Found a good image explanation of this whole thing.
Edit: update image to use light theme.
Credit goes to @ulu_mulu@lemmy.world
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Great post, but here are some questions those graphics raise, that I couldn’t find an answer to, and which have only my experience with email, usenet and irc for reference (all of which are federated, easy to abuse, had a host of problems, and have slowly migrated to centralized versions to solve these issues):
- how do you ban someone?
- what stops him from spinning 100 amazon ecc instances, federating 100 servers and spamming his thing 100 times from 100 different instances?
- how do you even block an instance?
- what happens with the federated content once the source instance goes down?
- say lemmy.ml and memes goes down, how do you post a new reply in memes@lemmy.ml? does it even work?
- i haven’t found any info for syncing accounts across instances (to prevent this loss) or if this is even possible at low level
- what happens with comments and pictures once a federated instance goes down? say, if i selfhost and i crash without backups, does my content and posts disappear?
- can i pull it back?
- what kind of capacity planning would I need to selfhost say, a decade worth of reddit browsing? assuming I only care about my posts and what I save, would they be accessible for me?
I’m a little worried Lemmy may not be ready for prime time. I’ve already had a few times where my post to another instance just vanishes. But when I made an account on the other instance that worked fine. It seems like choosing the right instance is more important than I initially thought.
Is this because the admin of one of the instances blocked the other from posting? Does it federate by default or is it on an approved basis? I’d like to spin own instance as well but depending on how interop works between instances that also seems like a poor decision.
I’ll keep looking but a more informative FAQ would be great
It may not be “prime time” but obviously the increased attention and user base will incentivize the tech and hosts to catch up quickly. From what people are saying, it has already been a dramatic change in the past few weeks.
I was thinking today that it’s actually weirder that I stuck with Reddit for so long without really thinking about it when I was consistently switching platforms before. Google Reader, Fark, StumbleUpon, bulletin boards, various smaller blogs and stuff…
Now that I’ve made the switch it reminded me how nice it can be to find and explore new platforms and communities. Kinda wished I woke up a bit earlier to these possibilities.
i haven’t found any info for syncing accounts across instances (to prevent this loss) or if this is even possible at low level
Not possibly or very difficult from what I heard.
what happens with comments and pictures once a federated instance goes down? say, if i selfhost and i crash without backups, does my content and posts disappear? Everything is stored in a database, so crashes are no different than any other site. It comes back and its accessible again.
what kind of capacity planning would I need to selfhost say, a decade worth of reddit browsing? assuming I only care about my posts and what I save, would they be accessible for me?
You mean like host an instance for just your own account? The smallest instance for $5 a month should be enough.
Uhh… What happens when I do create the same username + email on several servers?
it would be a bit like making multiple email accounts with multiple email providers. for example, if you were to signup “eskimofry@outlook.com” and also sign up “eskimofry@gmail.com”, all you’ve done is made 2 accounts called “eskimofry” at the two different providers.
it works the same in fediverse. your account is @eskimofry@lemmy.world, but you could just as easily sign up @eskimofry@lemmy.ml, or @eskimofry@feddit.de, or @eskimofry@lemmy.one, all you would be doing is making more accounts.
these accounts don’t conflict with each other in the exact same way that “eskimofry@outlook.com” and “eskimofry@gmail.com” don’t conflict either. if these 2 emails are owned by different people, then it is the user’s job to know which is the intended recipient.
I had the same question as eskimofry. I’m brand new here, and was under the assumption that one login was good across the fediverse. However, I am unable to login to comment or subscribe to other servers, so I’ve ended up with multiple accounts. Is there something I’m missing here, or do I need to create an account everywhere?
Attempting to log in to a different server is met with a spinning login button that does nothing, no matter how long you wait.
You have to search for the community you wish to subscribe to from on your server’s search page. You’ll navigate to it from within your server’s instance and give you the ability to subscribe to it that way. For example, if you go to the lemmy explorer: https://lemmyverse.net/communities You’ll note that each entry there has a link to the community, as well as an identity listed below it that you can copy. Like so:
!selfhosted@lemmy.worldThis is the identifier url to the selfhosted community at lemmy world. If you navigate directly to it: https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted but you don’t have a lemmy world account, then you’d have to sign in to lemmy.world to subscribe. But if you are on another server, and you search!selfhosted@lemmy.world, you should be taken to it from within your instance and you can subscribe from there. The same url would also be: https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted@lemmy.world So if you get the identifier of any community, you can navigate to it from within lemmy.world with that url scheme:https://lemmy.world/c/<identifier>Hope that helps.
Thanks for the reply! I have since downloaded the app, and things are running much more smoothly. Appreciate the help!
Something I think is missing from the email analogy:
We’re all getting a little more confused because every server basically looks the same, so it’s easy to think you could log into any of them with the same login. This is misleading, it’s because all the different instances are running the same core software even though they’re separate instances. It would be like if the Gmail interface was open source and people created servers on Gmail.com, Gmail.world, gbin.com and even if each of them looked the same, you could only log into the one where you created your account. And regardless you could email friends with accounts at any of them.
Hope that helps.
I think the part that’s so confusing is that right there on there on Lemmy page, it states that you can create an account on one server, and it is good on any server. I’m happy to say that I downloaded the app, and my experience is much more user friendly now. From what I’m reading, this has to do with the link, and where you access it from. The app is doing the heavy lifting while accessing other servers, so I’m a happy camper. Thanks for the reply!
Thanks for the easily visualiser, needed something to explain it to friends.
Hello, thank you for the post,
This clears up a few things for me, because the concept of Fediverse are still “abstract” for me.
When i first join, I created multiple accounts on lemmy.world, beehaw, lemmy.ml, because i thinks its mini Reddit, with its own content, and its own account.
Now i know that i only need one account, and i can still see the post from another instances.
There’s still some questions that i can’t understand
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The decentralized nature of the Fediverse, how does one search or now what community on another instances?
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Say when in Reddit, we have /r/aww for example, it means that lemmy, beehaw, or another instances can have their own /c/aww ? does it means that we have multiple instances of /c/aww or, we have one single /c/aww but distributed between multiple instances
Sorry for the bad English :D
deleted by creator
Ah, okay
I think I’m not exposed with multiple sub reddits with similar names, although ive been using it for more than 10 years
Thanks for the info :D
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Might be a dumb question and not sure how to ask this but… If I spin up my own instance, what happens with my posts if I decide to tear down the instance? Like, will the delete get propagated to other instances where I may have commented?
From what I hear, your instance will send the delete request to the other instances but they may or may not listen to it
Thanks, I was so confused with everything but this answers a lot of questions.
This is really great! I’ve also been quite lost but am enjoying the learning process!
One thing I’ve just learned is that all the different instances don’t neccessarily ‘federate’ with each other in real time (there can be some lag in content showing up in your instance) or at all. Only instances your instance federates with sync up? I think? :-) I see beehaw.org have had to cut ties to a couple of instances to help with the flood of new users and content happening right now. It seems while you can still view their content from your instance you can’t comment or post to it? I think? :-)
Another useful definition that comes up is “Federation”. As I understand it’s referring to the whole set of mini-Reddits for example, and multiple Federations exist in the Fediverse, correct me if I’m wrong.
You’re not wrong :) It’s the whole set of mini-Reddits + the whole set of mini-Twitters + other similar federated platforms/sites.
Fediverse = federation + universe.
You rock!! As soon as I find a way to pin this I will.
I didn’t make this. I found it from a comment. I was going to credit the poster but couldn’t find it.
Edit: found it. credit goes to @ulu_mulu@lemmy.world
Thank you for the credit and spreading the word!
Happy it can help :)
Thank you for making it. Just showed it to some friends so they can understand the fediverse better
Great graphic - the point about each instance being like a mini Reddit was one I eventually grasped the other day, and it really made things click into place for me.
Will try to remember to credit you if sharing it!
No need to credit, just share it if you see someone struggling with these concepts.
I changed the screenshots to a light theme, someone here said buttons are difficult to read on dark, can you please see if you can update the link in your post? https://imgur.com/a/fiLOmI7
Awesome post. Cleared things up so much for me
I saw a post yesterday about it, and someone said it was a known issue.
I’m more concerned about how the votes on this post are bouncing up and down between 4 and 818 as I’m typing this reply. Seems like there are some problems here…
EDIT: WOAH this ended up under totally the wrong post. Odd bug…
I think I know what thread you were trying to reply to, and I’m pretty sure the reason your comment appeared on a different post is caused by the same root cause fyi.
Haha good thing Ruud is a db expert. I think he’s going to need to be!
Uh… yeah, I had this tab open on an completely different post yesterday and then this morning I tabbed over to it and it switched to this post as soon as I clicked the tab. Very weird stuff going on.
This is helpful! Does anyone know what it means when you try to subscribe to a community and it just says “Subscribe Pending”? That has happened to me 2-3 times, and it just seems to stay like that.
I do not know for sure but I’m assuming that whoever set it up required sub approval, similar to how some instances require you to apply before being admitted. I’ve seen it too, but most/all went through within a few hours with no rhyme or reason, so that’s my best guess.
Good infographics! It is better to change the screenshots to light theme (instead of dark) since the links and buttons are hard to read in the photo.
Right now i’ve had an issue myself where the potential answer to my issue is in a privated subreddit. So, i had to search even more. Frankly, it highlights the downside of having this become a thing. So i am on the fence whether i want that to happen at all.
If you see the Google results on reddit for what you are looking for, you can click the three dots and look at the cached pages of reddit on Google
Totally understand this. I’m working on setting up my steam deck, and decided to go the Windows only route with it. Well, the main place for all things windows on the steamdeck is reddit. Youtube’s search means it’s a needle in a haystack for specific questions I have, since the overwhelming majority of people using the steamdeck are using SteamOS on it. It’s really put me at a loss when it comes to getting answers, until that sub comes back up. I just hope that data can be migrated somewhere else, since I don’t want to support reddit but I DO want to engage heavily with that community.
https://libreddit.domain.glass/
This might help you find what you need on there without being on there.
I’m not sure what the difference is…
They’re probably just both hosting the same project.
I feel like subreddit moderators dropped the ball here. They all could’ve made Lemmy communities and linked the subreddits there so everything could’ve just continued as normal but on Lemmy instead. I’m wondering why none of them did that. Do they actually think Reddit will revert the changes and go back to normal?
The trouble with Lemmy as an alternative to reddit, or ANY place as an alternative to reddit, is that eventually the server costs are going to rack up and it’ll either shut down or have to ask more and more for payment. I’m okay paying, but a lof of people probably aren’t. We’ll see how all this unfolds in the coming months.
I’m not worried. Mastodon instances have already happily been funded by their userbase, so I don’t see why it’d be any different here.
