I noticed many new individuals joining following the Reddit API news. Do you have any questions about this website, Lemmy, or the fediverse?
I’m good. Kind of in awe of the number of people signing up for this instance lol. When I started this instance 3 years ago I never thought I’d see this many people using it.
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.
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.
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.
I’m fighting a slight cold, but other than that - today looks like its going to be a great day (could use a little less heat outside though).
Does Lemmy and Mastodon (and also Friendica, or Peer-Tube, et al) interact at all? I know they are both on the Fediverse, but I don’t exactly know what that enables. Can I post here with a Mastodon account, or post on a Mastodon server with my Lemmy account? Does both being on the Fediverse just allow cross-following, or something more?
Lemmy and mastodon can interact. Can follow lemmy communities from mastodon and comment on Lemmy posts via mastodon. I’ve never tried it the other way around.
Yup, what seahorse said.
From a Mastodon (or similar) account, you can:
- comment on any post
- follow any community
- follow any user
- make top level posts by mentioning the community somewhere in the post. The first line becomes the title.
Like this?
Interesting. This will take me a bit to wrap my head around haha
So if I understand this correctly, if I have a Lemmy account do I also need to create a separate Mastodon account if I want to join Mastodon?
Yes you would need to sign up for a Mastodon account if you wanted to use it. Right now most of the functionality with mastodon is one-way (they can comment on Lemmy posts, but we can’t comment on their posts, unless they post it to a Lemmy community).
Yeah, accounts on the Fediverse aren’t universal. A mastodon account is not the same as a Lemmy account. They’re interoperable though.
I’m just happy it is Friday.
Amen to that! Could do with a smidge lower temp this weekend, but I’ll take what I can get.
I just finished a walk out there. Woof.
Is there a crash course on how the federated stuff works? I never really used twitter, so mastodon didn’t hold much draw, but with the reddit API sillyness, i’d be interested in trying to wrap my head around wtf i’m looking at.
Best analogy for Federated Stuff is to think of it like hosting an email server. You have many different email servers all talk to each others and route one email to the next. That essentially the idea with federated, just more robust and more focused on social aspects.
Essentially on Lemmy server, it can choose to talk to other lemmy servers to get contents, but each Lemmy server could moderate on their own. It’s possible to make a “clone” of a content from another server and you can make a new blank thread on this server even though on other server, there were already ongoing discussion about it.
Federation is right in the middle of peer to peer and central server like Reddit.com, it just server-to-server rather than person-to-person.
Another way to think about it is through Graph Theory / Connectivity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectivity_(graph_theory)
In a federated network, what you see depends on your connections, similarly, what others see depends on their connections. Lemmy/Fediverse operators can defederate with nodes that are ‘bad actors’ (however their moderation team / operators define that), eventually the defederated node may not see much or be able to interact with much because of the limits of their connectivity.
Graph theory / connectivity is also how social networks figure out who you might be friends with, and how the NSA figures out who might be bad apples.
Math is cool =)
Is there a way to subscribe to other servers or do I need to make a login at each one?
You can search “!community@domain.com” in the search bar to find and then subscribe to that community on the other server.
