Foundations of Lemmy: Using One Account for Everything, Defederation, and Navigation [Chapter 3]

In Chapter 2 of Foundations of Lemmy, we discussed how to use one account on your home instance to subscribe to communities on other servers. This post builds on this concept to address a few points of confusion I see within the community. If you're unsure how to use one account to access and subscribe to communities on federated servers outside of your own, Chapter 2 is worth a read.

Ultimately, the goal behind a federated platform like Lemmy is that it acts like one large social media site yet is decentralized and therefore hosted and controlled by many small individual servers. In general, you only need one account to access the entirety of what Lemmy has to offer. What seems to be causing most of the confusion is that, in some situations, you may end up accessing content from a different instance than your own. For example, a direct link to this post probably took you to NormalCity.life, even though you could have accessed this post directly from your home instance. You're in the right place if you're unsure how to do this. This is the main focus of this chapter. We will also explore how, in some cases, moving to a different instance may be advantageous if your home instance is defederated.

Dealing With Direct Links

Before we dive too deep into this topic, it's important to remind you that your account is only accessible from the instance in which you signed up for it. In other words, an account here on NormalCity cannot be used to log in directly to other instances. You can access and interact with content from other instances here, but the username and password you used for your account only authenticate with and are stored on this server (or your home instance).

With this in mind, it's clear that our goal is to navigate to the content we want to see, but we need to do so from our home instance in order to interact with it. There are a lot of ways you might come across a direct link somewhere on Lemmy, but let's explore the basic scenario of being sent a link via a message or a comment. Perhaps you're happily browsing all of Lemmy from your home instance, and you've even mastered subscribing to communities. In one of the comment threads you're participating in, another user on Lemmy.world sends you a link to a post about cats. If you click that link directly, you'll be taken to Lemmy.world, but your account is on (for the sake of this example) NormalCity.life. So, as far as Lemmy.world is concerned, you have no account, so it asks you to sign in to interact with the post.

By directly clicking the link, we end up on Lemmy.world, where we have no account registered. You might see a warning like this, which asks you to sign in or create an account. Of course, both of these things are pointless if you already have an account on your home instance.

Stand strong, Lemmy user. You need not listen to such lies; the power to access the post from the account you already have doth exist. The easiest way to access the content is, in fact, to navigate to the main community where the post is located. If you can copy the URL, you'll be able to search for the entire community on your home instance.

The aforementioned cat picture is located in this remote community. Remember, this is the remote server, Lemmy.world. We'll still need to go to our home search page to look for this community.

We covered this part in Chapter 2, but here's the relevant excerpt:

Once you have the link copied, proceed to the search page for your instance. If your account is located on this instance, NormalCity, our search page is located here. If not, it's simply <domain.com>/search, replacing <domain> with the domain name of your home instance. You can also access it using the magnifying glass icon at the top of the web UI. Once you're there, paste the URL you've copied and click the "Search" button. Wait, what? No results? It may appear so at first, but Lemmy is capable of reaching the community in question. The issue is that it can take a few seconds for the results to appear, so pressing the "Next" button several times will likely eventually lead to the result appearing. It may also appear if you give it some time, although spamming "Next" tends to work best for me.

Here's what the result should look like if you follow the above instructions. Obviously, you need to click on the search result to navigate to the community. This will take you to the community in question, but you will be browsing it from your home instance. In this case, I'm browsing on NormalCity, but the community is located on Lemmy.world's server.

Once you're browsing the community on your home instance, you have a few options. You can find the post you were linked to manually, as it's probably at the top of the sort. You can also try using the search feature again, but paste in the post link. Since your home instance has now cached the remote community, the search feature will work well for finding individual posts. That's the real hurdle with manually finding content on Lemmy, as searching for content from uncached communities is next to impossible. To continue with our scenario, I'll go ahead and search for the original post link. Remember, the previous steps were necessary for our home instance to cache the community.

After we helped our home instance cache the community by directly searching for and visiting it, searching for individual posts is a breeze. In this image, I simply copied the original direct link and searched for it.

Now we're in business. Once you're on the post and you've made sure you are still on your home instance (no warning asking for you to log in), feel free to interact with the post as you wish. Phew, that was a lot. A lot of these steps largely wouldn't be necessary if servers could anticipate and pre-cache searches for popular content, but that isn't really how Lemmy works, unfortunately. Instances hosted on overloaded servers can also cause sync problems, which is its own whole can of worms. If you remember, in Chapter 2, some communities may show "Subscribe Pending," even if you're actually subscribed. That problem, along with things like comments and metadata not fully loading, are also problems that can originate from overloaded remote instances.

Defederation

In short, defederation is when a Lemmy instance is blocked by another Lemmy instance. Just recently, Beehaw blocked Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. As you might expect, this was a controversial decision. When a Lemmy instance is defederated by another instance, all of the communities there become inaccessible to the instance that blocked it. The same is true for any instances that were blocked: in this case, Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works users have lost access to any of the communities located on Beehaw. This might prompt some users to make accounts on other instances, especially if they rely on communities that have been blocked.

While we just finished explaining how to access content without creating additional accounts, additional accounts on other instances is the only real way to dodge defederation. There isn't much to explain about this, except that you'll obviously lose access to the history you built up with your old account if you do decide to permanently switch to a new instance and account. Smaller instances, much like NormalCity, are pretty decent candidates for jumping ship. Smaller instances tend to have more lax rules for content, they often don't make enough noise to be blocked, and they often don't police their users as much. Of course, choosing your instance is important as well. If you like starting communities on a wide variety of topics, an instance with a more general focus is a good fit. If you don't really care about creating communities, or you only really care about creating a community about a specific topic, finding an instance that has a specific area of focus may be a better fit for you.

To quickly summarize, accessing content from your main account is required to interact with something you've received a direct link to. It's a bit of a process to get there, but it's easier the more you get used to dealing with Lemmy's quirks. Defederation is when one instance blocks another and can lead to large disruptions for users of Lemmy. In those cases, finding a smaller server to jump ship to might be something worth considering.

Next Chapter: Moderation and Administration for End-users

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