Dispelling the myth of a universal "Lemmy" community, and discussion of what the fediverse really is
Like many, when the recent defederation went down, I decided to create a couple other logins and see what the wider fediverse has had to say about it.
I've been, honestly, a bit surprised by the response. A huge portion of people seem to be misidentifying communities as belonging to "lemmy" as opposed to the instances that host them. I think a big portion of this seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what this software is, and how it works.
For example, lemmy.world users are pissed at being de-federated because it excludes them from Beehaw communities. This outrage seems wholly placed in the concept that Beehaw's communities are "owned" by the wider fediverse. This is blatantly not how lemmy works. Each instance hosts a copy of federated instances' content for their users to peruse. The host (Beehaw in this example) remains being the source of truth for these communities. As the source of truth, Beehaw "owns" the affected communities, and it seems people have not realized that.
This also has wider implications for why one might want to de-federate with a wider array of instances. Lets say I have a server in a location that legally prohibits a certain type of pornography. If my users subscribe to other instances/communities that allow that illegal pornography, I (the server admin) may find myself in legal jeopardy because my instance now holds a copy of that content for my users.
Please keep this in mind as you enjoy your time using Lemmy. The decisions that you make affect the wider instance. As you travel the fediverse, please do so with the understanding that your interactions reflect this instance. More than anything, how can we spread this knowledge to a wider audience? How can we make the fediverse and how it works less confusing to people who aren't going to read technical documentation?
I am also not a programmer, but I have been thinking about the above idea as key to simplifying the adoption of lemmy to the broader public. I think that this idea is good, but the fact that the host instance must locally store all the data of another instance it's federated with seems resources intensive (but I bet storage is cheaper than processing calls). Wouldn't it make more sense to have a shared API-like protocol to allow instances and users to migrate freely using a SSO?
I think that the problem I had was "but which instance should I join?" and the answer that I understood when I saw someone commenting from mastadon in lemmy.ml or something was "it doesn't matter."
Then it became "but which one do I want to join and be associated with?" and after a day or two, I found feddit.uk, which appealed to me very much as a concept. I've been happy with my choice.
I occasionally worry that I'll need to create other accounts on other instances, but thankfully I'm not (yet!) blocked from the communities I subscribed to on beehaw, beehaw being the place that I most nearly made an account.
I'm not sure that an auto-copy of accounts is simple in practice or secure in principle, and I worry that it would make experiencing the fediverse even more complicated, eg I'm commenting on beehaw, but should I use my feddit.uk or my usenet.revisited.digg.lemmy account?
I worry that it would also fail to solve your moderation quandries - the beehaw mods would want to block exactly the auto-copied accounts from other instances that are the only duplicate accounts you would need because you can already access content from outside the blocked instances without creating other accounts.
Yes, I joined Feddit.uk too - there was a recent post saying that they were going to keep the number of defederated instances small, which is good to know. Major stuff shouldn't disappear suddenly.
Yes, so way to merge some accounts (like elsewhere you can sign up with your Google, Facebook, etc accounts under one login) and/or being able to easily switch accounts/instances as easily as you can in Reddit. I am using the Jerboa for Lemmy app, so this may all be possible in other apps or web interfaces.