - https://lemmy.world/c/games - that’s the same as saying !games@lemmy.world
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.
You don’t need multiple accounts. While there are two separate communities on two separate servers, you can see them both from any server that is federated together.
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.
They do. This post is a bit misleading. If anyone on your instance is subscribed to games@lemmy.world or games@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/games@lemmy.ml. Two different communities, synced across both instances. The reverse would be true of you were on lemmy.ml.
If you’re looking at subscribed or All they do, but the local feed is the default, and that only shows stuff on the local instance, in this case lemmy.world.
If you mean your profile, that will show all your activity on every instance.
You can choose to show “Subscribed” communities—only the ones you’ve chosen, “Local” communities—only the ones on Lemmy.World, or “All”—which will pull from all the communities federated with Lemmy.World.
So to answer the question, posts from outside your home instance will show up in your feed, should you choose for them to.
I swear upvote counts are isolated to individual instances too. I don’t think they are supposed to be… But one post on Lemmy.world viewed from Lemmy.world shows hundreds of upvotes, but on another smaller instance it shows 5 upvotes.
I hope that’s not the way Lemmy is intended to work.
It makes no sense at all
This can happen if federation breaks for a while, I think. For instance, if a lemmy instance goes down and can’t receive activity for a time, I don’t think there’s any mechanism to backfill that activity
I feel like the Reddit migration is really putting the protocol to the test. There’s no load balancing so if your instance goes down you’re kinda screwed
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 !games@lemmy.world and !games@lemmy.ml - 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.
One community will be become dominant. It’s just the way things go. And it’s better for the user - why would we want discussions for some particular topic fragmented? It’s early days so some communities have competitors but one will be slightly bigger, more people will gravitate towards that, and the effect will compound.
As for federation yes a community is owned by an instance, sometimes a big instance.
But there’s no reason we wouldn’t have communities across a variety of instances. We already do. Most are on big instances sure since they have most users who create most communities, but there’s several larger communities on smaller instances. Like !houseplants@mander.xyz or !startrek@startrek.website
What you’re describing as an “issue” is just the way the fediverse works.
There’s no central authority that determines the ruling /c/gaming instance or whatever.
If you tried to create one then anyone could just fork lemmy to disregard the central authority.
Lemmy is not reddit, nor should it attempt to be.
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.
Imho a better option, which I’m sure if Lemmy is successful will get there, is a central app but with a public codebase and a federated ownership. A central platform owned by the people for the people.
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
But can I comment and reply in other instances? If that’s true then I guess who cares?
Yeah, it doesn’t matter much except when you wanna view several communities on the same topic. I’d like to be able to see all the 3dprinting communities at once.
Then just subscribe to all of them
We do need a “multi-community” feature where we can view a bunch of similar subs in the same feed, however
When I see multiple communities on the same subject, I just subscribe to all of them. Either they’ll eventually differentiate into their own unique spaces, or one of them will become the dominant one and the others will become fringe alternates. It’s a good thing.
