2y ago

If you can subscribe to communities on other instances than the one you're registered with, why register on one vs another?

I am new and trying to understand how Lemmy works. I am posting this from my lemmy.world account, on a lemmy.ml community. It seems like you can read, post, subscribe to whatever community outside of the instance you're registered with. So... Why register on lemmy.world vs lemmy.ml or any other instance, if all communities are accessible to everyone?

37 comments

Rules. Community feel. Performance. Geographic location. Just off the top of my head.
- what about jurisdiction? is that a factor?
  Could I, an EU citizen, say, I really want to extra failsafe and benefits of GDPR by signing up on an instance based in an EU country, with a server inside an EU country, abiding EU laws and standard of privacy protection? Is that a thing? Or is the lemmy ecosystem a lawless wild west?
  
  Currently... all very new and I'd say more like the latter. I'm not a lawyer, but I assume GDPR has exemptions for non-business ventures?
- Thanks, so for example I see you've signed up in an AUS instance, would you have other accounts somewhere else or use this one in different instances?
  
  I do have accounts on other instances, but thats really just for if my main one is offline for some reason. I use this one to sub and participate, no matter which instance the community is hosted on. ie the one we're on right now is homed to lemmy.ml
"The server I registered with might go down" was the reason I made my own instance instead of joining a public one. It was easy, and now I only have to trust myself that the server will stay online, and that the server is up to date and built from the GitHub source without modifications.
Right now, if lemmy.ml goes down, anyone who used that as their "home server" won't be able to log in or interact with Lemmy. So, one factor you might want to think about when joining an instance (or running your own) is, "What's their uptime like?"
In a few days, and then on July 1st, we'll also get to ask, "How well did handle the Reddit exodus?"
Load distribution. Different Lemmy instances are run by different volunteers who can only put so much money into them. So if lots of volunteers put up their own instances, then ideally each instance could have a few users signed up and thanks to federation, they'll all be interconnected.
- Thanks, interesting point. I guess if the load is distributed enough, we won't have Lemmy devs asking for donations to keep the servers running under bigger and bigger loads 👍🏼
  
  Another interesting thing I realised: In a centralised network like Reddit, if the site goes down, nothing is accessible. But if a Lemmy instance goes down, most, if not all communities you're subbed to should still be up given they aren't hosted in that instance.
You don't, that's the beauty of federation, you can pick whichever instance you want and interact with everyone!
The actual reasons to pick an instance are just rules/moderation and ping/bandwidth, really.
Some instances let you create communities, others don't, for example.
You can't create communities on other instances seems to be the main difference. Also you could lose access to your account if your instance goes down
- Thanks, it also looks like if I want to sub to a community on a different instance, I have to search for it from my own instance, as I can't hit "subscribe" in the community list on another instance. Regarding losing access to your account, do people keep multiple accounts to avoid this? No idea how likely instances are to go down.
  
  that's due to the way information is populated, while your instance can see the content, it doesn't actually know its there until you search for it which populates that data (in simple terms anyway)
Also new to Lemmy, but it looks like it only really matters which instance you register with if the instance shuts down (your account will be lost).
You should also try to pick a smaller instance, to avoid unneccessary load on the few 'main' ones, but also make sure you're on a reliable instance, since you'll lose access to Lemmy in downtime.
Also, when communicating with other instances, they can see the one you signed up to (I'm on sh.itjust.works).
Haven't seen anyone mention this but some instances are themed around a topic or a country, with all their communities on that theme. So if you want your local feed to be on that theme, they'd be a good choice.
Most instances are general though, so local is full of a bit of everything.
- Yeah I guess that's what I'm struggling with, say for example I'm into baking and there's a baking community here on .world, but maybe there's another one on .ml and wait here's a good one on .ca or something. So I'll be subscribing to three different baking communities in three different instances, it seems a bit redundant/divisive? But maybe it's just because it's early days, and with time the "best" communities will conglomerate and people will know the "best" baking community is on the .ml instances, but the best cooking one is on .world, etc, instead of subscribing to multiples of the same.
  
  I guess if you like to actually visit each community and look at their latest threads from there it could be an issue, this is presumably what the feature request for "multi-communities" is all about where in theory we could group them all together for our viewing pleasure.
  I do think certain communities will become the "main" ones for each topic though over time, we just have to try and make sure they're spread around and not all just on lemmy.ml.
  There's a similar thing going on with gamedev communities, I'm subbed to at least 4 or 5 at this point. But in reality nobody was posting much to any so I just picked one at random to post in and kickstarted some convos, now it's the only one that seems to see any action. But since I'm subbed to all of them, if one of the others does suddenly kick off, I'll see it in my feed anyway and won't miss out so having four of them doesn't really seem like an issue.
Trust in admin(s).
You're trusting the person running your instance to do a good job, to provide good hardware and keep it running, to ensure it isn't de-federated from other instances, to provide Lemmy software updates, to not ban you or vanish one day.
Really, I don't know who my admins are, I've read a few posts and they seem pretty good, but I've not seen them before. But really, this is what it will come down to in the long run.
it basically comes down to personal preference tbh, each instance have slightly different rule sets and internal communities, lemmy.ml / lemmy.world are simply some of the 'main' instances, They're higher on the list on the instance search and thus generally gather a larger crowd because people see the higher user count and just go with that.
and if you don't like any of the public instances you can simply roll your own and use it as an internal friends chat that can also browse the external fediverse
I'm also new, but I found it easier to subscribe to a community in your local instance. Just click the subscribe button. The only way I've found to subscribe to a community in another instance is to fiddle with the URL which is annoying if I want to subscribe to a hundred exyernal communities.

37 comments