this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2023
64 points (100.0% liked)

Lemmy.World Announcements

29027 readers
9 users here now

This Community is intended for posts about the Lemmy.world server by the admins.

Follow us for server news 🐘

Outages πŸ”₯

https://status.lemmy.world

For support with issues at Lemmy.world, go to the Lemmy.world Support community.

Support e-mail

Any support requests are best sent to [email protected] e-mail.

Report contact

Donations πŸ’—

If you would like to make a donation to support the cost of running this platform, please do so at the following donation URLs.

If you can, please use / switch to Ko-Fi, it has the lowest fees for us

Ko-Fi (Donate)

Bunq (Donate)

Open Collective backers and sponsors

Patreon

Join the team

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

If I registered at lemmy.world, is it possible to still comment on a thread at say lemmy.ml? I get the expected "You are not logged in" and while subscribing is easy enough, I'm not able to comment or interact with other instances. This seems normal as users are unique per instance, I just want to make sure I'm not missing a key component of federated services. The sign in page at lemmy.ml says "You will still be able to interact with other instances" so that is confusing wording there as well.

EDIT: it works fine, you just need to be subbed to the other community before you can comment. Thanks /u/nulluser !

Edit 2: you don't even need to be subbed, I still have lots to learn, lol thank you all for your patience

top 44 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It might help wrap your mind around this federation stuff by thinking about email. You don't need to concern yourself with whether you and someone you want to send an email to are on the same email domain, say between Outlook and Gmail, you just send an email and because everyone is using the same protocol, the email can get to anyone with an email address.

The fediverse is kinda the same way.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Good analogy. I think it's closer to USENET in nature, but there's every chance many people are not aware of what usenet is or was.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I miss the Usenet. That was my intro to nerd culture.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

this really helped, thanks!

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm not using lemmy (the software) however because kbin is also federated I can see your post and leave a reply as well.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is the part that blows my mind!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Lmao it's awesome isn't it, I'm just trying to wrap my head around it too

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It's so clever! I checked this post out on Mastodon and it just looked like a normal tweet. I guess you could see Lemmy/Mastodon as like "email clients" except rather than going by an email protocol we're going by the ActivityPub protocol.

I never really meshed with Twitter, but maybe it would work in my head if presented more in the style of a reddit thread.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

Greetings from kbin.social, Lemmy's cooler younger cousin.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Once subscribed, you can view the community from your lemmy.world instance and vote/comment on it from there. Your votes/comments are then diseminated across to other instances.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

oh my god that was so simple, i was looking at communities i wasn't subbed to yet lol - thanks!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Happy to help.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Heck, I'm not even subbed to this community, and I can still comment on your post from Beehaw.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm not even using Lemmy and I can still comment here

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm not even on the internet and I can comment here.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm not even alive and I can comment here

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Is lemmy.world connected to kbin? I'm trying to interact with their instances but it doesn't seem to work. kbin.social appears to be one of the faster growing instances. It would be nice if we could interact with them.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

kbin.social has been getting overloaded from sudden increased traffic due to the reddit hug of death today (Streisand effect from reddit banning a sub promoting it). The developer/admin of kbin.social has had to temporarily enable ddos protection to keep the site up which they say may be interfering with proper communication between kbin and the rest of the fediverse. This is probably why accessing kbin.social instances from lemmy isn't working right now.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

That makes sense. Thanks for the info.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Well, it is listed at https://lemmy.world/instances so it should work.

Maybe the servers were slow at the time you tried?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's super interesting seeing how Lemmy works. Came here from kbin and prior to this post had no idea about how instances link.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Took me a few minutes to work out how to link my communities, can you access the links if I do them like this? [email protected] and [email protected]

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I really think the fediverse decentralized structure is going to be the future in the long run. It's going to have some rough stuff here and there, and I don't fully understand how it will work (for example, let us say I joined a small lemmy server and it shuts down. Will all of those communities and posts cease to be part of the whole?)

I'm loving it so far though.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

To your question, my understanding is that all your account activity is stored on your instance as the primary source, and then copied into other instances as users there view and interact with your posts and comments. So if the instance with your account on it shuts down, all of its content that was already copied over to other servers will be preserved there, but some of the newer activity that didn't have time to propagate yet might be lost.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Thank you, that makes sense. So another question. If my instance closes down, will I lose control over all of the copied content from my previous account since I would most likely have to make a new one on another instance?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I'm not sure what options there might exist now or in the future for gracefully migrating between instances, but in the worst case yes, if your instance unexpectedly shuts down then you won't be able to authenticate and access that user account anymore. You do need to have some trust in the instance you join.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What about user accounts and ownership of the community though?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

If that's a worry for you, you can buy a cheap VPS and set up your own instance.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

That's a good question! I'm still learning about federation and trying to get my head around things too.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

it would help if there was some background identifier though so we could differentiate from the same community on two different instances without having to type @instance every time

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I (Lemmy.world registered) just managed to comment on a beehaw post… I don’t know enough about how this works to help you fix it but it is possible!

I got the β€œyou are not logged in” error before my registration was accepted, not sure if that’s useful for you?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Thanks, I got it figured out. It turns out the cross instance community you want to comment on, you just need to subscribe to it first.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago