I noticed many new individuals joining following the Reddit API news. Do you have any questions about this website, Lemmy, or the fediverse?
I noticed many new individuals joining following the Reddit API news. Do you have any questions about this website, Lemmy, or the fediverse?
Hi Jack! So I signed up under midwest.social, does that mean that I can comment on other servers and my “home server” is midwest.social? What happens if midwest.social gets shutdown, does my account disappear? I apologize if these are obvious questions but I’m about 1hr into learning about the fediverse!
Welcome!
So yes, midwest.social would be considered your “home server”. You’d be able to comment and create posts to other Lemmy websites seamlessly, from this website.
If midwest.social shutsdown, then unfortunately your account does disappear. Lemmy doesn’t yet have native account migration, but if that feature existed, the you’d be able to move sites more easy.
Ok that makes sense, thanks for replying and confirming. I think the benefits of decentralisation outweigh the current negatives especially given the reddit situation.
Another question if you don’t mind, is it up to the server owner to create communities or is lt like a reddit where anyone can create their own?
On this instance anyone can create a community. Some servers disable it so only mods can.
One thing I haven’t been able to figure out from the official docs, is how exactly federation works with comments. Like, if my account is on instance A and I comment on a thread on instance B, is that comment stored/hosted on A, or B? If B, then what happens if A shuts down, does the comment stay up? Is it still attributed to my now-defunct account, or is the username replaced with “deleted” or something?
From what I understand, all comments are hosted on their original server, but contain pointers that tell it what it’s parent comment is. These are then cashed to each viewing server. So if instance a goes down, to my knowledge someone viewing from instance b would still see it. But if instance C came along and never saw it before, it could never discover the comment. That’s at least my understanding, an actual Dev or someone more familiar with activity pub would give you a better answer.