It was confusing at first

msdos622@lemmy.world to Lemmy.World Announcements@lemmy.world – 1125 points –
183

It gets more confusing when the instance you joined decides to unfederate and half of your subs stop working! Then you have to join a new instance and start over because subs nor usernames carry over.

It was confusing at first

The confusion never went away. Beehaw defederated, so I understand that you would then have to create a specific Beehaw account in order to engage with Beehaw communities, but why would I want to as a Lemmy.world user, is what I'm confused about.

That's not the most convenient though. You could have an account on any instance that's not lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works and you'd be able to access both beehaw and Lemmyworld/shitjustworks

I got my account on lemm.ee and was wondering how the defederation affected me, good to know, thanks.

It doesn't. Beehaw blocked LW and SIJW because of open sign ups and, what I assume, was people creating new accounts when their old one was banned.

If you're not on any of those two instances or on beehaw, you're not impacted.

Beehaw is sending a message, imho, that instances need take reasonable measures to ensure their users don't repeatedly commit some sort of abuse.

This raises a question about the use case of user-only instances and community-only instances which might not be a bad idea.

Beehaw is sending a message, imho, that instances need take reasonable measures to ensure their users don’t repeatedly commit some sort of abuse.

Do mods even have this kind of power? Can they see what their users are posting on other instances?

For that matter, I don't know if this is so much a statement being made by Beehaw about quality of users as it is a necessary step for their moderation style. I think Beehaw has very strict mdoeration policies and they're just having a hard time keeping up with their own influx of users let alone LW and SIJW who have open registration.

In their own words

This is also not a permanent judgement (or a moral one on the part of either community’s owner, i should add–we just have differing interests here and that’s fine).

why not lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works?

My understanding from the announcement post was because those are two large instances with open registration, and they want to be able to better vet new users to make sure they're not trolls

Good luck to them vetting the entire internet. Hope they'll have fun in their little super duper exclusive club house.

Lol, they were the first instance I tried to sign up for since they are large and loud. They interrogate you in order to make an account. "Why do you want to make an account on Beehaw?" Um, because I'm addicted to link aggregators and tired of Reddit? Does it fucking matter?

It matters to them, so I guess you are not the type of user they want. It's annoying, but if they want their server to be more exclusive, they can do that. It is the beauty and the pain of federation.

I have like three now, because it wasn't clear that that wasn't required. I think I'm getting it more now, but it's taking a bit to get there.

And this is why you roll your own instance just for auth

At this point I'm considering it. I wonder how much it costs.

I did it, but my buddy has a server with extra resources that he doesn't care if I use and I already owned domains.

Say $20/yr for domain, Lemmy needs around 150MB of RAM and almost no CPU. You could easily do that for $5/mo. Slice up the domain renewal, call it $8.

So far, there are upsides and downsides.

The upsides, I can federate with anyone I want and it's unlikely that they'll defederate with me because I'm one guy, and maybe a handful of friends if they want accounts. Two, I wanted something I could use as a blog anyway, so I made a mod only community on my instance where I can blog. I don't care if people read it or not, it just seemed fun.

Downside, finding communities is relatively more laborious. I have to go to other instances and look at their communities, or all feeds, to find things to subscribe to at home. Which means for each one, I need to copy the link or name, go to my instance's search, then go to the communities tab and subscribe. On a big instance, someone probably already searched for a lot of communities at least once, which is enough to index it. But on your own, you gotta do it yourself and it can get a little tedious.

Overall, I'm liking running my own though, so I plan to keep doing that.

Discoverability is one of the biggest weaknesses Lemmy has right now. It should be entirely fixable, though. A way to auto-index the list of communities on a given instance would be a great start.

Are you talking about getting a list for yourself, or doing it in a federated way? Because for an individual instance, you can go to Explore Communities -> All to view the most popular communities for that instance, or click the local tab for only communities that they host.

I found a lot of my communities (including this one!) through Lemmy Explorer which aggregates it a bit.

Doing it in a federated way.

Specifically, when you tell your instance about another one, it should at least register the existence of every community on the other instance. Right now indexing is community-by-community from what I hear and that sucks.

I can completely understand why that wouldn't be, it would put a big strain on any server with a large community count.

I think the top 25-100 communities could be reasonable, though. This could also be accomplished with a bot either managed by an instance interested in pulling that data, or a user wanting to automate subscriptions a bit.

*I originally posted this with an example that I immediately realized was incorrect, so I corrected that.

Last I checked there were 10k communities and a few hundred instances total, which is tiny in computer terms. As it grows larger maybe it would be an issue, but really even millions of instance names properly compressed shouldn't be onerous for a one-time download.

150 MB of RAM is a bit optimistic. However I agree that you should be okish with cheap 1GB 1vCPU VMs for a one user instance.

Maybe even host it on an old laptop you can use as a server.

The 150MB metric was based on the documentation estimate. I would say that remains correct for my solo instance. The only caveat would be that postegres adds, at current, about 200MB of usage on top of that. Nginx and postfix add just about nothing memory-wise.

This may bloat up over time, or if I had a bunch of users I'm certain it would, but we're not really talking about hosting large communities in this case, so I'd say 512MB of RAM with no other software could probably do the trick as a bare minimum. For those hosting proper communities, 100% future proof and go bigger than that.

In my case I started with 4GB but had to double because there seems to be some memory creep / leak that gets reset when you reboot the server.

Of course, I'm hosting 50 active users and communities with over 200 subscribers.

Overall I would say that Lemmy is indeed lightweight.

I've got the domains already - I have a bad habit of buying domains that I never use. It's really the server part that gets me nervous. I'm not good at that stuff yet, and it's not really intuitive for me to learn. I know for Mastodon, they have some cloud based servers that they recommend, but Lemmy's instructions are kinda lacking detail for a newbie like me - and at this time, there's not really up-to-date YT videos showing you how to do it.

I know that being part of a server seems like a natural fit for someone like me who is totally lost with these things, but it's kinda frustrating that most larger instances have a ton of rules. I think the one I'm on has rules about lewd content, which is fine, but I feel like one of my comments got blocked from submission when I wrote about how Reddit's downfall will be similar to Tumblr's due to their likely eventual banning of that type of content. Maybe some of the words I used were triggering the auto filter or something? But either way, I didn't like that feeling of censorship.

There's a guy working on a runs-out-of-the-box Kubernetes install.

Cool! I'll probably go down that route then when it's ready.

I didn't mention the install process in my case, because the box I installed on already had Apache, which conflicted with nginx, and I couldn't get an equivelant apache config working correctly. So in my case, it took extra steps where I migrated everything from apache to nginx on the box, and stopped using apache. But I did the install using ansible to connect from my PC to the server, and the install process itself wasn't bad. Copy pasted the config files and made a few relevant changes like DB password, instance name, default admin credentials, and pointing to my existing SMTP mail service. For a personal instance, you could probably exclude that last step though. I already host email for my domain, so the effort to do the extra and make it work was miniscule.

After the config changes, I just put things where the lemmy-ansible repo asked, and ran it as directed. Aside from a few screwups on my part, which were mostly because I was trying to see if I could make Apache work, the install wasn't too bad. Ansible did the heavy lifting, and if I was installing on a fresh server, I have little doubt it would have given me trouble at all.

If you ever decide to go through with trying, feel free to reach out to me. I'll be happy to help as much as I can.

I'm using a $6 a month digital ocean droplet. Should be plenty of juice for me and my friends.

That looks neat! I'll look into it. How does it work, do you run Docker in it? I really have no clue what I'm doing.

Im currently with contabo and got an vps for 6€ a month with 8 gb of ram and 200gb ssd. I'm quite happy with it

Reminds me of the good old days creating a different identity for each forum I signed up at.

I did it on Lemmy on purpose. I'm somefool on four instances, subbed to communities with different themes. Soon, I might head back to PhpBB.

New here, does it mean my username propagated to other instances?

Yes, but you have to manually set up and switch instances; basically having multiple accounts for no reason other than having access to other servers.

And where is that bot that signs me up for all servers so I can save my name lol.

Lmao I did this, but for Mastodon. Mastodon kinda helped me to understand the concept a better

So, I’ve a question. Is there a back button?
I’ll select something from my feed, but then get stuck having to then go all the way back and scroll all the way back down to where I left off.

I just open in new tab, or the little two squares next to the comment button, that will enlarge the picture.

I've just been opening links in new tabs for this reason.

So many tabs... 🥲

Let me know if you figure it out because it's driving me nuts

If you are on the phone try using the apps. I am on Jerboa on Android I don't have this issue.

Yes, you have to create an account on every instance that exists and always use that account to interact with that instance.

If you keep a central account, one day you will anger the wrong person and they will blacklist you off the entire fediverse, losing all relationships and history to overcome ostracisation.

I even consider making a new account per instance per month. Maybe the process could be automated too.

You actually better off running your own instance that way you don't have to worry about getting delisted but that's not exactly easy.

I have 2 with the idea that if my home instance went down I’d still be able to see what’s going on. Not that I’m concerned about a mass failure, more for like server maintenance downtimes.

It started to click in my head today and then once all the defederation talk started I am confused again

It basically means that beehaw can't see any of our content, and we can't see any new content from them. The one nice thing is their mods did say they might reverse it in the future once things settle down hopefully.

I have no idea what’s going on myself honestly lol. I just made a Kbin account so I can see and comment on this thread even though it’s a thread that came from lemmy it looks like considering it states (lemmy.world). I’m confused why I’m seeing this thread. Was it shared to the Kbin server? And why can’t I comment and upvote posts on lemmy.one for example? Shouldn’t I be able to due to everything being connected in the fediverse?

You're not the only one. I made a kbin account. I'm not going to make more accounts. I'll just browse and lurk until this all makes sense.

Or I'll just give up and head over to the Empornium forums. There's titties over there. Is there porn on here?

The problem with porn is that these instances are hosted by individuals who don't want the risk or headache of having questionable content on their server that they may have to answer for when something illegal invariably pops up.

That said, lemmynsfw.com does exist and you can subscribe to content over there. My guess is more will happen over time.

You may need to shift your expectations of the federation model. It's not trying to solve the problem of needing separate accounts on separate sites (that's what we need portable identities for and I hope we see that in the near future). It's trying to solve the problem of enabling self-governing communities and preventing platform lock-in.

Kbin is federated with a bunch of the lemmy servers as well. If you look at the address of the post it's kbin/m(agazine)/lemmyworld@lemmy.world, so we're seeing a post from the LemmyWorld community (called magazines on kbin) on the lemmy server https://lemmy.world/

I promise it makes sense after a while lol

edit: the users of lemmy can also see what we say over here on kbin because kbin and lemmy talk to each other. This post lives on that lemmy instance

So its like a decentralized thing that all goes back to... lemmy? I legit don't understand.

Alright, so...I cannot find the person that posted this explanation but I think it makes more sense than the 'email analogy'.

Imagine the fediverse as a universe. Full of other solar systems and we are in the Kbin.social system

Now when we talk about Earth, we know it's in our solar system but what if another solar system also has an Earth, then what? Well, then we'd make sure to say which system it comes from, like Earth@ProximaCenturi or Sun@AndromedaGalaxy.

Same thing applies when we talk about places here, for example c/memes. When we talk about our memes we don't need any more info...it's the memes in our 'solar system'. But I want to talk about memes from the lemmy system and to do that I'd add the location info like memes@lemmy.world.

Tldr: instances are like other solar systems and magazines are like planets in those solar systems. We can hope in our ship and visit any other planet in the other solar systems

Thank you for the explanation, upvoting you here from the lemmy.world solar system.

We need a ELI5 post pinned about how lemmy works that DOESNT cover how lemmy works, just dumbs it down enough for the average mainstream normie.

TL;DR both of them speak the same language so both can call each other up and trade info back and forth. You can upvote/comment/whatever on either and it'll appear on both sides without you having to do anything special.

It doesn't all go back to lemmy, but lemmy and kbin speak the same language (ActivityPub) and can talk to each other (they are federated). Others in this thread have compared it to email where you might be on different services (gmail, yahoo, icloud) but they can still all understand messages coming from each other. The fediverse is similar, but instead of just sending a message to another site to put in your inbox like email, lemmy/kbin/mastodon/etc can ask each other for stuff on an external site and display it to you as if it was all coming from the same site.
In our case kbin calls up lemmy.world and asks for what everybody there is saying on some post. Lemmy.world tells kbin about all the comments and upvotes so kbin can plug it into the same style of page you see for everything else here. Even though it's happening on a separate server and underlying platform, they still know how to exchange data

I dont get it either, Ive been browsing different instances(? and when I find some community I like I search it up in kbin (which Im trying to make my main account I guess) by copying that little bit that comes up that says "copy and paste in your node's search bar", If I cant join from kbin I make a new account and join from there.
Its whatever, Ill figure it out eventually.

If you have an account at one instance, you can see everything from all of the instances that are federated with that instance. If there is another instance that is not federated with the 1st instance, then you have to make an account there to see anything there

But currently there is no redirect to preferred instance type of settings available which in quite uncomfortable to me.

For example, I created an account on lemmy.world instance and click an url like https://lemmy.world/c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml, it redirects to lemmy.ml instead of lemmy.world instance.

I've experienced that several times, especially since, on desktop, I like to middle-click and open any link in a new tab. Then I have to copy that URL and paste it into the signed-in instance to subscribe or upvote

I still don't get it lmao

I made an account with kbin because the interface most resembles reddit, but apparently that means I have a lemmy account or something?

It might help to think of it like email. If you sign up with gmail, you have a gmail account. You don't necessarily have a microsoft account but people @outlook.com can still send your @gmail.com account email and you can still read it no matter where it's from

In a similar way, you have a kbin.social account. You don't have a lemmy account but you can still see posts from people in lemmy.world

  • you can still see posts from people in lemmy.world

So if I go to kbin.social homepage, I am in fact seeing posts to any number of sites? Or is the notionof a site not accurate? I'm still kinda confused. Despite my age I'm a fucking luddite lol

Yep, (despite them saying kbin.social beside the title, not sure why that happens) I crappily edited this to show where the ones on my homepage comes from. And while it's technically correct to say sites, it's known more so as instances for this. You can check the instance a post is on by hovering your mouse over the name of the community and waiting for the popup to show it.

You don't have a lemmy account, but kbin gets content from lemmy pushed to it. So you can subscribe to subs that are on Lemmy. That doesn't mean you can't sub to the kbin equivalent; in due time, both may have a memes sub. But if you prefer lemmy over the kbin, you can see and interact with that lemmy content from here on kbin. You don't need to be on Lemmy to do it, the instances are federated.

Likewise, say in the future a sports-only instance is created. It exists solely for sports headlines across all the leagues of the world. It is way better than content on kbin. If kbin federates with that group, you can see and interact with that content.

Say there is a group that doesn't meet your instances ideals. They like to be inflammatory and provocative because they can. Your instance can not federate with them, so you won't see that content when viewing the All section of your instance. Likewise, they won't be able to interact with content you post. This prevents brigading and intermingling of groups that would only argue and conflict.

You can enjoy all the content of any federated instance from whatever platform you want.

So let's say we're a group of ships, call it a federation, and one ship decides I'm leaving the group. What happens.

They have a radio. They can still hear what were saying, and can say stuff on the radio, but we ignore it.

Doesn't work the greatest, cause we literally won't hear it at all because it's blocked by the instance so no one hears it period, but kinda works lol

I made an account on feddit.de and I'm not even German (learning to be, though)

Yeah, it took me some time to wrap my head around this when I started getting into Mastodon. Thankfully it became intuitive pretty quick.

¿Confuso? No... más bien un mini reto descubrir nuevas posibilidades exponenciales. Simple.

Translation using ChatGPT: Confused? No...rather, it's a mini challenge to discover new exponential possibilities. Simple.

@Lemmyin Takes about 1 day and then you are a pro. I have a mastodon account and lemmy account. and i'm satisified. just downloaded ivory for my iphone for mastodon

Will one account work on all the instances?

Do any of you guys and gals know how to best check with which instances my account instance federates? I see https://lemmymap.feddit.de/ but omg I am not able to run this page on my PC :D