I’ve signed up to lemmy.world don’t know what an instance is or why it might be important to sign up to something different. Want to help as much as possible.
Please educate me!
Whereas you signed up on lemmy.world, I signed up on lemmy.ca.
Our accounts live on these different instances of the same platform.
Someone else may have an account on sh.itjust.works.
Each of these instances can have communities (subreddit equivalent). Through federation (essentially agreement to talk with eachother). We (account holders on different instances) can interact, post and comment anywhere on these and other federated instances.
In a weird way, these instances are an adhoc load balancer since I am using resources primarily from lemmy.ca and you are using resources from lemmy.world. This last piece is most relevant to the potential issue stated. A good load balancer, balances the load efficiently and effectively. If everyone made an account on lemmy.world it would get an uneven share of the load and struggle to keep its infrastructure alive or scaled well. Additionally, it goes against the decentralized nature of federated instances.
Now please take this all with a grain of salt, I have been here since july 1 and so am taking the rough concept I’ve learned and tried to explain it. Likely missing critical technical details and the analogies may be imperfect. :)
Here is my simple understanding of things: (please correct me if I’m wrong)
lemmy.world is an instance of lemmy and it is connected to most other instances of lemmy.
Instances that are connected can see post and comments of each other.
However the host of a niche instance can adjust the connection, e.g. make the instance read-only for other instances. General purpose instances (like lemmy.world) usually don’t do that.
tldr: A lemmy instance is like a reddit. So there are many “reddits” now and most of them talk to each other creating one super reddit a.k.a. lemmy.
What happens if, through no fault of their own, an instance that a user has been investing their time in decides to rift against the other instances? In the future there could be many disconnected factions of Lemmy instances and users struggling to manage several different accounts if they want to see content across them? In that case they may also see many duplicates as people cross post across the disconnected instances?
What happens if, through no fault of their own, an instance that a user has been investing their time in decides to rift against the other instances?
If Lemmy.defederated gets defederated from Lemmy.world ( (or goes offline) and now you can’t participate at !coffee@lemmy.world with that account you can create a new one at Lemmy.federated and you can resume participation. If the community was !coffee@lemmy.defederated then folks can migrate to an existing community (such as one on a different instance) or recreate it on an instance that is still federated with the bulk of the network. This wouldn’t be without annoyances or difficulties but moving within the network will be easier than changing systems entirely.
In the future there could be many disconnected factions of Lemmy instances and users struggling to manage several different accounts if they want to see content across them? In that case they may also see many duplicates as people cross post across the disconnected instances?
Unless the subsections are largely of equal size I think people will migrate to the network that is larger and contains more content. I tend to see isolated networks existing only when they are significantly different in culture or content that isn’t found in the network at large and they can maintain a large enough user base to be self-sustaining. If an isolated network of 5 instances that want to be exclusively pig Latin speaking and don’t want fifthly non-pig Latin speakers federated with them is able to sustain itself with the user base interested in this: more power to them. People will either decide which network they want or they’ll have two accounts.
As far as managing those accounts, I use Liftoff and it supports multiple accounts and on a browser it is as simple as multiple bookmarks. I can have accounts on instances in a different network. So if I really love discussion about coffee in pig Latin I can easily swap accounts on the fly to get access to the latest discussions about ewingbray ethay erfectpay enchfray esspray offeecay.
That does appear to be a problem with the model, yes. Time will tell I guess. The other side to that coin is “what if I want to interact with other federated platforms, like Mastodon, from the one account?”. I believe that’s what Kbin is trying to achieve. All of this technology (ActivityPub) is in it’s infancy still.
The best analogy I’ve seen is “think of your lemmy instance as your email provider”. Your account “lives” in your home instance, but no matter which instance you are you can see content and interact with all instances that are connected.
Since the instance you are doesn’t matter much, people recommend spreading simply to avoid overloading one instance with too many users.
Email analogy is good to explain the systems architecture, but it still doesn’t communicate ethics of proper use (decentralization). Just look how many people have gmail or outlook as their mail account.
I’ve signed up to lemmy.world don’t know what an instance is or why it might be important to sign up to something different. Want to help as much as possible. Please educate me!
Whereas you signed up on lemmy.world, I signed up on lemmy.ca.
Our accounts live on these different instances of the same platform.
Someone else may have an account on sh.itjust.works.
Each of these instances can have communities (subreddit equivalent). Through federation (essentially agreement to talk with eachother). We (account holders on different instances) can interact, post and comment anywhere on these and other federated instances.
In a weird way, these instances are an adhoc load balancer since I am using resources primarily from lemmy.ca and you are using resources from lemmy.world. This last piece is most relevant to the potential issue stated. A good load balancer, balances the load efficiently and effectively. If everyone made an account on lemmy.world it would get an uneven share of the load and struggle to keep its infrastructure alive or scaled well. Additionally, it goes against the decentralized nature of federated instances.
Now please take this all with a grain of salt, I have been here since july 1 and so am taking the rough concept I’ve learned and tried to explain it. Likely missing critical technical details and the analogies may be imperfect. :)
Here is my simple understanding of things: (please correct me if I’m wrong)
lemmy.world is an instance of lemmy and it is connected to most other instances of lemmy.
Instances that are connected can see post and comments of each other.
However the host of a niche instance can adjust the connection, e.g. make the instance read-only for other instances. General purpose instances (like lemmy.world) usually don’t do that.
tldr: A lemmy instance is like a reddit. So there are many “reddits” now and most of them talk to each other creating one super reddit a.k.a. lemmy.
What happens if, through no fault of their own, an instance that a user has been investing their time in decides to rift against the other instances? In the future there could be many disconnected factions of Lemmy instances and users struggling to manage several different accounts if they want to see content across them? In that case they may also see many duplicates as people cross post across the disconnected instances?
If Lemmy.defederated gets defederated from Lemmy.world ( (or goes offline) and now you can’t participate at !coffee@lemmy.world with that account you can create a new one at Lemmy.federated and you can resume participation. If the community was !coffee@lemmy.defederated then folks can migrate to an existing community (such as one on a different instance) or recreate it on an instance that is still federated with the bulk of the network. This wouldn’t be without annoyances or difficulties but moving within the network will be easier than changing systems entirely.
Unless the subsections are largely of equal size I think people will migrate to the network that is larger and contains more content. I tend to see isolated networks existing only when they are significantly different in culture or content that isn’t found in the network at large and they can maintain a large enough user base to be self-sustaining. If an isolated network of 5 instances that want to be exclusively pig Latin speaking and don’t want fifthly non-pig Latin speakers federated with them is able to sustain itself with the user base interested in this: more power to them. People will either decide which network they want or they’ll have two accounts.
As far as managing those accounts, I use Liftoff and it supports multiple accounts and on a browser it is as simple as multiple bookmarks. I can have accounts on instances in a different network. So if I really love discussion about coffee in pig Latin I can easily swap accounts on the fly to get access to the latest discussions about ewingbray ethay erfectpay enchfray esspray offeecay.
That does appear to be a problem with the model, yes. Time will tell I guess. The other side to that coin is “what if I want to interact with other federated platforms, like Mastodon, from the one account?”. I believe that’s what Kbin is trying to achieve. All of this technology (ActivityPub) is in it’s infancy still.
Lemmy, Kbin and Mastodon instances and accounts already connect to one another.
The best analogy I’ve seen is “think of your lemmy instance as your email provider”. Your account “lives” in your home instance, but no matter which instance you are you can see content and interact with all instances that are connected.
Since the instance you are doesn’t matter much, people recommend spreading simply to avoid overloading one instance with too many users.
Email analogy is good to explain the systems architecture, but it still doesn’t communicate ethics of proper use (decentralization). Just look how many people have gmail or outlook as their mail account.