2y ago

ysk - your account doesn't exist on other instances and communities don't overlap

User accounts are fragmented and just because you signed on at lemmy.world doesn't mean your account exists on lemmy.ca.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1985

Communities are fragmented and /c/games on lemmy.world is completely different than the one on lemmy.ml with its own users, set of posts, etc.

Lemmy does not currently allow for instance or user migration.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3057

Nor does it allow for shared communities (ie the aforementioned /c/games is unified across multiple instances)

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3100

We are in the early days. If you're eager feel free to join in the development on these any many other core issues. There's real potential here.

98 comments

BUT you can still upvote or comment on posts from different instances if you access them from within the instance your account is from!
So you don't need to create one account for each instance.
Edit: commented from a lemm.ee account
- Yea the post is misleading. The community is games@lemmy.world not /c/games. That's reddit language creeping in.
  
  Yes, saying c/gaming is meaningless. I pointed this out to one user yesterday and got the most unbelievable snark back.
- It definitely confused me. I’m used to reddit so the idea that I would have to have multiple accounts was a huge downside. Thanks for clearing it up… At least a littl.
  
  The post clearly mentions “c/games on lemmy.world”, not just “c/games”. Cut them some slack.
- Exactly - as long as the instance isnt defederated, you should be able to post/comment/upvote/mod in communities that are outside of your home instance.
  
  Do posts outside of Lemmy.World not show up in my feed?
- I swear upvote counts are isolated to individual instances too. I don't think they are supposed to be... But one post on Lemmy.world viewed from Lemmy.world shows hundreds of upvotes, but on another smaller instance it shows 5 upvotes.
  I hope that's not the way Lemmy is intended to work.
  It makes no sense at all
  
  This can happen if federation breaks for a while, I think. For instance, if a lemmy instance goes down and can’t receive activity for a time, I don’t think there’s any mechanism to backfill that activity
This is badly written - to someone who doesn't know any of this it reads like they're missing out on something. Yes there's !games@lemmy.world and !games@lemmy.ml - but you don't need an account on either to participate in both! You can just go there and browse, comment, etc.
Eventually one will become dominant, and it will all be fine.
- One becomes dominant which is then tied to an instance and there goes your federation you're all clamouring about. Man I'm enjoying Lemmy so far but Jesus there's a lot of you need pulling your heads out your asses. It's a cool platform and a cool idea but damn there's a lot of core issues that need addressing.
  
  The benefit of federation isn't that no community becomes dominant for it's field, it's that there is no central authority. It's open source, so if a change is accepted that makes apps pay a ton for API access (random example), a fork can be made to roll back that change and servers can switch to the fork. It also means that if one server goes down, the rest doesn't go with it, or one wild admin can't destroy everything.
  If one server becomes dominant for one thing and they fuck it up eventually, a new community can be created. This isnt a feature of federation though. The same thing can (and did) happen on Reddit. There are huge benefits to federation, but that isn't one. Segregation of communities also isn't one.
  
  One community will be become dominant. It's just the way things go. And it's better for the user - why would we want discussions for some particular topic fragmented? It's early days so some communities have competitors but one will be slightly bigger, more people will gravitate towards that, and the effect will compound.
  As for federation yes a community is owned by an instance, sometimes a big instance.
  But there's no reason we wouldn't have communities across a variety of instances. We already do. Most are on big instances sure since they have most users who create most communities, but there's several larger communities on smaller instances. Like !houseplants@mander.xyz or !startrek@startrek.website
  
  What you're describing as an "issue" is just the way the fediverse works.
  There's no central authority that determines the ruling /c/gaming instance or whatever.
  If you tried to create one then anyone could just fork lemmy to disregard the central authority.
  Lemmy is not reddit, nor should it attempt to be.
Isn't that the whole point though? Not relying on a single entity by spreading out, but still being connected?
Fragmentation would be fixed by just integrating lemmyverse.net's functionality into lemmy itself (like in this github issue), allowing users to see the true user count/activity of comms and incentivise them to join the most popular one.
Needs to be done asap imo; comm discoverability is not good right now and is probably the single biggest hurdle for new users
- Anyone want to be the scrum master for them? Lol. Looks like they need a sprint planning session!
But can I comment and reply in other instances? If that's true then I guess who cares?
- Yeah, it doesn't matter much except when you wanna view several communities on the same topic. I'd like to be able to see all the 3dprinting communities at once.
  
  Then just subscribe to all of them
  We do need a "multi-community" feature where we can view a bunch of similar subs in the same feed, however
When I see multiple communities on the same subject, I just subscribe to all of them. Either they'll eventually differentiate into their own unique spaces, or one of them will become the dominant one and the others will become fringe alternates. It's a good thing.
- Like all the subreddits that have their “true” or “2” variant
What you have identified is a feature, not a bug. It immunizes us against mods getting swollen egos and going on a powertrip.
IMO thats the beauty of a federated network
- Agree but at the same time it could be better.
  
  It will improve over time. Hell, even reddit got better over the years, before it started getting worse for other reasons.
Ok so I'm looking at a post to You Should Know. When I look at the community info it says "You Should Know." The only way I know it's on lemmy.world is because it says you need to adhere to lemmy.world policies. I see nothing in the app (Jerboa) that indicates which instance it's on. What am I missing? If I am subscribed to a bunch of communities called "Games" how do I know which post comes from which community?
- Is this an app-specific issue? I’m using wefwef on iOS and it shows “youshouldknow@lemmy.world” as the community. It doesn’t show it for the user, though, which is another worthwhile piece of information.
  
  I'm on Jerboa and it does indicate as you quoted. I don't know why the guy said that way. Maybe lemmy.world is his home instance.
- This is definitely a gap on the main community pages, but in the interim, if you click into an actual post it shows the fully qualified community name at the top. At least that's what I'm seeing.
Lemmy does not currently allow for instance or user migration.
This should probably be high up on the list of additions. I like the idea of Lemmy but for things like getting support no one is going to use Lemmy if the entire community and all the posts can just disappear one day and all the history go poof.
- Instance migration, lemmyverse.net functionality in lemmy, and assigning new users to a good random instance upon registration (and letting them change it of course) so they don't need to know about instances, are the three most important features lemmy needs rn imo
Is this spez?
- Fuck that myopic dweeb
  
  Spez: furiously tries to shadowban user / change their comment
As other commenters have mentioned, this is technically true but pretty misleading. This is viewing the fediverse through an inappropriate lens.
Your account technically doesn’t exist on other instances but it effectively doesn’t matter.
- Devil's advocate but what if someone registers whoisearth on another instance and starts spewing vitreol? I'm sure many people would be concerned about any online reputation they've built then get cut down simply because someone wants to be an asshole. How would that scenario play out? Genuinely curious.
  
  And what if someone registers whoisearth on Gmail, Outlook, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn or PornHub? Have you registered your name on literally every social media ever existed? This isn't a new problem, or one that is created by the concept of federation.
So there is a !trees@lemmy.world and !trees@no.lastname.nz (pluss probably others)
The first is more or less r/trees the second I set up for therapeutic uses of 'trees' and shrooms
Each instance will have it's own ethos, mod policies and code of conduct. Choose your communities based on what gets posted to them.
The same could be said for [hypothetical] !worldnewa@beehaw.org and !worldnews@lemmygrad.ml. They would be very different communities to read
We need a more unified login experience. OIDC/Oauth would work wonders for this.
User registers at X lemmy/mastadon/peertube instance (activitypub app, [APA]) and gets malloc@lemmy.xyz
Users visits Y APA
Logins to Y APA using X user
User redirected to X APA instance to login (knows user registered at lemmy.xyz)
Upon successful login, user returned to Y APA
User now able to browse/post/comment in Y APA without having to manually go through original APA app where user account lives.
Basically each APA acts as its own IdP (identity provider); and would go a long way in improving user experience and reducing frustration.
If you are not familiar with this flow, then look at any web service with a login. They are usually accompanied by a Google/Apple/Facebook login option; and that’s that we are trying to replicate here. One set of credentials across the entire fediverse.
- honestly i feel that lemmy should just have been matrix-based rather than activitypub, sure it's nice to have native federation with mastodon but the forum structure is PERFECT for the matrix model.
  By using matrix you would have communities be independent of servers (thus actually owned by the moderators and not the instance admins), and there would be a possibility of decentralized user accounts somewhere in the far future.
- I think this would have to start off as some kind of defined standard in ActivityPub before it could be implemented across all ActivityPub services and be interoperable.
  Otherwise, it will result in fragmentation.
  But yeah, having one ActivityPub account for many services is ideal IMO, along with being able to follow any content on your platform of choice (like interacting with Peertube or Mastodon postings in Lemmy, or even something rediculous like interacting with Lemmy posts in PeerTube)
- Sounds like Stack Exchange
I like Lemmy a lot so far, and I’ve brought along a couple of friends… I do have a couple of questions though!
What happens if the server I’m on goes down for an extended period of time, or forever? Is my account data just gone? Or is that mirrored somewhere else?
- I'm thinking it's gone unless the owner of your instance makes backups
- It’s gone. Portability is ostensibly a core goal of fediverse development, so I would assume we’ll see it arrive in code form fairly soon.
- I wonder if that happened to me. I signed up a few weeks ago, but my account disappeared somewhere in the Lemmy ether. I made this new account the other day. Hope this one sticks..
This is the whole point...?
I just sub to multiple communities with the same name.
I don’t think the post has a ton of merits for reasons that have already been described. That being said, there is one potential issue that I’m surprised that hasn’t been mentioned, which is impersonation.
Say someone takes the username jimbo on an instance somewhere and becomes super popular. Then someone else decides to create the same username jimbo on a similarly named instance and tries impersonating the other user. Sure, people can look and see “oh this isn’t that other jimbo” but you would have to look and see.
Probably not a major issue, but could theoretically become one.
- I could see this becoming a massive issue when the Fediverse becomes popular enough for niche internet microcelebrities. People like u/SirLulzingtonEsquire, who invented a whole new genre of trollface comics on Reddit, could get impersonated on a platform like this. It also seems like it could be an issue for actual celebrities. Remember what happened when Elon started selling blue checkmarks?
- As far as I'm aware, there's no way to nickname/tag users. That would solve the issue. You could tag someone as the real one and the tag would only apply to that address specifically, not the username in general. It seems like a relatively easy solution, and any others are very hard with the realities of federation. We can't have a central authority to check names or anything like that.
Im just here to enjoy the ride. No matter how bumpy it gets. After a year goes by and im still here, I can look back at this and remember that we all got through it.
- Agree. It's going to be interesting to see where this goes.
- This double posted fyi
Hello there, and welcome to our community! I hope you like it in here.
Could you please include some body text as to why should people know this, and how would that help them? It’s our second rule. Thank you :)
Such an easy answer to basically handwave away problems. Will potentially work for idiots I guess.
"It's not a bug it's a feature!" - lazy developers everywhere
- So what software exactly have you developed? You seem to have very strong opinions about "lazy devs," but you also don't seem to know much about how any of this works.

98 comments