this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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I'm quite lost, and don't think I fully understand the distributed nature of the various Lemmy instances (if I'm even using those words properly).
I'll do it like Reddit 10 years ago... wander in, poke around, make a snarky comment or 4 and see where it goes.
I was a bit confused about the place at first too. Here's a comment I copy-pasted from a previous post of mine:
My friend gave me a great explanation:
Lemmy the platform is planet Earth
“Instances” like lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, etc. are like the different countries on Earth
When someone signs up, the user picks one instance to be a part of, like how an Earthling becomes a citizen of a country
If you register at lemmy.world, that means your home instance/ “home country” is lemmy.world, but you can “travel” to lemmy.ml, another instance / “country”, to check out and subscribe to their community
When you subscribe to a different instance that’s not your home instance, you can still participate in their content, and other people will be able to see which instance / “country” you’re from
Each instance can have its own version of the same “subreddit”, so you can have a c/Memes in your home instance that is different from a c/Memes in another instance. But you can subscribe to both separately
c/[community name] is the naming convention used here I think like r/[subreddit name] on Reddit. If talking about a community in a different instance, it's c/[community name]@[instance name] so like c/memes@lemmy.ml
Donations will help with the cost of running lemmy.world only and not lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, etc.
Someone please correct any of this if any of it is wrong, I’ll happily edit
Hope it helps even a little
i have a question: i've made accounts on multiple instances thinking i won't be able to post on them otherwise, is that okay?
You can make an account on each instance. That's OK, too!
but then i am a bit confused, if i can use an account on every instance, why is there an option to make accounts per instance in the first place?
Why isn't there a centralised account log in, and then you select what instances you want to browse?
Also what happens if say, two people have the same username, but are on different instances?
sorry for the myriad of questions i am still new to this whole thing
Then there is a central authority that encompasses the Fediverse/Lemmy. That also means one single point of failure, eg Login system goes down. Right now if one instance goes down then all of the others are unaffected.
that makes sense, i didn't think of that.
Instances do not care about users on other instances like that.
A user is not unique by username alone. A user is unique by username AND instance. There may exists another skye on another instance, created by someone else. But only you can be skye@lemmy.world
Think of it like email addresses.
You grab the name abc on gmail, giving you the user abc@gmail.com
Some other person can grab the same name on another mail provider (ie. instance), say abc@outlook.com
You don't need to have an account on every email provider to be able to send mail accross providers. But nothing is stopping you from making an account on every provider, it's just that it's redundant
Another caveat with instances is that some instances block each other. If you made your account in Instance1 that for some reason blocked Instance2, you can not interact with or even see any content from Instance2.
So that also fragments the world here. It may well be that if you actually like some communities in both Instance1 and Instance2, you are forced to have a separate account on each (happened to me already)
The username thing is the one lingering question I have not seen answered as well. I suspect there's just going to be duplicate people.
I dont understand this part either. Should just be a single login across the whole fediverse
using the email address analogy - every server maintains its users. You can't log in to Gmail with your yahoo email either, but you can still email a yahoo user.
Having multiple servers that you can sign up for helps keep things decentralised. If all the logins are centralised, then either one of two things need to happen:
One single entity controls all the logins. And if that entity decides to go on a power trip (say... a completely fictitious example where he decides to start charging all servers a ridiculous monthly fee to use the login, then gaslights people who call him out, and doubles down when presented with call logs that show otherwise), the fediverse is dead.
Everyone has to keep a copy of the same userbase. When 1 person signs up on 1 server, every server needs to acknowledge that signup. This is going to create massive problems if/when the fediverse becomes huge - imagine thousands of people trying to sign up across thousands of servers.
Makes sense, thanks