If you build it, they will come... (welcome thread)
If you build it, they will come... (welcome thread)
..maybe. Welcome, UK (and worldwide) people and reddit deserters.
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I'm here still trying to figure out how instances and communities differ.
I signed up on lemmy.world, which is the hosting instance for my account, right? And then I'm posting this in a thread in the CasualUK community.
But is this community just on lemmy.world, or across all instances?
I'm working it out too.
Lemmy.world is an instance - a server that hosts your account and any data.
UKCasual is a community, essentially a subreddit. Its stored solely on the Lemmy.world server
Whilst this community is stored on lemmy.world, if you're logged into another instance you can still see and interact with the UKCasual community, but data remains on lemmy.world
I'm not sure if there's a sync delay between instances etc
Okay. So if lemmy.world goes down then presumably all the communities it hosts also go down? This seems to present a bit of a logistical problem for community longevity. For example, a small instance that creates a popular community across all of the fediverse then has to try and support a large amount of traffic with possibly little local income/support?
I think this is why lemmy.ml has been asking people to stop signing up there. Centralising everything goes against the point of the Fediverse but also ends up costing the people running the instance a lot of money. It's best for everyone if we all spread out a bit.
My other account is on Beehaw.org and they're pretty transparent about what it's costing them and how many donations they've had, it's definitely interesting https://beehaw.org/post/416496
Is it beneficial to have accounts across multiple instances?
Nah, I just have two because I've historically split my online presence up into these two usernames. Tbh I've just subbed this one to all of the same communities as the other one so it's largely pointless until things spread out a bit more, but if I'm posting about videogames I tend to do it under this name and if I'm posting about cross stitch I tend to do it on the other one. Eurovision goes on both :D
No actual practical benefit beyond it just seeming tidier to me lol.
I think it's a good idea to spread out your online presence to regain some anonymity; being doxed or stalked does not sound like fun.
Some people post pictures of their street and their airline ticket and then are surprised when they get back to find they've been burgled.
Yeah my craft persona is also a YouTuber which makes it even more important, imo. These two usernames are generally open about being the same person but suffice to say I have plenty of secret ones too ;)
Fair enough, cheers
I think your posts and comments are stored on your own instance - lemmy.world for example - and then that instance uses the ActivityPub protocol to tell the community you interacted with that you did it.
From there I'm not sure exactly. I think the primary source of truth for your activity is still your home server, but the server hosting the community still at least caches the data as well, meaning a popular community might still overload it.
Worth asking how long the server is likely to be up, ive been trying to ask on all the small servers ive signed up on
Yes, as far as I understand that is an issue. I guess more popular instances may request donations to increase resources in future? I believe that Lemmy is super lightweight so shouldn't need much in the way of server power etc
For now this is peanuts. If it might grow a lot, I can use some of the mastodon.world donations or setup a new Patreon.
What I think is needed is a way to migrate communities and users between servers and something like the Mastodon Server Covenant so people would have time to migrate if a server decided it was going away.
That would be great
It also seems to create multiple of the same communities. Also depending on what instance you are signed up with you can't access posts from certain other instances
Only if your instance is banned by another.
Duplicate communities will exist for a while, but the same thing happens on reddit.
I'm here. Took a few days as I stood up my own friendica instance first off and it took me a while to realize it doesn't play that well with Lemmy. So I've started my own Lemmy instance now, which was 300% harder than it should have been as the devs aren't keeping the documentation up to date with the config files.
Now that I've used the fediverse it's not as weird as it sounds. But the learning curve is steep and I'm only here thanks to perseverance.
Yeah lemmy.world is the instance your account is on, and it's the one this community is on. But you can basically join and interact with communities on any instance.
The community is cross platform as I’m signed in via beehaw with a nice new name that has no connection to my old Reddit one