I don't understand.
I looked up a list of Lemmy World instances and signed up for a bunch, but how do I see everything at once in one app instead of downloading one for each instance? I am new to what the kids call "federation." Thank you.
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It would be so nice if this were true.
You need to sign up with every instance that isn't federated with an instance you've already signed up for.
So, for example, if you have a Lemmy.world account, and you want to subscribe and post to a community hosted by beehaw.org, you also need to create and maintain a beehaw.org account.
As the fediverse gets more mature, news of de-federation between big/popular instances becomes more common.
That's beehaw's problem. They defederated with lemmy.world recently
Your statement may be true but that does not make it helpful
I doubt it was meant to be helpful. It’s just the reality. Just as a lot of people left Reddit for specific reasons. The same will probably apply to different instances choosing to block off large chunks of the fediverse.
Most posts and subscriptions to lemmy.ml don't work from lemmy.world as well, in my experience. To clarify - they work, but no one at lemmy.ml sees your posts, and the subscriptions all permanently say 'Subscribe Pending'.
Why? Doesn't that undermine the whole strength of the Fediverse?
Not really. If the admins of that instance don't want to federated, that's their prerogative. They'll gain or lose users based on that decision. The beauty of the fediverse is that it's all on a voluntary basis. If beehaw decides to federate with a small cluster of other instances, then they'll have their own niche just like the current internet.
If there's content at beehaw that a user wants to subscribe to and comment on, then it's more than just beehaw's problem, it's also makes it the user's problem...and that means creating and maintaining logins on multiple servers.
But that's no different than the current internet. Like I said, it's beehaw's problem. If they want to strictly enforce native users on their instance and have their stricter account creation process to join their community, then that's no different than the current internet.
And depending on the app you use, adding and switching to multiple accounts can be easy. I use Memmy which emulates Apollo’s account switcher.
I don't need to sign up with every instance that isn't federated with my home instance. I only need to sign up on one of those instances if they have a community I want to follow and participate in.
While true, it sounds like communities from instances that un-federate should be avoided. More users are on other instances so the beehaw ones should be left to die in obscurity